subject: How Does Reputation Management Work? [print this page] You work hard to earn good grades in your class. You make sure your car is properly insured and you and your family's future is safe. You work late nights to meet the deadlines of projects at work. But, what about your reputation? Are you sure that reputation is well protected and you are not losing prospective employers or regular customers because someone is feeding the worldwide web with wrong information about you and your company? If not, it might be time to learn about reputation management.
The basic idea behind reputation management is to emphasize on positive information about your company and to suppress the negative stories as much as possible. Contrary to the popular belief, this strategy cannot get rid of the unwanted information about you or your company. What it can do is to conceal the undesirable material from the search engines so that people will never get a chance to access the pages containing those materials.
Reputation management works through micro-sites, social networks, RSS feeds, business profile links, blogs, wiki-sites, and videos and other media. Micro-sites are, as the name suggests, small sites that contain a keyword of the main site and aid in the search of your company's name or keywords related to it. Another strategy of reputation management is to create desirable and positive profiles of companies in social networks like Facebook or MySpace.
RSS feeds, a format for obtaining feeds from regularly updated websites, also act as a valuable tool in reputation management. Through business profile links, it is made sure that quality sites have the links to your company. The higher the quality of those sites, the better the chance of success in bringing positive search results for your company.
Well-maintained blogs that are regularly updated with positive and quality information about your company are also equally important. Wiki-sites, sites where you can build your own wiki and profile instead of having a Wikipedia entry of your company, are very helpful in projecting the positive image because Wikipedia entries can be altered by anyone at any given time but wiki-sites are always under your control.
With the number of internet surfers watching videos and pictures increasing every day, reputation management also makes sure that there are sufficient positive videos and pictures of your company thereby making the negative ones negligible. With all these tools and strategies, reputation management strives to protect your and your company's reputation so that you can carry on your projects without worrying that someone might me damaging your reputation you worked so hard to build.
