Companies which offer reputation management consulting are doing nothing that public relations firms have been doing for over 50 years, managing the reputation of their clients through media outlets. The only difference between then and now is that these days we must take the fight to the internet, rather than media companies. In my rep management firm we have clients from all background and walks of life, in a number of different positions, from all over the world. These men, women and businesses rely on us to maintain and manage their reputation online to ensure that no unnecessary damage is caused.
A negative online reputation can hurt your business al lot and some of the symptoms of this can be an affect on sales and leads, damage to the brand that you are trying to create and in extreme cases, a complete boycott of your business. If you think that you don’t need this just yet, here are some of the triggers which mean that you should call for help.
Viral Story
If a negative story about your business or an employee in the business should break it could quickly go viral which will have catastrophic impacts on your business and your success. If this were to happen then the first thing that you need to do is to contact a reputation management company to firefight on your behalf. Even if the story disappears, which it will given the speed of the internet, you need to see about repairing your reputation.
Partners
One of the most common issues which businesses face is when their partners or another company that they have worked with in the past are found guilty of wrongdoing. In such a situation your business could easily be considered guilty by association so you need to sever ties with them online as soon as possible. Should this happen you need to contact a reputation management firm as soon as possible in order to rectify the issue, and hope that you can come out of this unscathed.
Huge Mistake
PR disasters can take place at any time, in any type of business and once the mistake has been made, it can be very difficult to find your way back. In such a situation you will need to rely on a rep management firm to ensure that the damage is limited and that your company can still go on with a positive online reputation. We recently had a company CEO who sent out an ill-informed tweet which had racial connotations. Although the CEO was completely innocent, that is not how it looked online, even after deleting the tweet the screenshot was still being shared and so the business called us to see what we could do. Whilst we can’t repair damage such as this, we can, over time, repair the reputation of the company to ensure that they only feel a little bit of pain as the result of the disaster.
If these situations happen to you, call a rep management firm to help you out.
