Building your company reputation should be a priority for any startup. The nuance of reputation is that it can take years to grow and only minutes to destroy. New companies tend not think about online reputation until they grow, and it’s usually at the point where they are experiencing issues.
In this guide, you are going to learn about the five biggest mistakes new companies make when they are attempting to build their reputations.
Not Taking It Into Account
The first major mistake is that companies don’t take it into account at all. A good online reputation requires proactive building from the beginning. If your reputation is already in the doldrums, it’s much harder to make a difference. An online reputation firm can do a lot to help you, but they can’t control what people say.
A good online reputation built up from the start is better positioned to deal with negative comments because anything negative or defamatory will be buried under a pile of positivity. It does cost money, but this is where bootstrapping isn’t the best option.
Failing to Acknowledge Bad Reviews
Online reputation isn’t about preventing people from giving honest opinions. It’s about protecting your company from disgruntled employees and opinions that are blatantly untrue. If your company is genuinely terrible, your reputation is deserved and nothing can hide that.
Bad reviews should be acknowledged when trying to build up your online reputation because 87% of customers won’t even consider a business with low ratings. If you receive the same criticisms over and over again, it’s a sign that you need to change. By ignoring negative reviews, you are not targeting the source of the comments, and therefore, you’ll never fix bad reviews.
Furthermore, many complainers can become loyal customers through addressing their concerns.
A Lack of Tracking
To protect your online reputation, you need to track it at all times. A lack of tracking leaves you blind to what people are saying about you. Thankfully, it’s easy to track your online reputation through what Google offers.
Set up a Google Alerts signal for your company name, any particular brand names, and the company founders. Every time someone mentions you, there will be an automatic alert sent to your email inbox. These alerts can be both positive and negative and will give you an exact snapshot of where your organization is right now.
Not Controlling Who Can Access Your Social Media Accounts
Social media is notorious for destroying company reputations. All it takes is a disgruntled company employee to say something slightly controversial and it could whip up a storm that could bring your company to its knees. The way around this is to carefully control who has posting rights on the company’s social media feeds.
Anyone who does have access should have to conform to strict guidelines regarding their conduct. A written social media contract will ensure that they are aware of what they should be posting and what’s acceptable/not acceptable.
On a side note, anyone you employ should have a squeaky clean social media account. Employees and their behavior reflect on the company as a whole. If you have a part-time KKK member working for you, it could cause a lot of damage to your organization.
Some people believe that you are being intrusive by demanding this of employees, but the reality is that not doing this could lead to disaster.
Failing to Deliver a Five-Star Service
Deciding to build up your reputation is a fantastic way of staying one step ahead of the competition. On the other hand, there are no secret tips and tricks on how to do this. There’s nothing you can do to hide poor performances and not delivering on your promises.
You should be delivering a five-star service each and every time. Companies that do this can guarantee good reputations in the long-term. Then an online reputation repair company can help them just to deal with the unwarranted feedback.
So how do you ensure you are delivering a five-star service?
You need to go out of your way to under promise and over deliver. If you smash expectations each and every time, you are going to have much more success in the long-term.
Last Word – Repairing Your Online Reputation
The easiest way to repair your online reputation is to not have to do it in the first place. Prevention is always better than the cure. Online reputation firms can remove bad search results from the first page of Google, but if you are regularly receiving negative reviews there’s little they can do.
The crux of your online reputation is in what you are doing in a world where you are under intense public scrutiny.