Bad press online can harm your reputation more than you think. In many ways, the Internet is like a small village, where gossip and news spreads fast and is remembered for a long time. If you do business in a small town, you may instinctively understand the stakes. If your local small-town paper prints some negative news about your business, everyone will know it and will remember it. The Internet works the same way, but damage control can be more complicated, because gossip and negative press on the Internet does not usually go away organically. Plus, it can easily go viral. If you want to clean up bad press online, you cannot just write to your local newspaper editor. You need to take concrete actions that can impact a whole global community – and you have to act quickly, before bad press starts affecting your bottom line.

There are four basic things you can do to start to clean up bad press online right away:

1. Measure and prioritize bad press online. You cannot manage something you can’t measure, so you need to find a way to quantify and monitor the press your company gets online. This allows you to respond appropriately and in a timely way to online brand threats. A good way to pin down some concrete information is to hire a professional reputation monitoring or analysis service.
2. Focus on positive references to your company. Find some positive blog posts about your company or some positive online testimonials and make the most of them by optimizing the links. Respond warmly and in a positive way to those who take the time to praise your company online. Anyone who is writing well about your brand or services online is doing you a favor — Edelman’s 2008 Trust Barometer proves that customers trust other customer’s opinions more than they trust marketing messages. Make sure that you show appreciation for customers who speak well of your business and make sure that you do what you can to make these positive notices as prominent as possible.
3. Take the right action steps over and over again to counter bad press. When bad press does occur, listen to the negative comments, find some sympathy for the customers making the comments, and respond in the most professional and sincere way you can. You must do this consistently and in a timely way to counter the effects of negative comments. It may be challenging, especially when customers make unfounded or especially harsh comments about your company, but you must stay calm and respond in a way that will win these customers over.
4. Keep bad press in perspective and use every opportunity to further your brand. A certain segment of marketers believe that there is no such thing as bad publicity. If you are facing bad press online, that may be hard to believe. However, even negative press can be an opportunity to win over new customers and bring more attention to your company. Every time someone makes a comment about your company – whether positive or negative – it is an opportunity for you to respond and put a positive human face to your brand.

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