There is a reason why large enterprises spend big money on online reputation management strategies. A lot of thought goes into how potential or target customers view a particular brand and how their perceptions affect their buying habits. In fact, even startups have to focus on ORM strategies even if they have to start out small at first.

Simply put, reputation management is all about controlling how your business and products are perceived and turning negative content, positive. This isn’t a one and done deal. Successful online reputation management is proactive because it can be swayed by search results and listings.

It can be broken down into these 3 sections:

Don’t be intimidated. The good news is that you can protect and maintain your business reputation online without a huge budget. Here are some tips that can help you keep:

Each business has a unique online presence depending on services and products it pushes. Even if you know your business inside and out, that has little to do with its online perception. The best way to find out cold hard facts is via a simple Google search.

If the content that pops up is negative or irrelevant, you need to do a cleanup fast. This includes removing old pictures (such as office party snaps) and old websites.

Plus, review your social media history and flag potentially harmless updates. Once the feeds are clean, you can add positive content to replace the material you deleted and make the accounts public again.

One of the best strategies to maintain online reputation is to register a website with your name as he domain name. This way you can prevent other people from taking it and prevent them from using it in the future. Rather than stopping there, build your website as the main hub for the information your business is based on via PRs, blogs, articles and relevant press.

Think about it. If your website is optimised well, it will show up at the very top of search results. That way when people search for you by name, they will land right on your site. If that isn’t a great first impression, we don’t know what is!

Of course, a website is great and all, but it only ranks on one position in the search results. Your aim should be to spread the word about your business across multiple platforms so you can control what is being said about it across the web.

Consumers don’t like looking for a needle in a haystack. Make your business stand out online Start by registering it on prominent social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter. Of course, that doesn’t mean you should ignore lesser known platforms such as Quora and Crunchbase.

Remember, your aim should be to secure your business across as many social platforms as you can. Plus, don’t forget to optimise all of the profiles to make them appear in search results.

Building and optimising a social media presence is only half the battle. Search engines have to be convinced that these properties are worthy enough to get high rankings in their lists. One of the best ways to do that is to share content that your intended audiences search for or which they find helpful.

This should be done on a regular basis and across multiple mediums such as articles, blogs, slideshows, Infographics etc. In other words, distill your business and what it offers into content that consumers can find interesting and which can make them come back for more. The aim should be to find a balance between their needs and the value your business can provide them.

Reviews are a part of business. It’s how you use them that determine how well you are perceived online and offline. If you have a website or social platform with no testimonial section, you are only tooting your own horn so to speak.

That can look bad to site visitors who are interested in becoming paying customers. Peak their interest and maintain it by publishing authentic testimonials on all of your online business platforms. They don’t need to be positive, glowing reviews either.

To make the section look bigger and thus more attractive, add customer success stories or quotes from news publications that mentioned your brand.

Your online reputation is not the only thing that should be kept in check. Your employees are the face of your business. What they post about or say about it online can have a negative or positive impact on its reputation.

A single tweet on the company’s Twitter page accompanied by the hashtag #boredatwork can have lasting negative repercussions on target consumers.

To prevent ‘trigger happy’ comments, create a policy around appropriate online behaviour that represents your business. Serious consequences for breaches should be enough to deter even disgruntled employees from posting smack about your business.

Of course, you cannot monitor this behaviour constantly as the owner of the business. Since online chatter is constant, it should be monitored by a responsible employee.

This includes responding to feedback as per company policy and setting up Google Alerts that targets keywords people are using to describe or look for your business. Needless to say, the person you choose should have strong working knowledge of social networking.

Don’t give up if you find tons of negative comments online when you start your cleanup. Rather than shoving them under the rug, respond to serious ones as quickly as possible and come back to minor ones later.

Unchecked negative comments can spread like wildfire and make your business reputation go up in flames. Responding promptly is the best way to reduce damage. This includes owning up to mistakes the business made via genuine apologies.

This should be done in 3 parts: admit to the mistake, promise it won’t be repeated and revamp procedures to ensure it isn’t. The more transparent you are, the more your customers will trust you.

It takes very little effort to rile up negative reviewers and rightly so. They are already in a high emotional state because they think your business duped them so it is little wonder why most are just raring for a fight.

Even if you are technically in the right, the worst thing you can do at this point is to respond to their anger with harsh words of your own. You will only come across as unprofessional.

A courteous response has more of a chance to win over irate customers AND assure others that you take issues seriously, even if you are right. Your aim should be to diffuse the situation as quickly and painlessly as possible.   

The best way to avoid a crisis online regarding your business’s reputation is by focusing on customer service. If your customers are treated with respect and their issues are resolved systematically, they become staunch supporters and defenders of your business – even after your business suffers from a blow to its reputation.

To ensure you have enough customers like that to drown out naysayers, consider investing in customer care training for your employees. You won’t have to worry about your online reputation when happy consumers are spreading positive reviews online.

Contrary to popular belief, the customer isn’t always right. In fact, some can be downright mean even if they don’t have probable cause for their behaviour. In such cases their impulse to ‘punish’ bad service can play out dramatically which can cause immeasurable damage if left uncurbed.

Besides customers, your business can also suffer from comments made online by disgruntled employees or a competitor who wants to boost his/her’s brand’s reputation.

In such cases, don’t be afraid to stand up for the values and mission your business stands on. If someone is trying to drag it through the mud without probable cause, post a rebuttal online and out them with proof of your innocence.

The key to online management is constant vigilance, but that can be a challenge for someone who doesn’t have a team seeing to it. This includes monitoring your website for negative comments and the removal of inappropriate content.

To prevent people from posting whatever they want, tweak your blog’s or site’s privacy settings to approve posts before they can be posted. That way you can prevent half-baked facts, malicious gossip and rumours from ripping your reputation to shreds.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you should treat every comment in a similar manner. Posts that contain constructive criticism that is free of malice and cuss words should be treated with respect.

By replying to such comments and thanking the commenter, you can make your business transparent and assure your customers that you are open to corrections.

This is where you should know the difference between constructive criticism and defamation. Defamation refers to false and injurious published statements that are posted strategically for the most damage.

These are open to the public and spread as much as possible to gain credibility. Online comments such as these are called libel in legal terms which means you can sue if you find yourself at the nasty end of it.

In order to win a case, you have to prove that the public comments are not only lies, but factual statements. For instance, a review that says “the masseuse at the parlour was rude” cannot be called libellous – it is too vague and opinionated to qualify as defamation so to speak.

However, if say you target a journalist and say he/she pays people to interview them, when it is completely false, you have a lawsuit on your hands.

Besides being a statement of fact, the comment has to be public to be libellous. Since most of these statements are made on social media, these can be considered as such.

However, a private conversation between a business owner and a disgruntled customer doesn’t count. The public comment doesn’t have to be widespread though.

In addition to these, there are other requirements for public and private personalities and the knowledge regarding the false statement. To ensure you don’t accuse someone of libel falsely, get in touch with an attorney beforehand.

Don’t balk at the first signs of slander. Even though the lawsuit can be time-consuming, the damage false comments do to your business reputation can be just as, if not more devastating.

This is particularly true if you are suing a customer for online defamation so make sure that you can win against them before confronting them.

If you happen to win the lawsuit, you can end up getting millions of dollars in damages depending on the extent of the damage the comments caused. This includes loss of income, earning capacity, pain, suffering, humiliation etc.

As the owner of an enterprise, your business’s reputation should be a priority without question. Protecting it online is not as challenging as you think especially if you keep the aforementioned online reputation management guide in mind.