subject: What Are The Strategies Behind Reputation Management? [print this page] So your company has taken a hit from a couple of bad mentions on the internet, and you've heard about Reputation Management companies that claim to fix that. But with the internet such a huge and uncontrollable place, how could anyone do that?
Reputation management companies manipulate the internet, the very tool which brought about your negative company image, to turn the tables and place your company back in a better light. Their primary goal is to remove or replace the damaging search engine results with positive ones.
One way they seek to do this is by contacting websites with libelous material and asking them to remove it. Sometimes, this works. Other times, either sites will not remove the material, or the site is a user-based, interactive site with millions of users that are impossible to contact, such as Facebook or Twitter.
In the case that a reputation management company cannot remove the negative search engine results, their next focus is to push those results so far down in the rankings that no potential customer will read it.
Studies show that there is less than a 10% chance that people will look at search results beyond the third page, so the goal is to get it on the fourth page or lower, if possible.
The reputation management company will work to create a plethora of natural-looking, positive sites they work to get high in the rankings. Here are some of the ways they create these sites.
One way is to create micro sites, or mini-websites or web pages associated with your company's main website and that oftentimes links to your company's page. They use key words on that micro site that an internet surfer might search for to bring them to your company. For example, if your company deals with selling computers, they might create a micro site that talks a lot about desktops, laptops, and other computer terminology.
Another strategy reputation management companies have is using those same sites that damaged your reputation to improve it. They create blog posts and use social networking sites, too. They might give you more popular appeal by creating for you a Facebook page or MySpace profile. Sometimes, they change the content on your company's Wikipedia page or, more frequently, create an entirely separate business profile--one that only they can edit, not the whole world.
Also, reputation management companies might create press releases or promotional pictures and videos. With this flood of new, positive information about your company, they then create a linking network, so that when someone visits one of the sites they have created, they can link to another site, then to another, then to another, giving the sites more traffic, more hits, and higher rankings in the search engine results.
