Online Image Restoration Tactics: All businesses go through periods of good attention and bad attention, but when your business experiences a sudden rush of overwhelming negative attention, it can be a crisis if it’s not managed properly.
Online reputations are complicated and difficult to restore. Whether your online reputation is being marred by negative reviews, a negative news story or even a dysfunctional rollout of your company’s updated website, there are steps your business can take to resolve the problem. Restoring your online reputation can be done when you’re following a plan and working with the experts.
Companies like Status Labs help businesses to monitor their online reputations and take steps to remediate reputation blemishes. Here’s what you need to know.
1. Perform an Online Reputation Audit
Establishing and understanding the scope of the problem is the first step in crisis resolution. Conducting an extensive online reputation audit can help you determine what’s going well and what isn’t, what challenges you expect to encounter during the reputation restoration process, and what your plan of action should be.
When auditing your company’s online presence, it’s best to do this work in an incognito browser window. Use a search engine to look up your company including your Google Business Profile, ratings from previous customers, social media attention, and more. Look closely at everything that appears on the first page of the search engine window.
When you’re working with a company like Status Labs to do this research for you, you can expect a report of all negative and positive attention, particularly that attention that appears on the first page of a search engine.
2. Decide What Needs to Be Changed
Once you’ve uncovered the negative attention, it’s time to decide what needs to be changed and why. Remember that changing your online reputation can be a time-consuming effort, so it’s important to focus on the most important parts of your online reputation. It’s also important to decide what is not worth changing or worrying about.
3. Make a Plan for Reputation Restoration
Establish a strategy to achieve your goals. Since online reputation management is complicated, your plan will likely have many phases and steps. Here are some examples of what you may decide to do:
Manage Comments and Reviews
Responding to negative reviews can help alleviate the impact of negative attention. Find channels where negative reviews appear, then create a plan of action for addressing those reviews. Establish a consistent tone and message before addressing reviews, and if multiple individuals are managing those responses, review the plan with everyone who will be addressing reviews. Develop guidelines and create response templates to aid with this effort.
Encourage Positive Reviews
Encourage customers who have had good experiences with your brand to leave positive reviews about your products. Share links with clients where they can leave reviews, and provide clear instructions to make it more likely they’ll do it.
Utilize Influencer Partners
Work with influencer partners to reestablish credibility with customers. Know the most important influencers and, if possible, broaden the scope of influencers you work with to reach a wider audience during this effort.
Monitor Your Brand Attention
Continue to monitor brand mentions. Set up an effort to watch for negative comments in forums, social media sites and more. Using media monitoring software can help with this, as can working with a company of experts like Status Labs.
4. Make a Crisis Management Plan for the Future
Most important of all is to have a crisis management plan for the future. You can’t always prevent bad things from happening, but when they do happen, a fast and organized response can help make a bad situation better.
Keep a plan of action on hand to help keep your company’s reputation safe, and of course, know your partners during a crisis. Having this plan in place can help you turn around the trouble and preserve your reputation with clients and potential clients.
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