I’m finishing up a reputation management project and thought this would be a good opportunity to explain online reputation management in simple terms, include an entertaining example, and direct you to more resources.
In the simplest of terms, online reputation management is the process of creating new web pages that rank higher than the pages containing the bad stuff for your name, product name(s), and/or important keywords. Create enough high ranking & relevant content from enough sources and in time your reputation is clean. Ideally, it’s pushed down to page 3, 4, and lower, but page one is the first big goal.
I hadn’t given much thought to embracing poor reviews until I read this SEOmoz post about reputation management. It was written by Las Vegas Reputation Management & Social Media Consultant Jason Murphy. He gives United Airlines some brilliant ways to respond to the wild popularity (and incredibly awesome) United Breaks Guitars YouTube video from David Carroll. If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the video. Oh yeah, it’s also the 4th listing on page one of Google for “United Airlines.” Tell me this didn’t get their attention.
Well, according to the LA Times, it looks as though they are contacting Dave Carroll to “make things right.” I’m curious to see if they’ll take any of the steps outlined by Jason in his post. Rather than re-cap his ideas, check out the complete post to see some very creative ways to handle a big reputation management challenge.
In addition to Jason’s post, I recommend reading related posts from SEOmoz, Distilled, Matt McGee, and Bruce Clay.