What are Reputation Management Services

(408 Words)
Reputation management services are businesses that have emerged in response to the wildfire spread of negative company information via websites and social networking sites. They can provide a business with a way to “clean up” its Internet reputation and hopefully garner more business.
Customers who become angry at a company may execute revenge by creating negative posts and web pages. When a potential customer reads these posts they may decide not to utilize the company’s services. This can have a significant effect on the business the company receives.
According to Bloomberg Businessweek, a reputation management service can help with this by creating a more positive influence on the web. They will sometimes try to get rid of the negative posts but mostly try to create a lot of positive web pages to bury the negative ones in the search engine results. They may create them themselves or ask bloggers or others to create positive reviews. Of course there has been some criticism about whether all of these are legitimate because many of them do not disclose that they are a service working for the company. Potential companies may think they are legitimate reviews.
Reputation management services try to give companies positive reputations on the web. They use search engine optimization to achieve this. Because Google has such as strong presence on the search engine market, many of them are specifically targeted to them. They hope to get the negative results off of the first pages so that someone will miss them when looking up the reputation of a company. They may be part of the marketing or public relations functions of a company.
Most companies that hire reputation management services are looking to cover up problems of the past. They do not want customers making decisions on these. Some will want to legitimately respond to customer complaints, however.
The services of a reputation management service do not come cheap. According to Businessweek, small businesses may incur fees that start at $1000 per month. Larger companies pay more.
Reputation management services can provide companies with the good name they need to do business. Of course these companies should be careful not to push the line. If Google detects that they are using creative techniques in order to push their posts to the top of the results unfairly, then they could be penalized and show up lower. Companies should evaluate whether such a service is right for them.
Source:
http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/apr2008/sb20080430_356835.htm