If your company reputation has suffered from unflattering online comments, you may be in need of a reputation makeover. Getting a fresh start and a new image isn’t as hard as you might believe. You can accomplish a quick overhaul by starting with a few basic questions:

1) Who are your customers? Knowing who your customers are allows you to focus on the most damaging comments online. For example, if most of your customers are over 30 and most of the negative comments about your company are posted on sites aimed at pre-teens, you may not have as much to worry about as you believe. Knowing your potential customers also allows you to determine what it would take to bring your customers back. What would your customers respond to? What are your customers looking for in your company?

2) What tone can you or should you take with customers? Knowing your customers allows you to also decide what tone to take. If there are problems with your online reputation, you will want to use the right words and phrases to communicate. Will your customers react best if you clearly lay out all the evidence that the charges against your company are untrue? Or, will your customers react better with a sincere apology? Before you react to bad online comments, make sure that you understand what reaction your customers are looking for.

3) What online resources are you not using right now? If you only have a website, maybe it is time to develop a company blog, a social networking page, feeder sites, an ezine, or a sub-domain for your website. Perhaps it is time to upload photos to photo sharing sites or videos to YouTube. Positive comments across a variety of sites and applications will help bolster your reputation quickly.

4) How can you project sincerity and friendliness more effectively? If your reputation has suffered, your company may be associated with negative images in your customer’s minds. You need to project friendliness and sincerity in order to turn these negative associations around.

5) How much time can you dedicate to your online reputation makeover? A reputation makeover will take time and money. You will need to meet with professionals, develop an action plan, and implement it. You may have to pay for reputation monitoring services or for search engine optimization in order to bolster your site’s visibility on search engines. Be sure to budget both time and money for the makeover.

6) What are the strengths of your current reputation? It is easy to start focusing on the negative comments available online, but you need to focus on the positive as well as the negative in order to change your online image. Are there positive comments being made about your business online? If so, what are they? How can you accentuate those comments and make them more visible online? If there are very few good comments online, consider some of your strengths as a business. What can you develop in your company to create the sorts of customers who will want to comment positively about you on blogs and social networking sites?

Bad online reputation analysis allows your company to learn about negative comments being made about your business on blogs, websites, message boards, social networking pages, and in mainstream news sources. This allows you to gather comprehensive information about the way that your brand is portrayed online.

Bad online reputation analysis is the first step to gaining control over your online reputation. You simply cannot get control over your online brand image until you know what is being said about your company, your top team members, and your products or services on the Internet. Once you understand the comments being made and once you understand what is being said, you can start developing a branding strategy and a method for promoting a positive reputation.

Unfortunately, many businesses don’t realize that they need to run a bad online reputation analysis – they Google their company name and decide whether their Internet reputation is good or bad based on the search results. There are several problems with this technique. One problem is that using Google to search for your company name gives you very incomplete results. You may not be able to see all that is being said about your business online by using one search engine. Also, you may need to use various search terms to get good results. For example, you may not notice with a simplistic search that while your business name does not often get used in connection with bad reviews, many people online are making very disparaging comments about your product name online. Worse, a simplistic search once in a while doesn’t allow you to see changes to your reputation over time. Your company’s reputation may be slipping drastically and you might not realize it – simply because you do not know where or how to look for the danger signs.

Running your own bad online reputation analysis online will simply not give you the same results as taking your online reputation to professionals. Professionals can monitor your brand name, company name, and even the names of your key employees over time. They will thoroughly monitor newswires, traditional media outlets, blogs, forums, social networking sites, and other types of web sites to bring you the most comprehensive understanding of how your company is truly faring online.

Best of all, professionals will present the information you need to know in easy-to-understand graphical reports, so that you can quickly see at a glance how whether your online reputation is faring poorly. Rather than wasting your time researching your own company, you can have the pertinent information delivered right to you so that you can take action. Plus, the professionals will do the analysis for you. That way, if your company reputation is taking the worst beating on blogs, you can focus on blogs when trying to repair your online reputation. Professional analysis means that you understand the problem thoroughly so that you can start turning your reputation around.

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.

In today’s world, where just about anyone can set up a free blog in minutes, negative blog articles can be a real problem for companies. A disgruntled customer can easily write up an article that negatively depicts your company and publish it almost instantly on a blog. Competitors, too, can depict your company in a less-than-flattering light in an article that gets published all over the Internet. If your company is being negatively depicted in blogs, there are many things that you can do:

1. Monitor blogs. Monitoring blogs in your industry as well as personal blogs can help you determine whether there are in fact any negative blog articles about your business being posted. While this can seem like a simple task, new blogs are created every day, so a professional reputation monitoring service will give you the best idea of what is being said about your business online.
2. Monitor trolls. In fairy tales, trolls are usually small creatures found under bridges. Online, trolls are people who deliberately create trouble for companies and for individuals by stirring up animosity or spreading negative comments. Trolls may take the time and effort to go from forum to forum bad-mouthing your company or may take the trouble to send out guest blog articles depicting your company in a negative light. You need to keep tabs on any Internet user who deliberately and regularly spreads negative information or misinformation about your business. You may try contacting trolls directly in order to get them to stop making negative comments about you online. If a troll is making untrue comments as well as negative comments, you may be able to get an attorney to send a cease-and-desist letter. However, keep in mind that many trolls are only encouraged by any attention — much like bullies.
3. Prioritize any blog post with negative comments about your company. If there are more than a few blog articles that depict your company in a bad light, you need to prioritize which blog articles are truly worth following up on. A blog article on a personal blog that simply depicts your company as underwhelming is far less serious than an article that slams your company and happens to appear on a high traffic blog or on a blog that is well respected in your industry. In general, you want to pick your battles.
4. Look for a blogger’s email or contact information. You can try contacting a blogger directly, offering to resolve a problem that the blogger has had with your business. However, keep in mind that the blogger may well post your e-mail on their blog. Therefore, be professional and kind, no matter how rule the blogger has been.
5. Respond to a blogger’s comments. When you do find a blog article that casts your company in a poor light, you can often use the comments feature to comment directly on the article. Identify yourself as the owner or company executive of your business, and offer to make things right.
6. Find ways to outrank bloggers. In some cases, a blogger simply does not want to make things right. He or she wants to complain. In these cases, it may be easier to use search engine optimization (SEO) to ensure that your own blogs, company web sites, and articles score higher on search engine rankings than the blog in question. The blog will eventually work its way lower and lower on the search engine rankings until it is no longer clearly visible to your potential customers.

What happens when you search for your business name, company products and services, or employee and owner names on major search engines such as Google? Are most of the top results positive endorsements of your company or your official web sites? Or, are some of the top results negative comments coming from disgruntled customers, former employees, and competitors?

If your search engine results are not excellent, you do need to clean them up. Search engine results can affect your bottom line, because:

1. Many people use the Internet as a primary form of information before deciding which companies to do business with. A potential customer may look up your information on the Internet, hoping to find information about your company. Unfortunately, any negative reviews may overshadow positive testimonials and glowing reports from satisfied customers. It is human nature to be somewhat fearful of new things, and potential customers not familiar with your business may rather risk doing business with a competitor rather than risk doing business with you if you have many negative comments. Quite simple, negative online comments about your business are red flags for potential customers.
2. The media uses search engines when looking for sources and information about businesses. If you do have a marketing strategy that includes dealing with the media, you can be sure that media contacts research your business and company online. While it’s true that you want all your media contacts to have the full story and to have an objective view of your business, many of the negative comments that may be appearing on search engine results and web sites may be anything but objective. If you don’t want these sorts of negative comments to end up in articles and news stories about you, you need to take care of bad search engine results upfront.
3. Search engine results have a way of perpetuating themselves. If someone researches your company name via search engines and find results are less than complimentary, that person may pass on that information — or misinformation, as the case may be — to other people through personal web sites, blogs, and forums. For example, many people use forums to ask others about a particular company. Someone who does not even have any experiences with your company may Google your company name and respond to the questioner with a comment along the lines of “I don’t know much about this company, but these URLs suggest that they have some problems….” You certainly don’t want you or business discussed this way online.

Obviously, poor search engine results are serious problem. In fact, they can be as much of a problem as not showing up on search engines at all. To fix search engine rankings, you need to speak to a reputation management service. Professionals can find out exactly what is going on with your online reputation — whether a reputation problem is being caused by a few individuals or is a more sustained problem. Professionals can then advise you on the steps you need to take right now to get immediate results.