Entries Tagged 'Reputation Insurance' ↓

On Saturday, an Op-Ed article appeared in the International Herald Tribune (global edition of the New York Times) in which Alex Beam takes a humorous look at the letters that ReputationDefender might receive from those seeking help with their online reputation.

Reputation Defender

by Alex Beam

“There is a company in Redwood City, California, with the suggestive name of ReputationDefender. According to its Web site, “ReputationDefender was created in 2006 to defend your good name on the Internet. Today, ReputationDefender has grown to be the world’s first comprehensive online reputation management and privacy company. We’re the most experienced and most technologically innovative company of our kind …”

One can only imagine the correspondence they receive:

Dear Reputation Defender:

Things have proceeded from extremely bad to unimaginably worse. I have a problem with unscripted events.

A few years ago I made some unfortunate comments about Jewish people, which I tried to retract, except they appeared in a police log. Now I am again world famous, but not for my dynamic work in the field of motion pictures, but rather as a potty-mouthed Australian cad accused of striking the mother of my child.

Can we turn back the clock to a rosier time? Appreciating your guidance in this matter.

— Mad Mel in Malibu”

Read the rest of the article here.

While I’ve had my fair share of problems with construction, I think contractors get a bad rap. Sure, there are some unscrupulous builders out there who will overcharge you for a simple job and then drag it out from two-weeks to three months, but for the most part, general contractors, and other skilled professionals like plumbers, mechanics, and electricians, work hard and offer fair prices. If they didn’t, then they wouldn’t get referrals and their businesses would soon dry up.

Unfortunately, even the best contractor can’t be perfect all the time. Some projects will inevitably have cost overruns or end up running over schedule. It’s just one of those annoying realities of the construction industry. Of course, for the person left with a temporary hole in their roof or unworking faucets, the temptation to share their righteous anger with the world is too powerful to resist, leading to the creation of countless angry blog posts, Twitter updates, and one-star Yelp postings.

A contractor with a bad online reputation is like a home with faulty wiring: You might not be able to see the problem right away, but one of these days, everything could go up in flames. To this end, ReputationDefender would like to help contractors and other skilled professionals learn some ways to protect their reputations on the web and use the internet to help grow their business. Check out our five tips below.

1) Get a Website (or Two or Three)

Since it’s almost 2010, the odds are good that you have at least some rudimentary website for your business. If you don’t, stop reading this and find yourself a web designer right now. Having a well designed and search engine-optimized homepage for your business is one of the most important tools you can have in preventing negative publicity online. When you decide on a website, make sure the URL you choose is as close to the exact name of your company as possible. For example, if your company’s name is Four Star Builders, LLC, make sure that your website is FourStarBuilders.com.

Purchasing additional domain names for similar incarnations of your name is also a good idea. Consider how a new client might search for your company online. If someone told them to check out Four Star, maybe they’ll look up Four Star Construction. If you buy multiple domains, you are increasing the odds that web surfers will find your company online and you are decreasing the odds of an angry client or malicious competitor hijacking your company’s name on the web.

2) Start a Blog

Not long ago here at the ReputationDefender Blog, we shared the pros and cons of starting your own blog. While there are certainly risks associated with sharing your thoughts online, the benefits a well-managed blog can have on your online reputation are definitely worth the trouble. If you still have your web designer on the phone from tip one, ask them if they can add a blog directly onto your homepage. If you’d rather handle the blog yourself, you can start one for free using Google’s Blogger software. WordPress is another popular option.

The key to successful small business blogging is knowing your audience. As a contractor, there are a couple of good approaches. One thing you can do is use your blog as a place to showcase your most recent projects: “Look at the beautiful crown moulding we installed on Saturday.” Another great option is to use the blog as a place to offer construction tips:
“How to install a ceiling fan without electrocuting yourself.” Just like with the website, make sure that the URL you choose for your blog is as close as possible to the name of your business.

3) Get Help on Yelp

Yelp, and other consumer review sites, can be tricky for small business owners. For some reason, Google loves consumer review sites and frequently places them at the top of search engine results. As such, if your company has a bad review, that might end up being the first thing potential new customers see. Of course, you don’t have to have negative reviews with a little bit of outreach.

Unless you’re one of those contractors who routinely makes homeowners across the country curse your name to the heavens, the odds are good that the majority of the work you’ve done has been good quality. If one of your previous clients was particularly happy about a project you completed, contact them to see if they will testify on your behalf with a positive review. While this may not be a long-term fix for beating negative Yelp reviews, it can give you time to address the original complaint and make any apologies that need to be made.

One note about consumer reviews, however. DON’T POST FAKE REVIEWS. This is a tactic only for the cheap and desperate. If you have real satisfied customers, let them do the talking. If someone spots that your reviews are fake, your online reputation will take an even bigger hit. Additionally, if you’re considering soliciting positive feedback, do so sparingly. The Yelp algorithm will downplay reviews from new users, especially if they are leaving content that sounds overly positive. Before asking for a review outright, simply find out if any former clients use Yelp. If they do, point them to your profile.

4) Keep Your Eyes Open

In the age of Google, it doesn’t take much longer than a few days for a negative news story to make the rounds on the Internet and become a permanent blackmark on your online reputation. The best way to mitigate any possible damage from a negative consumer review, blog posting, or news article is to know about right away. For this reason, we recommend checking the web daily for new results on your company’s name.

Of course, spending your mornings at the computer keyboard instead of at a construction site probably won’t do any good in helping you improve your reputation for timely work, so we recommend leaving the Google (and Bing and Yahoo) searching to us. With MyReputation, you can sit back as we search the depths of the World Wide Web (including the invisible web) for you. We will then compile our findings into easy-to-read monthly reports with our suggestions.

5) Reach Out With Social Media

In addition to the blog that we mentioned in tip one, you can expand your company’s presence online (and your digital real estate) by joining social media websites. If you already use Facebook (and with 350 million users the odds are good that you do), you know how useful it can be for networking. By creating a Facebook Fan Page for your business, you can control the content that appears on your page and take up a spot in your Google search results. If you’re worried about getting fans, ask former clients or your current Facebook friends to help out.

By now, you’ve also probably heard of Twitter, which is another good way to bolster your brand online. Like your blog, your Twitter account can be a place to share tips and tricks on home repair issues or to share updates on your work projects. As always, with both Facebook and Twitter, you should make sure to use your full business name in the username to ensure maximum protection against bogus reviews or anonymous attacks.

You spend your whole day building things, why not take some time to build up your online reputation? For more help on protecting your business online, please feel free to send us an e-mail or give us a call today at 877-720-6488.

NEW JERSEY –

Levinson Axelrod is one of the oldest and most prestigious consumer injury law firms in New Jersey. It has been in business since 1939 and has won more than $250 million for its clients in the last 5 years alone.

But you wouldn’t know that by looking at the Google results for the firm’s name.  If you search Google for “Levinson Axelrod” today, the fourth result is a site called “Levinson Axelrod Sucks” at levinsonaxelrod.net (intentionally not linked to avoid making it any more visible in a Google search).

The site is a gripe site built by Edward Heyburn, an employee fired in 2004.  The firm says that Heyburn was fired because he was planning to open his own firm.  Heyburn claims that he was caught in disagreements about the firm’s direction and feels that the firm is not living up to its image of the working man’s protector.

The site lists many alleged problems at the law firm. Heyburn’s site claims that some of the firm’s accomplishments (like “Super Lawyer” status) were actually paid advertising and not independent awards, and that the firm called him just to disrupt him when he was in the delivery room assisting his wife in labor.  The site also highlights recent courtroom losses by Levinson Axelrod lawyers — something that can’t be found on the firm’s official site.

To a consumer law firm, image is everything

A firm like Levinson Axelrod depends on clients who are willing to trust the firm with claims that might be worth millions of dollars. When deciding on which lawyers to pick, clients depend almost entirely on the firm’s image and reputation.

After all, you can’t judge the skill of lawyers just by their names alone — instead, potential clients want to hear about experiences other people have had with a firm, and evaluate the firm’s reputation in the community.  Law firms spend tends of thousands of dollars on branding and image maintenance just to make sure that customers get an impression of strength, skill, and experience in the courtroom.

But all of that careful branding can be undermined by Google.  Potential clients might look at the firm’s website to learn more. But informed consumers will also routinely search for the firm’s name in Google to find out what other people have had to say. They will look for other experiences — positive and negative — that are described on Google before entrusting any firm with a claim that could be worth millions.

Here, the “gripe site” lists many complaints about the law firm.  Some of them might be true, or all of them might be false.  But it’s certain that many consumers won’t take the time to sort out which allegations are true and false; there are plenty of personal injury lawyers in New Jersey, so why take a risk on Levinson Axelrod when there are other firms with pristine reputations?   Maybe consumers should spend more time evaluating the gripe site’s complaints, but for most consumers, any complaint is enough to cause them to just click onto the next law firm’s site.

The same is true for doctors, lawyers, contractors, construction companies, and almost any other service industry: customers rely on  reputation to make the decision to hire a service firm.  And today, Google is the number one source of reputation — whatever Google says about you is what consumers will think about you.

SEO was not enough

Levinson Axelrod has spent a lot of energy on making its website come up first in search engines (“search engine optimization” or “SEO”).  The firm name comes up first in searches for terms like “New Jersey Personal Injury Lawyer,” “NJ injury lawyers” and other targeted keywords.  These are keywords that are worth $20.00 – $30.00 per click because they are very likely to lead to high-paying clients.   One analytics tool estimates that this SEO is worth the same as $15,000 a month in online advertising — or $180,000 a year.

SEO is important, especially to firms that benefit from consumer traffic. But SEO didn’t stop one ex-employee from trashing the firm’s image.  Any potential client that searches Google for “Levinson Axelrod” sees the “Levinson Axelrod Sucks” site right on the first page of results — and right below the firm’s official site. All that SEO value is undermined every time a potential client starts to do his or her due diligence on the firm, starting by searching for more information about the firm through Google.

SEO is designed only to get one or two pages to the top of a Google search; it is not designed to protect a brand or image online.

A lawsuit was not enough

The law firm has sued the ex-employee.  It should come as no surprise that a lawyer saw this problem as a lawsuit waiting to happen.

But the lawsuit hasn’t solved their problem: the web page is still up while they wrangle it out in court.  In fact, the legal conflict has actually drawn more attention to the website: a story of high-powered lawyers fighting each other is a guaranteed draw for reporters (see the Streisand Effect). And, of course, the ex-employee has every incentive to play up the media angle as much as possible.

Online monitoring and Google management: A better answer

If SEO and litigation aren’t enough, what is?  Comprehensive monitoring and Google image management that will push truthful positive information to the top of search results for queries related to your company name or brand.  If positive information fills all the top spots in a search, then false and disparaging information will never appear.

Proactive Google management now — before something goes wrong — can help keep false and negative information from ever reaching the front page of a Google search.  Building positive, truthful content today can block many types of negative information from ever appearing on the first page of a search.  It’s almost like a form of “Google-proofing” your brand — an investment today can stop damage in the future.  And if false information never appears on the front page, then it won’t have power to undermine your brand or spark a media frenzy.  In the case of an former employee’s complaint site, a hidden complaint site is like the ex-employee shouting into the wind: they might spend a lot of energy and vent a bit, but it is not likely to damage your brand.

Learn how you can use tools like MyEdgePro to protect your company’s image from attack today; visit http://www.reputationdefender.com/myedgepro or contact ReputationDefender for more information.

We often get asked the question “Can’t you just remove that page from Google?”  As it turns out, Google employees get asked that a lot as well.  Making the internet rounds today is a post from Google Search Quality manager Matt Cutts, where he clearly states Google’s position.  A small exerpt:

We typically say that if person A doesn’t like a webpage B, only removing page B out of Google’s search results doesn’t do any good because webpage B is still there (e.g. it can be found by going to it directly or through other search engines). In that sense, the presence of that page in Google’s index is just reflecting the fact that the page exists on the wider web.

So what should you do if you see a Google result that you don’t like?  This is what we’re here for.  First, contact our team to get a full assessment of the situation.  We know exactly how to handle results that you don’t like.  Whether it’s monitoring your online rep and attempting to have it removed with MyReputation or taking control of your own results with MyEdge, we’ve got you covered.

Donald Canning has a great post over at Windows in Financial Services that covers Online Reputation Risk Management, ReputationDefender and the emerging concept of Google Insurance for professionals, students and corporations. Don Canning is currently Managing Director of the Insurance Worldwide Group at Microsoft Corporation so he has deep knowledge of insurance, risk management and technology. Mr. Canning’s post is both readable and information rich and well worth a read. Quoting from the post:

Call it search engine insurance. Since every personal and corporate decision is now preceded by multiple fact-finding queries on search engines, it’s now time to get protection – preventative and remedial – for the Internet. If you don’t control your search engine results, you’re letting fate or someone else decide what people will see first about you and your enterprise. Warren Buffett says it takes twenty years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. Today, in fact, it takes only five minutes for anyone with access to the Web to ruin your reputation.

Back in the mid-1990s, the Internet was the domain of computer-focused people. Risks to computers and networks from rapidly proliferating viruses gave rise to virus protection software. Then the early 2000s saw the emergence of e-commerce. Risks to credit cards and other electronic payment instruments gave rise to sophisticated tools to protect credit. Today, you live your entire life on the Web. You do all of your business on the Web. You work, date, learn, and labor through and with the Internet. And a recent survey of insurance brokers even named “reputation risk” as the number one threat to their clients. But, as yet, there is no life insurance for the Web, or property and casualty insurance for the Web.

That is why Michael Fertik founded his company, ReputationDefender. It gives its individual and corporate customers tools to control their online identities. It’s not insurance, per se, since insurance is a regulated field, but the solutions are inspired by the same spirit. ReputationDefender’s mission is to protect the good name of people and companies on the Internet, a place where reputations can explode at any time.

[SNIP]

And the search results matter! Eighty-three percent of executive recruiters use search engines for researching job candidates and 75 percent of patients search online for information about physicians. Our online reputations impact our offline lives across employment fields and social strata. Like any other valuable asset, our reputations are worth insuring and protecting.

ReputationDefender thanks Mr. Canning for the thoughtful post. We look forward to preserving and maintaining reputations in the digital age.