Corporate reputation management is more important than ever. In 2018, Ipsos MORI conducted a study that showed that 97 percent of business owners felt that online reputation management was critical to their business. This is according to an article published by Forbes, where it also pointed out how things such as a social media presence and positive online reviews are equally as important. The businesses most concerned with online reputation management include travel and hospitality, as well as eCommerce. However, trends show that consumers in every industry are greatly concerned about what they find online about a company, whether it be B2C or B2B customers.

Corporate Reputation Management The Threat of Fake Reviews and Review Saboteurs

In a post published by HubSpot, enterprises could lose up to 22 percent of their customer base due to a single negative article. When it comes to your bottom line, that is a lot of money to be lost just because of someone’s negative review, especially if that review is not truthful. The fact is, you have no way of knowing if a competitor has been posting false negative reviews about your company until it’s too late. With that advent of “fake news,” review sabotage has reached new levels in the last few years or so. A textbook example of review saboteurs at work is when the CNN mobile application suffered thousands of one-star reviews from hardline conservatives who were angered by the network’s treatment of a Trump supporter on Reddit.

With nearly 85 percent of consumers trusting what they read online, it’s important to hire a corporate reputation management firm to monitor and handle negative online reviews, social media posts, or articles about your enterprise. And keep in mind that each star your enterprise gets in a review can increase revenue by five to nine percent. On top of that, Google uses good star reviews as ranking signals, which means maintaining a good online reputation has a direct effect on your website’s SEO.

A Few Ways You Can Protect Your Company’s Corporate Online Reputation

One of how corporate reputation management services like JW Maxx Solutions assists clients is by showing them ways to protect their company’s reputation themselves. Below are a few simple ways for you to protect and manage your company’s reputation, both off and on the Internet.

Do a quick and simple Google search for your company. Googling yourself or your company is the best and fastest way of knowing whether or not you have anything negative floating around the Internet. The things are, it’s not enough to do it once or twice; you should do a Google search of your company at least once or twice a month. Set up Google alerts. The great thing about Google is that you can set up Google Alerts to notify you of any brand new postings concerning you or your brand. At a minimum, you should set up an alert for your company’s full name, including its address. Don’t allow anyone to tag you or your company’s profile in social media posts. One thing that gets a lot of people and companies in trouble is allowing others to tag them in social media posts. If your company has social media accounts, be sure to turn this function off. When you think about it, there is no reason for others to tag you or your business in their posts unless they ask you beforehand.