8 Types of Reputation Management Issues

Glen Allsopp / 25 Comments / January 28th, 2008 / Subscribe via RSS

Reputation Management is a serious online service that needs timely attention, although not enough people do it justice and simply monitor feeds online for mentions of said brand / product / service. There’s many forms of ‘negative reputation’ online and this blog post is going to cover a few that crop up from time to time and some you may not be aware of.

1. Logo Infringement

Companies like BMW will no doubt have some form of copyright / trademark protection for their logo and if they were a client of mine I would make it clear that others are using their logo for their own benefit. Just look at this example I found for a site named ‘Blog Money Wiki’.

The original logo is on the right, not much difference

Of course for something like this we would have to get in touch with a legal team before taking any serious action if it is deemed to be affecting the brand. I think a simple email to the site owner might just do though.

2. Bidding on Trademarked Terms via PPC

Any company that has a trademark on it’s brand name has the right to get in touch with the relevant search engine to stop people bidding on their terms, especially if proved to be affecting them. For examples of a site that has issues you could try a huge window company in the UK named ‘Velux’.

As a reputation management company, the best we could do in this situation is actually advise a company on the exact steps to take as this can only be solved by the company actually filing this process.

3. Negative Social Network Groups

It’s all well and good when a company is raving about your brand, but what about when it turns negative and gets in front of a large amount of people. This is a big issue but it’s something I’ve had experience dealing with personally with a lot of success, I’m going to be doing a blog post on how to deal with each of these issues in the future. Motorola for one could do with some help regarding facebook groups.

Here is our guide to dealing with negative social network groups.
4.Harmful Forum Feedback

In my experience when finding negative issues online, a large percentage of people complaining about a product or service tend to do so on relevant, public forums which can rank highly in the search results. Brands can certainly benefit from managing their reputation online, especially when people are going to forums and saying their account has been hacked, like in the case of Digg below.

5. Micro sites Criticising a Brand

Believe it or not, people will go as far as setting up new websites just to share their displeasure and hatred towards a brand or the product it offers. One good example includes Paypal Sucks, which ranks highly for the term paypal. In South Africa, a company named Telkom provides the majority of their communications, they are awful to be honest so there’s no surprise a site named ‘Hellkom‘ was set-up to talk about just that.

6. Negative Blog Posts

Just like forums, this is a huge contributor to negative feedback online as it’s so easy for people to setup a blog and talk about anything they like, in fact it probably accounts for the majority of mentions. A simple search like in the image below can reveal a lot of negativity for a brand on blogs, in this example it’s UK phone network o2.

That was just for an ‘intitle search’, if you take that out there are a lot more relevant results. For tips on how to deal with this issue see our post on ‘How to Deal with Negative Blog Posts‘.

7. General Search Results

People do actually search for issues or negative terms when undecided on using a company over the internet, or even use the internet just to research a company for offline purposes. Taking all the terms like ’sucks, rubbish, problems’ out of the equation, there can still be bad results when just typing in a brand name which is even worse; Paypal is a good example of this.

For tips on how to deal with this issue see our post on ‘How to Deal with Negative Search Engine Results‘.
8. Review Sites

When helping clean up negative results online these can certainly be the hardest to deal with. They tend to rank highly especially for review related terms which is what people often search for when deciding on whether to go with a service or choose a certain product. This example looks at how Samsung could be losing sales due to a negative online reputation.

This isn’t every issue you are going to find but does include most of them, I will be doing a post on how to handle each of these situations.

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