Crisis PR: Here's some tips on repairing your online reputation

Do you know what’s being said about your brand online? Do you check customer reviews and respond to all of them, whether they are positive or negative? Or do you ignore unfavourable comments and simply hope they will go away?

Online reputation rehabilitation is key to the success of any business or organisation, driven by the far-reaching power of social media. Negative comments can morph into monsters in the blink of an eye if you don’t pay attention and take charge of the narrative. Honest London’s crisis PR and online reputation repair experts can help steer you in the right direction if you need guidance when a social media narrative spirals out of control.

Whether you are a business owner, employee or job seeker, your online reputation is extremely important to your professional success. Both modern consumers and employers use search engines like Google to find information about companies and people before doing business with them.

The proliferation of various social media and review websites make it easy to establish an online reputation. But it’s important to remember that hard-won reputations can be tarnished in a moment, and once the shine is gone, it can be difficult to get it back. However there are many ways you can help safeguard your good name.

Here are six tips to help repair your company’s reputation if something goes wrong:

Own up to your mistake.

If the negative online content about you or your company is true, acknowledge it, correct it and apologize for your mistake. Explain what steps you’ve taken to prevent the incident from happening in the future.

Test and trial social media profiles on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Tik Tok, etc.

The main goal of any online reputation management effort is to push the negative content down in search results. Creating a variety of engaged social media profiles and updating them regularly with new content, will help ensure that this is what people will find first when searching for you or your brand.

Try to take the negative content down.

Once negative content is posted online it is extremely difficult to remove. Still, you can try to reach out to the person who posted it and politely ask them to take it down. If that fails, produce additional positive content to push the negative content down in the search engines.

Start a blog.

Similar to the creation of social media profiles, frequently updated blogs serve as a good way to boost your website ranking and bring it up higher in search results.

Create a YouTube channel.

Video is king. Google search algorithms favour video content and tend to rank it high in search results. Creating a video blog may help to further bolster your ORM efforts.

Monitor what is being written about you or your business online.

Always keep an eye on how your brand is being discussed online. A good (and free) way to monitor your online reputation is to set up Google Alerts for your name and/or company.

If you have budget, you can invest in an agency like us or use software specifically designed for social listening.

Need advice? Honest London‘s team of online reputation repair experts can audit your social media accounts so you can see how your brand is being viewed online. If your reputation needs some polishing, Honest London’s PR professionals can guide you through the process, offer suggestions or take charge of the process so you can move forward without any worries

As Benjamin Franklin once said: “It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it.”