Messages constantly appearing on the Internet instantly become the property of the masses. Reviews of dismissed employees, opinions of dissatisfied customers, rumors from random witnesses and competitors, opinions of partners – all this, once on the World Wide Web, settles in its information field. It becomes very difficult to erase these stains if you do not control your reputation on the Internet.
In the eyes of users of the world wide web, the company’s reputation is determined precisely by the nature of this information, and among them there are key figures for the company:
- clients;
- journalists;
- representatives of the authorities;
- potential investors.
Each of these individuals considers a company’s media reputation before entering into a relationship with it. Therefore, the lack of control over the Internet reputation can have an extremely negative impact on its activities.
Start by collecting information
It is impossible to manage reputation effectively without first collecting data. You need to check what search engines report about the company, and after collecting information, find the weakest points. If it turns out that even Google and Yandex do not find anything about the company, then you need to create an image on the Internet, attracting qualified specialists for this.
To develop popularity, you can also connect Yahoo Alerts or Google Alerts to add uniqueness. You can easily find those services that can track the presence of a company on the Internet, reputation in social networks, comments left. Special services can provide information about attempts to find a company, which can also give food for thought.
Feedback control
You can control your online reputation by:
- study of the issuance of search engines;
- studying social networks;
- studying mass media sites;
- controlling the appearance of mentions.
When all the information has been analyzed and studied, then you can start planning the rise in popularity in a positive aspect. You need to think about how you can improve the current state of affairs and think about measures to protect your reputation on the Internet to correct the situation in weak places. Sometimes this can be solved by directly deleting pages or profiles containing unflattering correspondence on behalf of the company or discrediting its data. You can just “lay low" so that inconvenient links sink deeper in the search engine results lists over time, or even write a request for their removal as soon as possible, but it’s better to just crowd out negative reviews with positive ones.
To do all this, it is important to throw all your efforts in time to prevent the spread of negativity:
It must be remembered that posts and photos of individual users or friendly communities where company profiles are present cannot be protected by privacy settings. It is necessary to monitor, by monitoring the reputation on the network, how the list of friends and subscriptions affect it. But the material posted on third-party resources is very difficult to control, if at all possible.
Almost nothing disappears without a trace from the network, so you need to control any available or emerging information about the company. You need to be able to repel not only effectively, but effectively any attacks. Instead of hushing up mistakes, you need to learn to gracefully admit them.
DLP systems
Dissatisfied employees of the company very often become a source of negativity. They can discredit individual employees or the work of the company itself in social networks, forums, blogs, employment sites. There are two problems in reputation analysis:
- to detect significant negative messages, it is necessary to constantly monitor and evaluate the nature of mentions;
- identify the specific person who published the negative.
Finding the origins of a negative review or insider inside the company is not so difficult with the help of a DLP system. A quick response to an incident will help to minimize the damage: quickly find an employee, have a conversation with him, if possible, force him to delete his post from the network and take measures so that this does not happen again in the future (close some sites, set up filters).
Reputation control on the Internet can be carried out using Zecurion DLP, which is able to prevent the publication of information discrediting the company by its employees. Filters can be configured so that messages containing the name of the director or the name of the company cannot be sent to forums or blogs.
It is for reputation management that special companies have been created, whose task is to clean up the image of the client from negative reviews distributed on the network. These companies methodically examine search queries on topics of interest and instantly respond to a negatively colored characteristic of the object. Thanks to this, a positive image formed on the basis of the work of search engines is preserved. Here are the actions of these companies:
- analysis of search queries on the topic;
- compiling reports on the nature and number of object reviews;
- complex work with sites that carry negative information, lowering their lines down in the results of search engines;
- promotion to the first lines of those sites that contain positive or neutral information about an object or service.