Personal Online Reputation How to Avoid a Disaster that will haunt you for years.

Your online reputation is far more important than you might have previously thought. Your reputation online is almost always going to be more important than how you are perceived offline. Most businesses fail to properly manage their online presence and end up handicapping themselves in the long run. If you are trying to avoid some kind of personal online PR disaster, it’s important always to consider how every decision affects your personal online reputation. If you are hoping to avoid a disaster, there a few simple steps you should always follow, and a couple of tips and tricks that you need to know to avoid a total PR nightmare. Luckily, this article is here to help.

 

 

What simple things can you do to improve Personal Online Reputation?

There are several simple things you can do to help avoid a PR disaster. The first is to learn to appreciate just how broad and complex the internet is true. When something is out, it’s out, and it doesn’t come back in. If you reply to a bad review with a sarcastic and rude reply, it will be screenshotted. It’s almost impossible to get something like that removed from the internet because there is no way to discover every copy of said information. People are under no obligation to delete things like that too.

Anything you do online should be done on the assumption that it is permanent. What you do and don’t say online will be used against you. That is the eternal paradox of online content; you always want to be on the right side of every issue, by not saying anything you are on the wrong side of. But, by saying something, you run the risk of either saying something wrong or being on the wrong side of the issue when people’s minds change. Simply put, you need to be cautious with everything you do and say.

Just as what you do and say online affects you in the long run, so does who you hire. Who your company hires reflects you tremendously. If you hire someone with a sketchy past, you may feel like you are giving that person a chance to prove themself. But, you are just setting yourself up to fail. You can look deeply into a potential employee’s background. This should always be done by a professional if possible, to avoid any potential disasters. If you hire someone who has a history of posting racist comments on Facebook, and someone discovers later on that you hired said person, to them (and the rest of the world) it will look like you hire racists and are indeed racist yourself. Your business’s online reputation includes the people who work there too. It’s a good idea to set social media policies for your employees when they sign their contracts stating they can and will be terminated for inappropriate comments or behavior online.

 

 

A simple thing you should avoid doing is trying to falsify your online presence. Don’t write yourself fake reviews, don’t pay people to write ambiguously worded articles about you and your company, that is generally a good way to give yourself a reputation as a dishonest business. A reputation that will follow you around online and be massively detrimental to your business’s growth and success. Instead, you should positively address negative reviews, offer solutions, not excuses. Respond to positive reviews with gratitude, maybe discount vouchers, this is a good way of saying you appreciate someone’s business and an ethical way of encouraging more positive reviews. Asking someone to write an article about you and the company is excellent, you do run the risk of getting a bad review though. So, it’s important only to encourage people to write articles about you if you are confident in the results.

How am I supposed to manage my reputation and run my business?

You have two choices. Either make time or pay someone else to do it. The biggest problem with reputation management is how broad and endless it is. It’s not a finite task; it’s ongoing and tedious, which is not abnormal in the world of business.

The problem most business owners have here is there isn’t enough time in the day to manage a business, and it’s reputation. Luckily, you can hire professionals from companies such as JW Maxx Solutions to handle everything for you. It will save you a whole lot of headaches and ultimately end up saving you money with the reduction of lost revenue and improved business growth. You don’t have to do it all yourself. You have enough on your plate already.