Keeping Up An Image: The Importance of Online Reputation
Digital Marketing • 5th Apr, 16
Don’t worry, we’re not about to give you a lecture on how important keeping up a good reputation is when it comes to running a business; it’s Business 101, and odds are anyone who doesn’t understand that won’t be able to keep a business going long enough to even start looking for web development services.
We do feel like we should remind you, though, of the sort of effect the internet has had on the nature of business reputation. Simply put, there’s a flipside to the sort of cheap and easy exposure your company can quickly attain on the internet: it can attain a bad name just as fast.
It can happen to any business, at any time – and oftentimes, you won’t notice until after the damage is done.
The internet, in many ways, is like one giant tabloid page: when you want to make a quick splash, it’s best to think in the short term. In other words, whether your assertions are true tends to be secondary to how much attention they get.
All it takes is one negative article about your brand. Whether or not what it claims is true, if it gets enough views, your company is going to feel it. And if it gets the sort of views that push it to the front page of Google, and the first thing someone searching for your company’s name sees is an article claiming that you get all your merchandise made by a Taiwanese child labour ring…sure, some of them are going to make the effort necessary to delve into the matter, but for the most part, you really need to ask yourself: can you afford the considerable dent that’ll make in new customers?
Odds are, you can’t – it’s something any responsible business owner should wish to avoid. And to that end, when faced with such a predicament, you really can’t go wrong investing in a bit of, eh, corrective treatment.
After all, it’s hardly a new issue; and there’s plenty of services available to help ensure that, if your business is ever brought to its knees, it’s not going to be because of the sort of petty half-truths that the internet eats up. Among the most prominent is Reputation Defender, an online service dedicated to ensuring that search results relating to your brand prioritises positive content, ensuring that potential new customers’ first impressions are just that much more optimistic, and that they’re just a touch more likely to question any disparaging content they may happen upon later.
But of course, search results are simply a customer’s first step in their investigation of your brand; and, really, for all the steps you might take, if anyone out there has anything negative to say about your business, odds are someone else, somewhere else, is going to hear it. Ultimately, it’s up to you – through your business’s central website, its social media representation, and, of course, its actual relationship with its clients and customers – to ensure that your business’s online presence reflects its integrity, its reliability, and its dedication to its customers. That, and that alone, is the path toward creating the sort of loyal customers who, thanks to their personal experience of your business’s integrity, will dismiss those petty efforts to poison your company’s reputation.
Your brand name turning up an appealing-looking set of search results is a solid start; establishing an online presence that pulls customers in, and affirms all of their promising first impressions, is a solid follow-up to that solid start.