The advertisements from Reputation.com all focus on helping you understand and improve your online reputation. But what does that really mean? From their ads you would expect that they scour the internet finding info on you and help you clean it up or have it removed. Unfortunately, this has nothing to actually do with what the company really provides.
I recently found out that one of the companies I work for hired Reputation.com to help boost the company’s image, in particular the Reputation Defender package for companies. To my dismay I discovered that this consisted of Reputation.com creating 34 “Websites” or rather 34 profiles on various free websites. While I think the idea was to increase positive new content online, the problem was that these new profiles didn’t always use the proper logo or accurate description of the company and on many of these web profiles even the contact information was incorrect.
Unfortunately Reputation.com felt that profiles on the following sites would somehow accomplish a boost in PR. Re.Vu, Webs.com, Magnt.com, Ziggs.com, VisualCV.com, Manta.com, BusinessWeek.com, Corpiva.com, Sidengo.com, Follr.com, Webberid.com, Flickr.com, Central.Ly, WordPress.com, Behance.net, About.me, Tumblr.com, CVShare.net, ProfessionalsOnThe Web.com, Worky.com, Weebly.com, Docstoc.com, Pinterest.com, LookUpPage.com, OnePagerApp.com, Slideshare.net, Scribd.com, and BigSight.org.
If you’re wondering how having an empty Flickr.com account helps your online reputation, the answer is it does not.
In some cases our company already had an active account on these sites and the creation of a secondary account with a similar name was actually more detrimental to our SEM efforts than helpful to our reputation. Also, some accounts made little sense such as the Flickr account that was setup yet no photos were uploaded during their three month “campaign” of helping the company’s reputation.
So here is what I would have expected their service to do, or at least, here is the service that MGHurston Creation Services, LLC has provided to clients to combat negative press or comments.
- First begin with creating and staggering a daily publishing of new press releases to your media partners, on your website and social media outlets.
- Second, it doesn’t hurt to bump up your current budgets for AdWord and AdCenter campaigns, but do create a new Key Word campaign targeting the terms in the negative article or comments and have your ad direct users to your positive feedback and articles.
- Third, use your existing voice to post positive and promotional stories, events on our social media outlets. There is no reason why negative comments or articles should eat up your time, keep the good pushed forward.