Successfully Managing an Online Reputation Crisis

News spreads faster than ever now that social media has become a central part of our collective experience online.  This can be great when there is an emergency, like a pending natural disaster, and providing people with faster access to information can literally save lives.  However, just as there are two sides to every coin, this also means that if your company is caught in a storm of negative press it’s unlikely that you will be able to prevent it from spreading.

The most obvious thing to do to avoid getting caught in a viral explosion of negative press is to avoid doing things that risk putting you there to begin with.  This may seem obvious, but in this case the best defense is a good offense, and it takes some effort to be proactive about making sure that you’re not making yourself vulnerable unnecessarily.

Monitoring the sentiment for your company online and trying to remedy any problems before they have a chance to spread needs to be a major priority for your social marketing team.  There are two key forces working against you when a bad story about your company comes out, and once that happens there’s little you can do to stop it.

First, blogs are paid to sell advertising.  The more pageviews they generate, the more cash they pull in.  This means they’re more than happy to post a developing story, especially a scandal that will get a lot of attention, before they get all of the facts.  Posting an “update” to the story later that says their first story was wrong just gets them more pageviews, so they’re happy to publish first and ask questions later.  The problem for your brand is that most people see the first post that gives you the bad publicity, and not as many see the update that clears your name.  This means the public still walks around with a bad impression of you even if the blog makes the correction.

Second, a study by the two researchers at the Wharton School looked at nearly 10,000 stories that made it onto the New York Times’ most-emailed list, and they found that anger is the emotion most likely to make a story spread.  Unfortunately for you, anger often goes hand-in-hand with bad press.  So if a negative story that makes people angry comes out about your company, you’re in serious trouble if you don’t find a way to mitigate it.  Once it starts to spread there’s nothing you can do to slow it down, so all the more reason to be proactive about protecting your brand online.

But what do you do if your company is already caught in an online reputation crisis?  Here is a case study from one of our clients, who wishes to remain anonymous , about how we were able to turn their reputation around.

We were contacted by a business in New York who found out that they were receiving a lot of negative reviews on a certain review site. They saw their revenue, as compared to previous years for that specific time frame, drop considerably. After looking at their situation, we came up with a game plan to help them reduce the negative reviews (which is what we felt was causing them the drop in revenue), and then to work on getting more positive reviews.

• First, we set up alerts using Google Alerts, Trackur and Brandwatch to monitor what people were saying (you can check out this article to learn more about these various tools and how to use them).  Without getting too technical, we monitored the terms that were most appropriate to the client’s problems in order to make sure we had the best understanding of what was happening possible.  This also prepared us to be able to jump on any further negative comments as soon as they happened.

• The next step was to create social media profiles for the company. This helped to humanize their business and gave them a vehicle to connect with and mobilize the customers who had positive experiences with their brand to try to counter the negative reviews.  It also gave any future unsatisfied customers an outlet for their problems, which made it easier for the company to track and respond to complaints.

• After setting up the company with social media, the owner went through the negative comments on the review site and made a list of which complaints were legitimate.  For these complaints, the owner responded to each one with an apology and explained what he was planning on doing to improve the situation that led to their complaint. These planned improvements were also posted to the company’s social media profiles so that other customers who had a similar problem but didn’t post a complaint would also see the company taking action to remedy the issue.

Following these three steps, and correcting the problems on the business side that lead to the complaints, caused the number of positive reviews to begin increasing almost immediately.  One person who had a bad experience even wrote a new review changing their opinion of the company.

Remember: An unsatisfied customer is an opportunity to create an evangelist!  If you can resolve a customer’s problems, they’re going to feel like you truly care about their happiness with your product, and when someone sees a brand go out of its way to accommodate them they will go out of their way to spread the word about your company in return.

Your brand’s reputation online is one of your company’s most valuable resources.  Just look at how Dell has never been able to recover from when the “Dell Hell” story went viral.  So what are you doing to protect an asset that is so critical to your company’s future success?  We’ve all seen it; one scandal can end the career for a politician, CEO, or company.  Are you doing everything you can to protect yourself from this risk?  Because here at Smart SEO Designs guarding your brand’s identity online is our primary responsibility.  Don’t leave yourself vulnerable to a career-ending storm of bad press, contact us for a proposal and we’ll let you know how we can help.