“44 percent of online adults have searched for information about someone whose services or advice they seek in a professional capacity.” Pew Research Center
Has the Internet made you look bad? MarCom’s proprietary reputation management services will help push down negative or inaccurate search results about you or your company. We offer proprietary processes to hide or eliminate the “bad stuff.”
Like it or not, today there is a permanent record of everything you post on the Internet. Additionally, there is a permanent record of everything that others post about you or your company, and these posts can come back to bite you.
Negative content on the Internet is anything that presents you and/or your company in a bad light. Search results that come up from the search engines online help shape public opinion. A negative or misleading impression created by search results can not only damage your reputation, but destroy your business, career, or even family and personal relationships.
This might include:
- Negative or unflattering news articles, videos and photos
- Bad reviews about you, or your company or products and services
- Any online content that can do serious damage to your reputation
- Out of-date content like old police records, blog posts, or comments in forum posts
- Anything that can simply give people the wrong impression
People aren’t just searching for you online and in social media sites, they are also judging you or your company based on what they find. Private information from people-search sites and databases can include everything from income to religious beliefs and political affiliations.
Do you need reputation management?
Two clear signs are: 1) if a potential client tells you how they were just about to sign a contract with you until they checked you out on Google; 2) if you can’t even get an appointment with a potential client.
Reputation management is a serious business and MarCom treats it as such. We can’t give you too many references because we keep some of our client information confidential. For the most part we don’t judge, after all, who among us doesn’t have a blemish somewhere on their record.
But what we can do is to suppress inaccurate or misleading links from the top search results about you or your company. We can help control your content by creating the high-quality webpages that people see first when they Google you or the name of your business.
MarCom can share a number of online reputation management programs that we have done with you in person, without divulging the client names, to prove it does work. But just in case you must know, here is one reputation management case history.
Client: CyberDefender Corporation
Los Angeles, CA
Challenge: MarCom was retained to re-brand Los Angeles-based software developer providing early warning and defense against Internet attacks. We were also faced with assisting the company’s CEO with reputation management because his prior company had negative listings on the Internet.
Solution: The marketing team strongly recommended re-branding the anti-virus company under a new corporate identity – CyberDefender. MarCom employed reputation management to deal with the negative listings. We then began branding their new corporate identity and product line, using basic public relations and Search Engine Optimization and link building. MarCom conducted a key word analysis, and began using the optimum key words in all press materials, and then began publishing CyberDefender Alerts for phishing, spyware and viruses along with the company’s ongoing traditional press releases on electronic wire services. We also began and wrote a CyberDefender blog and distributing articles to the article submission feeds for increased visibility. Once the company’s phase two website was complete, marketing and PR was brought in-house, and the company went public.
Results: The negative listings were pushed back off of Google’s first page within six months. Within three months there were increased product sales and revenues and after six months the company’s ranking by the search engines showed a significant increase in organic listings based on the key words, while increased product sales and revenues amplified after the press launch.
“Kristin and Mike at MarCom are absolutely efficient and incredibly proficient in the field of SEO, SEM and reputation management. I’ve seen huge results in the visibility of my life’s work in a very short period and I owe it to this wonderful team.” –R. B. April, 2008
Reputation management is not cheap-it’s basically like SEO on steroids. It’s a lot of work to fix a bad online reputation and even more work to maintain the positive one we re-establish for you. So, you need to do the math before you call us and figure out what your ROI is–if you are losing tens of thousands of dollars a month in business because of your bad online reputation then the ROI makes sense. However, if you feel you’re losing less than that, then you’ll probably just need to bite the bullet because the expense of reputation management doesn’t make sense.
The best practice of course is to always do the right thing and think twice before posting anything that you wouldn’t want your mother to see. But even the most blameless of us can fall victim to an angry individual with too much time on their hands. It’s not fair, but it is life. We’re here to help.