Reputation Management: Protect Your Brand

A Brand has value, offering a promise and representing an image. Recognized Brands are often responsible for the sale of a product, based solely on its own merit. A brand, your brand, is probably the most important company asset at your disposal. As important as these assets are, often times they are taken for granted and treated with little regard: “just a corporate name.”

Reputation Management is a reality of the online world. With the proliferation of numerous online review portals, your Brand and reputation is just one disgruntled employee away from being slammed online, or worse, your service or product is labeled a scam. And with the advent of anonymous posters (on many review sites, a poster does not have to reveal their identity) these postings do not always originate from unhappy clients or customers. We’ve uncovered several cases where our client’s competitors purposely spread false and malicious information about our client. The greatest part of the Internet is also its biggest challenge – the Internet is unregulated, free, and for the most part, open to new ideas and a repository for useful information. Unfortunately, some website owners take advantage of this openness to promote corporate bashing and online corporate bullying on an industrial scale. For the websites owners, the more salacious the better – more postings equal more traffic and that usually translates into higher online ad revenue when they pair up with a search engine advertising program. What disturbs us at Saint George is the growth in these types of websites that base their business model on publishing scandalous reviews, with little or no fact checking, simply to drive site traffic and generate ad revenue. It doesn’t seem very fair to not be able to confront your accuser. We dealt with numerous companies that would have welcomed the opportunity to speak with an “un-satisfied” customer or client and taken the required steps to make it right by them. Unfortunately, for many of our clients, they first found out about an unhappy or dissatisfied client once the review was posted online for all to see. And worse, they were not given an opportunity to make things right.

Saint George Brand Reputation Management programs are designed to promote your Brand. They can be new Brands or older proven Brands in need of a “makeover”. We realize the value you have invested in your Brand, and more importantly, the value your Brand has in the marketplace. It’s your Brand and your reputation – Let Saint George help you protect it.

Reputation Management Tips

1. Stay calm and do not take this personally
2. Although this feels like a very personal attack, you can’t engage an anonymous attacker – you need to run your business
3. Don’t go crying to or threatening the website where the bad review is posted. They are just enablers and on the Internet, we all have a right to free speech
4. Do look inwardly and learn from this: Is there any truth or substance to the complaint or claim being made online? Is there something you could do moving forward that would prevent this type of complaint from being lodged?
5. Contact Saint George: This is what we do. We’ll look into the matter and let you know if we can help or not. We’ve had some success with malicious online bloggers and have worked with numerous companies to improve their online reputation and more importantly secure their online Brand