Reputation Management

Welcome to the Online Reputation Management blog category.  We have something very important to tell you.

You suck.
Your company ripped me off.
You don’t care about your customers.
You messed up my order.
Your president is a liar.
Your brand eats babies.

Don’t look at us like that. We didn’t say it; droves of your angry customers did.

The sad truth is this: If you haven’t been watching and monitoring your online reputation, these may be the comments filling the blogs and social networks right now. They’re piling up faster than you realize and are scaring potential customers away.

Not all social media visibility is good. Online vigilantes have invaded the space and they’re taking their problems with your company to the main stage. They’re leaving disparaging remarks on blogs, forums, social networking sites, Wikipedia pages and everywhere in between. And the only way for you to stop them is to know that these problems exist in the first place.

And that’s where we come in. This section is designed to get you up to speed on all the different tips, tricks, and tools available to help you monitor your online reputation and put out small reputation management fires before they grow into unmanageable blazes.  We’ll show you how to find the problem, create a strategy to defend against it and how to discretely get rid of negative brand mentions.

The FruitGuys: A Case Study in Follow-Up

May 15, 2012

What if I told you that you could reduce reputation problems, provide great customer service, strengthen your brand, and live according to your values and mission through a single marketing tactic? The answer lies in fruit. Yes, fruit. Around the Outspoken Media office, we’ve been on a big corporate social responsibility kick. It’s one way [...]

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The Secret to Good Marketing: Good Business

April 27, 2012

Recently, I was contacted by a small business owner who was facing what appeared to be an insurmountable slump in sales. The business owner was a wreck. He’d opened his store in a part of town that no longer received much foot traffic since a new overpass was added to a major intersection. Sales were [...]

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Avoid an ORM Disaster By Controlling Online Responses

March 14, 2012

I love the Internet. As a user I love being able to meet people I wouldn’t have otherwise been connected to and how easily it is to be part of larger conversations. As a business owner, I love having this direct line to the people we’re trying to help and serve. Of course, there are [...]

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Manage Your Online Reputation When Disaster Strikes

August 29, 2011

What follows is a look into how the City of Troy responded to disaster with takeaways you can immediately implement in your own business for online reputation, social media and SEO emergency preparedness. Prepare now. Act later. Over the weekend, our little town of Troy, NY got hit by Hurricane Irene. By the time she [...]

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How Online Affects Offline: The Shame of Weinergate

June 28, 2011

Ah, the notion that the Internet isn’t real life. It’s so cute, so innocent, so absurd! What makes us believe this? Is it denial or ignorance? It doesn’t matter. Either way, it’s dangerous. I didn’t really want to talk about Weinergate. It’s not only gross, but it pains me to think about how someone in [...]

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A Simple Way To Keep Bad Reviews Offline

March 4, 2011

Earlier this week I caught a post from Entrepreneur.com about cleaning up your online reputation. Curious if there’d be any good tips, I decided to give it a read. But there weren’t any tips. Instead, the article introduced me to a site called Skweal. Hmm. If you haven’t heard of it, Skweal is a feedback [...]

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5 Reasons NOT to Delete Negative Reviews

November 19, 2010

Yesterday afternoon I had a chance to chat with a writer from a bridal magazine. She was looking for tip on how retailers could protect themselves from negative reviews and how they should respond to negative reviews that are left on their sites/ Facebook account. She wondered – if someone leaves a critical review on [...]

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Google on Manipulating Search for ORM

October 22, 2010

On Tuesday, Search Engine Roundtable covered the WebmasterWorld thread, Create more content to bury negatives? Fair game says Google, in which tedster and the WMW community discussed Google’s apparent stance on online reputation management. The conversation was sparked by a quote from a Google representative on NPR’s All Tech Considered: Meanwhile, Google doesn’t seem to [...]

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DIY ORM Without The Nasty Emotional Breakdown

September 8, 2010

I recently chatted with a student working on his thesis. He was interested in the effects of the social Web and how these new tools were changing things for business owners. One of the big topics we touched on was online reputation management. The student asked me why someone would attack a brand and what [...]

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Air Canada Ignores Dying Boy Til He Goes Viral

August 6, 2010

I was introduced to Tanner via Scott Stratten on Twitter. Tanner is a 10-year-old boy fighting muscular dystrophy. He’s 10 and he’s dying.  I don’t even know how you’re supposed to handle that. However, while the world still has him, Tanner’s aunt Catherine Connors and social media’s own Scott Stratten organized a tweet-a-thon on his [...]

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