Do you remember that time United Airlines violently removed a passenger from one of its flights? Even though it was almost ten years ago, you most probably do. If you’ve forgotten, a video recording was circulated online showing the airline dragging a customer off one of its planes. It created quite the stir and did serious damage to the brand’s online reputation.
While that may be an extreme example, for any business looking to effectively compete in the digital space, having a firm online reputation management strategy in place is critical. What exactly is online reputation management, though, and what is considered best practice?
A simple explanation for the practice of managing your online reputation is the monitoring, influencing, and managing how your business is perceived in the digital space. It’s often a combination of search engine optimization for reputation management (SEO), public relations, and customer engagement.
We like to put online reputation management into three key areas. The first is setting up and optimizing the way in which your business appears online. This includes the likes of a Google Business Profile (which includes things like Google reviews and maps), having a good website with relevant content, and references to your business on third-party digital platforms like local listings, news platforms, etc.
The second is to make sure that the content across each of these platforms is current and optimized for SEO wherever possible. You’ll obviously have the most control with your own profiles or platforms. A key focus in this area is driving customer testimonials like Google reviews. The third area is to have a plan in place if things go south. In other words, there is an event that triggers a lot of attention towards your company or brand, one which may negatively impact how people perceive your reputation.
Having this type of plan in place is important for any business, but it’s especially critical to small businesses. The digital space is a competitive area, where both big and small businesses are fighting for market share in a constantly evolving environment. Small businesses often don’t have the budget to come up against their big competitors, so when their reputation takes a hit in the online space, it’s very difficult to claw back that market position.
To give you a practical example, let’s consider an independent coffee shop in a small town called “Mr. Bean.” They know their customers by name and pride themselves on offering great service. Then, a national coffee chain opens down the road and starts to compete with them on price. A few months later there’s a robbery at Mr. Bean during trading hours, and the local media writes about it. Questions are being asked if the coffee shop is safe. As Mr. Bean hasn’t spent any focus or time on developing online content, driving positive reviews, and having a communication plan in place in the event of a crisis, the only content going online refers to that incident. It’s all negative. Had Mr. Bean had a strong online presence with positive media reviews, customer testimonials, and various articles on how to make the best flat white, for example, the negative online content would not have had as much of an impact.
There’s much more to it, and the above speaks primarily to an incident happening to a small business, but the fundamentals of online reputation management remain the same. It’s all about creating a positive experience with your brand in the online space.
If you’re looking to improve your online reputation and don’t know where to start, there are a few things to consider.
Before you start to create content, invite media to write about your product or service, or push for customer reviews, it’s vital that you know exactly what your online reputation looks like. A quick way to do this is to simply open up an “incognito” window on your browser. You’ll most often find this in the top right of the browser when you click on the three dots.
First, you want to search for your specific company. What are people saying about you? What is the general narrative associated with your brand? Do you even appear at all? Do the same on AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, etc. Understanding this is an important first step as it becomes the baseline you’re going to measure against. While you can go manual, you will also find a variety of free and paid-for tools online that can pull up these results for you.
The first step above will give you a good indication of where you need to do work. If you are not appearing at all, then there’s a good chance you either don’t have a website or it’s poorly optimized for SEO. If your audit results show there are a lot of negative comments about your business, you first need to find out what they are complaining about and fix it, and then put a strategy in place to generate positive reviews.
Following on from the above, you cannot underestimate the power of online reviews. While Google reviews is an obvious example, there are other platforms you may need to create a presence on. These reviews not only play a critical role in the purchasing decisions of consumers and businesses but also, perhaps more importantly, in how you appear in search and AI results.
The likes of Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc., use these reviews to formulate a picture of you. That picture, in essence, becomes your reputation, and it will influence the results that appear when someone searches for your business online. Here, you don’t only want to drive more positive reviews but also make sure that you answer each of them. This not only tells the customer who left the review that you care, but also plays a key role in SEO. What we mean by this is that the search and AI platforms consider the words you use in your response as part of their evaluation.
Control the narrative of your business by having a clear and relevant content strategy for various social media platforms. Put messaging out that adds value to your audience — don’t go for the hard sell. A good example here is for a local dentist in Fort Lauderdale. Instead of putting out posts about their various services and products, they post tips on how to improve your dental hygiene at home. They create a positive association with their brand. So, the next time someone chips a tooth, guess who they will call.
Part of your social media strategy needs to factor in the important point that we’re covering next.
The reality is that we live in a time where a digital crisis can happen at any time and quickly. One negative review from an influencer, for example, can break a business. It’s critical that you have a strategy in place that covers how you react to various scenarios. Essentially you are setting out how you respond to a crisis within the business. This should cover both internal and external factors, so things you can and can’t control.
How and when you react to a crisis in the online space can be the difference between riding the storm and coming out stronger on the other side or closing up for good.
With the rise of AI-driven search platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, etc., your online reputation is being “read” and summarized by machines. AI models don’t just look at your website; they scrape the web for a general picture of your brand. This is where Google Reviews and Reddit become vital:
At Connectica, we’ve built a team of digital marketing experts in South Florida that have extensive experience in online reputation management. We combine our SEO, copywriting, website development, and overall digital marketing expertise to create a powerful service that enables small businesses to effectively compete in a complex digital environment.
To see how your business compares to your competitors, get a free SEO report, which will give you key insights into the health status of your website. To find out more, contact our experienced team at 877-816-2259 or send us your contact details, and we’ll be in touch.
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Connectica LLC
8499 West Commercial Blvd
Tamarac,
FL 33351
Toll Free: 1-877-816-2259
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