Fuzzy Bus

Anyone who questions the power of online reputation need look no further than the BP disaster and the Toyota recall to see how even large, established brands can experience a significant negative impact to their brand name. These and other globally recognized brands spend a significant amount of their public relations budget each year on reputation management — online reputation in particular.

Those in the online reputation management industry consider proactive online brand management to be key to weathering any sort of PR disaster . To this end, they will employ a strategy of generating positive articles, blog posts, reviews, and websites for a company over time. These create a positive overall reputation and make it harder for negative results to find their way into the search engines. They will also engage in constant monitoring of the web, usually focused on social media sites, so that any conversations about the brand can be monitored, and, if negative, directly addressed or countered.

While there are plenty of brands that are deserving of negative publicity and need to work to regain the public trust , the reality is that the internet makes it easy for competitors and disgruntled employees to intentionally attack and even significantly damage the reputation of a brand using false information and fraudulent claims. A recent elixir interactive case study documents one such example of a coordinated attack on the search results for a company’s name. Brand managers and executives need to recognize the threats, however minimal, to their online reputation and take steps to protect it from any attack.