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With thousands of blogs, forums, and online news websites churning out news on almost every topic under the sun, it’s becoming hard for companies and individuals to maintain their reputation online.

Almost anyone from your ex-employees to unhappy customers might contribute to damage your online reputation easily. However some preventive and proactive measures mentioned below should be taken in order to avoid a PR disaster.

What is Online Reputation Management?

Proactive companies tend to apply an online reputation management plan that improves visibility of positive PR of the company into search results. I have created a basic-level online reputation management plan

Monitor What People are Saying

The first step is to keep track of what is being said about you or your company online. There are a number of free to paid tools available online for the purpose. I am going to list down a few

• Set up Google and Yahoo Alerts so that whenever a search result with your company name appears in the top results, you are notified by email.
• Regularly search blog search engine Technorati to see if there are any blogs discussing your company
• Go to http://www.socialmeter.com/ and see where and how you have been discussed in the social media network.
• Often search for your company name in search engines to see how positive the top results are
• Type of websites to watch for are
  • Blogs, Forums, and Consumer Opinion Sites
  • Consumer Complaint Sites
  • Social Network Sites
  • Competitor Attacks
  • Trademark Infringement
  • Counterfeit Products
  • Counter-intelligence
  • Crisis Management Developments

Influence Results
Once you are closely monitoring your reputation online, you might come across web pages, blogs, forums where discussion is not in your favor. If those pages are appearing in the top 10 or 20 search results, a number of potential customers and existing customers might be reading them too. What you need to do is

• • Participate:You can influence online discussions by actively participating in them. Of course you need to have sharp PR management skills to handle direct attacks tactfully.
  • Optimize your online properties Your websites, your blogs and whatever websites you own should be optimized to rank high on search engines. You can get help of a professional seo consultant for that matter.
  • Create New Sites or Sub-Domain You can also create new sites about your brands, or services and link them up to get more share of the search engine results. This will keep the negative PR sites out of the top 20 results.
  • Start a Blog Blog is a great tool for personalized communication online. You can use it to your advantage by communicating with customers and also creating positive PR for your company’s name
  • Employee Blog Some senior partners and employees in your organization can also start their blog to create positive PR for the company in a more untraditional manner.
  • Paid ReviewsThere are websites that allow you to ask for reviews about your company by a number of bloggers for a fee. Examples are www.payperpost.com www.reviewme.com

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