Melneka Bowers | Reputation management can be a difficult task to execute well. Most people either ignore reputation management altogether, or aren’t exactly sure how to repair or create their reputation. Tens of thousands of press releases fly around Internet on a regular basis, filling cyber space with poor attempts to build a company’s reputation.
Here are some tips that should help you build your company’s presence and show it in a positive light.
Be Humble – This may not seem like a major asset, but humility often makes the difference between success and failure. Humility will allow you to try ideas that are new and different, while fear and false pride will drive you to trust on the old way. The old way often won’t work in a new world of communications where the Internet spits out information at an alarming rate.
Understand the task at hand – The court of public opinion is unforgiving. It’s often arbitrary in who it exploits and why. Politicians who are dedicated to public service might be publicly embarrassed because of slip of the tongue. (Melneka Bowers) You need to recognize that you need to fight fire with fire, and online techniques as well as public relations tactics are necessary for quality reputation management.
You need the right professionals – Hiring your nephew to write press releases isn’t going to get the job done. To repair, create or build your online reputation, you need qualified reputation management professionals who know and understand Google, Yahoo and every other search engine people use.
Image and reputation aren’t the same – You can have a great image, but a terrible reputation. An image tends to be a short term imprint. For example, at any point during his presidency, George W. Bush had a good image, but overall his reputation plummeted amongst many communities of people. You can fix your image but still have a bad reputation if your tactics are too short-term.
Reputations aren’t built overnight – A reputation has legs, is built upon honesty, trust, transparency, and accountability and is regularly supported by character and integrity. Anyone can buy a good image for a week, a month or even a year. However, building a reputation takes years to do properly.
Assume everything will make its way to the web – It’s no longer safe to think you’ll be able to make a single comment that won’t be Googled eventually.
Melneka Bowers | Choose the right outlets – It’s important to know what social networking outlets will work, what blog voice will work, what search engines to focus on. There are various forms of blog software, WordPress for example, but you have to choose what works best for you. Facebook and MySpace are both popular social networks, but that doesn’t mean your customers or clients will use either.
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