Bad company news spreads like wildfire online. Left unabated, bad PR can ruin your company's reputation and the brand's ability to conduct dealings with both its target market and investors. Fortunately, just as easily as bad news can travel fast online, it's also very simple to extinguish the fire with these five options.
Flush it Down the Bottom Search Pages
In a perfect world, anything you post or someone posts about you can be erased by removing search results online. Unfortunately, in reality, no one can just erase the footprint of their activities in the World Wide Web. You do have the next best thing - to push it back to the bottom search pages. By posting more positive content about you through articles, blog posts, and customer reviews, you are able to push down the bad content that's affecting your business or professional reputation.
Learn and Master SEO
This is actually connected to the first option, but search engine optimization is too big of a technique to be merely attached to a section. Search engine optimization denotes a set of techniques and strategies that are used to increase the traffic to a website. SEO experts use tactics to earn higher, and therefore more visible, rankings in major search engines, like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. There are many different techniques to getting favorable rankings on SERPs including, but not limited to, writing high-quality content that uses specific keywords or phrases searched for by the target market, and making it easy for users to share and link the content from your blog or website.
Create an Online Forum
Online forums allow you to closely monitor what's being said about your business. The feedback posted by customers are mostly unbiased so you actually gain insight over the collective view of your target market regarding your brand. What do they like about the business? What don't they like? What managerial weak spots do you need to account for? Answers to these questions are relevant information that may have sparked or catalyzed the bad news online or can help you fix it.
Seek Professional Help
You probably wouldn't know the industry existed if you never needed the service, but professional reputation management is an actual industry, an increasingly growing one to be precise. Like any service provider, professional reputation management services cost money, ranging anywhere between a few hundred to a few thousand bucks. Although it's a hefty expense for a crime which you are innocent in, the business damages from being decried as a scam artist is a more expensive route to accept for your business, especially if you are serious about building a long-term brand.
Own up Your Faults and Apologize
Nobody likes a sour loser, especially in the business world, which is ironic since mistakes and losses are prevalent in the industry. Own up to your faults and shortcomings both to the public and, most importantly, to your employees. There is no shame in admitting your mistakes. In fact, it humanizes you and shows how committed you are to actually succeeding since you're able to put your own pride aside for the better of the company. Bad news is bad for business, but so is trying to hide the fact that you messed up big time. By admitting, however, you quickly let go of the fear of being judged and free up your mind to tackle business issues.
Fixing bad news online can be painful, especially as you read barbaric blog posts and user comments. The five options aforementioned were chosen for their simplicity, cost-effectiveness, and ability to quickly minimize damage.
