The Best Online Reputation Services for 15 Years.

What is online reputation management?

Reputation management is the effort to influence what and how people think of a brand or person when viewed online. Put another way, character is who you are. Reputation is whom other people think you are. Search engines like Google have inserted themselves as determiners of brand reputation. Online reputation managers work to change the sentiment portrayed by Google about a brand. Read more about reputation management here. 

What can it do?

Reputation management services include:

• Build online brand with better search results than competitors.
• Removal of negative online content on blogs, newspapers, review and rating sites.
• Development of a counterpoint to provide a more balanced perspective in search results.
• Improve the neutrality and balance of Wikipedia articles.
• Increase star-ratings and remove or dilute reviews online.
• Remove or reduce the visibility of images online. 
• Improve search engine friendliness of corporate communications.
• Enhance visibility of online articles about a brand.
• Remove search results from Google and Bing.

How much does online reputation management cost?

 Costs depend on many things. For example, a simple removal may be free, $3,000, or much more - one time. The cost to improve reviews can be as little as $250 per month per location. The cost of pushing down a search result in Google may run $3,000 to $15,000 per month or more and may require many months to complete. 

What goes into a typical campaign?

A typical reputation campaign includes five stages:

• Research
• Strategy
• Web development
• Content
• Promotion

Not included in the above list are things like campaign setup and sentiment monitoring, but they're important as well. Within each stage are various actions. For example, during the research stage there may be competitive analysis, content gap analysis, SEO analysis, persona development, sentiment analysis and more. 

You can learn more about how a typical reputation management campaign is budgeted here. You can learn about the process in detail here. 

How long does it take?

Removal of problem content can take as little as two weeks, or much longer. Sometimes reputation management companies have a relationship with a website from a prior campaign which makes things faster. Other times a more drawn out timeline occurs when attorneys or negotiations must ensue.

The length of time necessary for reputation repair versus review management is significant. For example, small businesses can begin to see their star-rating improve within a couple of weeks. But the time needed to push down a negative search result will almost certainly be many months. Find out more about how long reputation campaigns take here. 

Can Wikipedia be edited to improve brand sentiment?

Wikipedia pages can be changed, but the changes must adhere to Wikipedia guidelines. Importantly, while the guidelines themselves are fairly clear, volunteer Wikipedia editors make those guidelines subjective. With more active pages a consensus must be reached because there is no "best" way to edit a page. 

A core guideline for Wikipedia articles is a "neutral point of view". But for controversial people and companies that neutrality is often overlooked. Reputation X brings balance and neutrality to Wikipedia pages. 

To complicate things further, we've run into many instances where Wikipedia editors (regular unpaid people) have an agenda or are (sometimes) paid to damage corporate reputation. The bigger a company gets, or the more visible it is in the press, the more people are watching the page. The more more people watching, the more challenging it becomes. The more challenging, the longer it takes because pages must be edited slowly and by very experienced editors. 

Reputation X has been successfully improving Wikipedia pages for over ten years. Our process engages editors in a peer review process prior to edits being made. The group edits content off-line, discusses it, and only once it is agreed upon that the new content will most likely pass judgement do editors make changes. This method works best for the users of Wikipedia, as well as our clients. The work we do must always improve Wikipedia. 

Can software be used to improve reputation?

Software cannot be used to solve most online reputation problems. Only reviews and ratings can be improved with software. Software to remove an article from a prominent publication does not exist. Nor does any application exist to push negative search results down (reduce visibility in search results). We do use many types of software, some proprietary and others public. To see the types of publicly available reputation management tools we use click here. 

Why online reputation matters

Almost everyone will search a brand online before doing business. The same is true for individuals. 60% of consumers say that negative reviews made them not want to use a business.