We recently began offering reputation management as one of our marketing services here at Digital Firefly. This makes us unique, because reputation management is not typically a service digital marketing firms offer.

So what is reputation management?

Reputation management is essentially a loop of reporting about an entity’s actions. That entity can refer to a company or a person. Additionally, the loop starts with tracking an entity’s actions, and the opinions of other entities regarding those actions. The next step is reporting on these actions and opinions. Finally, the loop finalizes by reacting to these reports.

3 Different Categories

There are three different categories of reputation management; building, maintenance, and recovery.

1. Building

Building a reputation involves releasing your own positive press. Did your firm just gain a high-profile new client? Great! Now, why not tell people about it?

2. Maintenance

Maintenance simply refers to keeping an eye on the opinions about an entity’s actions, and ensuring that the public opinion of that entity remains positive. This occurs when the entity establishes well and has a positive reputation.

3. Recovery

Recovery is when an entity earns a negative reputation. This is where reputation management really comes into play. In order to repair an entity’s damaged reputation, steps must be taken to “hide” the bad press, and create positive content. We like to refer to this as “reverse SEO”. Typically with SEO we try to get our clients listed in the top search results on Google for the best possible keywords. Reverse SEO is a process by which positive content is created and pushed to the top of Google’s search results, while the negative content is pushed down the rankings where it is less likely to be found. Finally, this can be accomplished through creating blogs, hiring someone to write a direct review of an entity, syndicating article writing, and using social media effectively.