Protecting Your Online Presence and Reputation

Everyone is out there doing it — busy building their online presence. They are building a profile for themselves, boosting their brand and making inroads into valuable customer communities. To be smart about your online image, you have to be just as smart about how you handle what others say about you as you have to be about what you say about yourself. Rightly or wrongly, your reputation can be in tatters in a matter of minutes given the speed at which online resources can fuel communications. You have to be one step ahead of bad comments and be ready to act and react accordingly. Protecting your brand and your reputation can be a full-time job for dedicated marketing resource, and it shouldn’t be something to look on as a ‘nice to have’ extra. If you spend all your time loading content and making comments but never dealing with what comes back to you, then you could be doing a lot of damage to your reputation and brand rather than the positive impact you intended. However wrong you may feel a customer comment or post might be, you would be wise to view them all as opportunities to enhance your image. How you respond to and rectify an issue will leave a much longer-lasting impression than the initial issue raised. If your response is nothing, the unaddressed complaint will live on and its impact can grow out of all proportion. However, handle it well and appease the complainant and you will find yourself with customers who are more loyal than they were before the problem was aired. It is well to remember that publishing content to the web is what it says — a form of publishing. There have been many stories in the news relating to what individuals have said on social media platforms which have landed them in hot water. Learn what the dos and don’ts are and the difference between a genuine customer complaint and slander or liable so that you know how to react accordingly. If you are managing an effective online presence, then hopefully you will be generating mostly a positive range of feedback. With positive comments and postings you will rightly want to make the most of them. To do this, you need to make sure that your online and social media activities are integrated with your overall marketing strategy. Co-ordinating your content development, communications and PR can be the perfect mix for boosting your positive brand profile across all media. Don’t let your online presence suffer or do your business damage through lack of dedicated resource. Speak to marketing recruitment agencies in Worcestershire about the available talent who can help protect your brand and help enhance your online presence. Good marketing recruitment agencies in Worcestershire will have a range of skilled candidates who could meet the needs of varying role types in your business. And if you’re not sure what the role profile should be to cover this or any other area of marketing work, then they can help you with that too.