It takes 20 years to build a good reputation and 5 minutes to destroy it. This is one of Warren Buffet’s gems. The canny doyen of investors is right. Online reputation management is as important as never before. People are connected as never before. They can access any information with just a few clicks. A single negative comment may just be enough to ruin a good reputation built up over years.
This can have a negative impact on a company’s reputation in the shortest possible time. Potential customers attracted to products or services of that company will take the comment as a warning. The observation of John Doe is now on public record and consumers hope to save themselves from frustration under the same circumstances. This is only one of the possible effects on a company.
Good or bad online reputation affects all facets of business relations. It influences the behavior of whole groups of existing or possible future consumers, suppliers, employees, investors, and shareholders. These individual groups are often linked within a closer network on Facebook; any negative news travels that much faster along those lines. As usual, good news don't travel well.
Decision for or against a company and its products or services are more and more dependent on search engine results. It can be observed that digital reputation is directly influencing decision makers. The virtual reputation on the net becomes crucial for success or failure of a company (or an author at that). Many may claim to be objective and not being influenced by online information. But even the big rating agencies react to it on a subconscious level.
To restore a flawless reputation without blemish takes time, energy, money and the help of a team of experts called fixers. A specific response to a justified negative comment by expressing regrets is a first step. Defamatory statements without any truth in it make removal that much harder. Making contact with qualified experts is the course to take. Getting false statements to disappear from the net requires a lot of know-how. The perpetrator and author of the original comment might be brought to heel and his comment erased. Gaining control over the subsequent spin-off comments is a different matter all together. Often, the only course open is to push them back in their search engine ranking with dozens or even hundreds of blog posts specifically spun to purpose.
There is truth in the widespread opinion that nothing can ever be deleted from the net without trace and that the net never forgets anything. Even law to the right to forget are very limited in their effect. Networking allows information to spread like wildfire in all directions through the various platforms and groups. Information published on the net today in Turkey will be available the next day in Bhutan; a day later, the whole world knows it.
Online reputation management is a complex science. It should not be left to an incidental person who just happens to be able to write a blog. Too much depends on the presence of a company as a virtual online persona. For the same reasons, book authors should leave it to their publishers to determine the scope and content of their public persona. Self-promotion can do more harm than good if done by an amateur without professional guidance. Just because book authors think their publisher is not doing enough to promote them should not lead them into temptation to attempt it on their own without proper guidance.
As an online writer and blogger on the other hand, you have to be your own expert. Making mistakes is human and at least in this context not lethal; annoying maybe, but you can fix that. In this way, you become a fixer and an expert yourself. And this opens a whole new line for your writing career.
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