We don’t mean hiring one of the current snake oil reputation management firms that promises to have negative reviews removed, while posting an untrustworthy number of fabricated positive comments. Studies show customers see through these even faster than Google and Yelp’s supposedly legitimate algorithms. By actively engaged we mean offering a variety of different places for customers to form an opinion of your brand. Certainly Facebook and Twitter are two obvious sources, but there are plenty of other powerhouses. For example, what about making a name for your company as an expert in answering questions on related forums, or Ask.com, or even Yahoo!answers?

How about not only having a blog, but sharing it’s content via Digg, Stumble Upon, and Reddit? And don’t forget about YouTube. As the online world over saturates us with written content, people will defer more and more to video for everything from shopping decisions to consumer opinion. What about telling your brand story in  pictures? There’s almost always a way, so use photo sharing sites like Flickr and Picasa.

And yet, just being on all these sites is not enough.  Updating new and interesting content at least twice a week is a must – everywhere. But even more important than staying active is being creative and interesting. If you give customers other online opportunities to get to know you, you’d better give them good reason why they should prefer you.

Sounds like a lot of work, huh? It is. But just having a website, a Facebook page, and a Twitter account is not enough these days. You need to create two-way conversations everywhere you can. That way, even if some negative reviews pop up, customers have a variety of other venues to learn more about you and what you sell. Venues that can tell a great story – the story you want them to know.

Bummer, huh? Especially because ticked off customers tend to respond more than happy customers. And bad competitors are apt to be aggressively negative. This is why the most important thing you can do is to be diligent in your listening.

If you find an illegitimate posting soon after it was submitted, and you are fairly certain it has been put there by a competitor, you can submit a complaint to the sponsor of its source (i.e. Yelp, Insider Pages) as well as the search engine (i.e. Google, Bing, Yahoo!). But you need to do it quickly. And you need to have legitimate backup to prove it.

If you find a negative, but legitimate, posting, 90% of the time it pays to respond to it publicly – no matter how painful that may be. If you also have a way to reach them offline without invading their privacy, it is obviously helpful. But, even more than the unhappy complainer, think what your response will do for a potential customer who reads it. You have the opportunity to show them you care, you are timely, and you’ve made an effort to right what might be a wrong. Only when it appears that you are dealing with an irrational person who would just use your response to continue degrading you or your company should you keep quiet.

Finally, the best thing you can do to get these comments out of readers eyesight is to “push them down”. That means create more relevant and current information that will show up higher in search results and move this older information down and off the first search page results.

If you have questions or want to talk more about this, feel free to contact us.