An Introduction to Online Reputation Management
Online visibility is critical to any company looking to develop business and brand awareness in the Irish tourist industry, but what happens if your business is at the receiving end of some bad publicity online? Poor management of bad publicity can magnify the situation and the consequences can be disastrous.
This has never been truer than with online publicity of a negative nature which can spread throughout the web in a very fast nature. In a worst case scenario, bad publicity can be made to rank for branded key phrases by a SEO savvy webmaster or blogger, effecting people who are looking for your business online. It is vital that companies carry out consistent research on their brand or business name so they are ideally placed to deal with any situation that may arise.
What is Online Reputation Management?
Online Reputation Management is exactly that, the managing of a reputation on online media such as search engines, press releases, viral content or user generated content such as blogs or forum postings. Due to the social nature of the internet, consumer generated content can spread easily throughout the internet. Online Reputation Management can also be used by a company for positive results.
How to Find Bad Publicity about Your Company Online
There are numerous ways of doing this:
- Keyword research on brand related terms
- Use systems such as Google Alerts
Often simply researching a branded key phrase on Google, Yahoo or various blog searches will be enough to find content that might be considered negative to your operation. Branded key phrases mixed with words such as poor, bad, terrible, review, unhappy etc are very effective at finding content that might need to be managed or engaged.
Google Alerts is a very effective way of finding out on a daily basis where your brand is being mentioned online. An alert can be set up to monitor any topic you want, and can be delivered either by email or RSS feed on a time scale of your choosing. Google Alerts monitors news stories and blogs along with video and web content.
This service offer a very easy way to monitor all brand related news on a hourly, daily or monthly basis, and are an extremely important part of your arsenal when it comes to dealing with bad publicity online.
Turning Bad Publicity to Good
If you discover negative content about your business online, step one should be to try and engage the person responsible and attempt to address the cause. Ignoring the issues at hand looks bad for two reasons: it shows you don’t care about your customers or that they had a bad experience, and you have failed to address the issue by responding to the customer. In many cases the bad publicity will be posted on a personal blog which allows ample opportunity for response and engagement.
Engagement with the unhappy customer shows any prospective customer that happens upon the content that you care about your customers and you are attempting to rectify the situation, leaving them with a positive impression of your company.
Legal or threatening approaches simply don’t work and will entrench support for the unhappy customer and may even result in the complaint going viral on the internet. If this happens the complaint will receive far more attention that it would of initially. The costs for this approach far outweigh the costs of engaging the customer and dealing with the issues raised.
What if you Can’t Engage The Customer?
If you are unable to engage with the complainer, and the complaint is very visible on the Search Engines for brand related key phrases, reactive search engine optimisation could displace a listing. For many companies this is the only option available, particularly if the complaint has been previously mishandled. This can be achieved by the following:
1 – Build links to other listings in the top 10 for the required phrase
2 – Set up sub domains or a blog related to your company which will take some of the places
3 – Release a press release through a site such as PR Web.com which can rank quickly
Examples of Bad Reputation Management
In the Irish tourist market, there is one case of bad online reputation management easily visible which results in this blog post ranking 3rd for the search term Budget Car Rental Ireland. This is a classic case of bad online reputation management. I’ll explore the case in chronological order:
June 2008
A customer (Peter Donegan) of Budget Car Rental rented a car, but felt the advertisement that enticed him to rent from Budget was misleading. He posted a copy of the advert, a copy of his receipt and all of his correspondence with the company, Failte Ireland and the Car Rental Council.
Dear Paul,
Is the point not ‘misleading pricing advertising’ ?
- for me it was never the money amount or figuring that out from my receipt
Slán go foill
Peter
The blog post gathered comment after comment with people retelling the bad experiences they had with car rental companies in Ireland. The post was now about poor experiences in an industry with Budget Car Rental being the focal point.
February 2009
Peter Donegan put a post on his blog saying he had received a call from a legal office informing him he had 48 hours to remove the post. Instead of dealing with the complaint and making sure Mr Donegan was happy with the customer service, a bogus legal threat put new life into the matter.
February 2009
The story gets picked up by the Blog of Bock the Robber who gives Budget the right to reply:
“A guy writes a post complaining about the bill he got from Budget Car Rental Ireland and some gobshite calls him up threatening legal action unless he takes down the post.” Bock The Robber
Budget Car Rental eventually replies saying they did not employ a solicitor to force Mr Donegan to remove the post. Since 19 February 2009 there has been no update on the post or clarification by Budget Car Rental on the matter, even by comment on the blog which anybody is free to do.
The end result is that if somebody types Budget Car Rental Ireland into Google.ie they will see a negative post about Budget Car Rental.
What Could Have Been Done Differently?
Budget Car Rental explained the bill (which was confusing) to Mr Donegan, but never once replied about on point on misleading advertising which was key. In other words they didn’t take his complaint or the fact it was live on the web for anybody to read seriously. They replied by explaining the bill but not on the matter of the advertising. Budget didn’t seriously engage the complaint or their customer when this should have been their first port of call.
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This will be the first in a series of Search Engine Optimisation posts related to travel in Ireland. If you have any suggestions or comments on this topic or future topics, as always we would be delighted to hear from you.
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