Top 12 things CEOs can do to boost corporate reputation

As the face of the company, CEOs like Andy Defrancesco embody and express the company’s reputation, so it’s important they play an active role in defining and maintaining it. Following are the top 12 things CEOs can do to boost corporate reputation.

1. Be very visible and vocal.

As the topmost representative of the business, a CEO’s name often becomes synonymous with the company’s. Being visible and vocal reinforces the connection and builds leadership.

2. Use social media.

There are several positive results from CEOs’ using social media use, including improved corporate reputation and increased employee engagement. It also helps with online reputation management and builds relationships with employees, partners, prospects, media, and others.

3. Become an industry leader.

“Publish or perish” applies to executive and corporate reputations as much as academic ones. Regularly publishing high-quality content about your industry, like innovations, research, and predictions, builds both the CEO’s and the company’s thought leadership and authority.

4. Be friendly and approachable.

CEOs are the human side of the business. The more open and friendly you are, the more approachable the company as a whole seems. It also helps you attract better talent and publicity.

5. Maintain a strong executive reputation.

Because the CEO’s reputation is tied so closely to the company’s, keeping a strong executive reputation is a must. Your good name and the business’s good name build and reinforce each other.

6. Encourage transparency and integrity.

Openness and honesty are two critical factors influencing how your company is perceived. They especially affect your reputation as a trustworthy, credible business.

7. Champion the company values and vision.

As the highest executive officer of the company, a big part of the CEO’s job is promoting and communicating the company values and vision. Embracing them is the most effective way to show what the business stands for.

8. Foster improved communication.

Better communication all around contributes to many benefits. Increased customer exposure to your messaging is important, while improving internal communications is how you build a strong, loyal team.

9. Ask for feedback.

The company’s direction should be constantly evaluated and adjusted to make sure it delivers the most benefit. Asking for and acting on feedback helps you maintain a good corporate image and executive reputation.

10. Turn employees into brand ambassadors.

The CEO can only do so much to communicate the company’s values and boost the corporate reputation. Helping employees embrace the vision can substantially improve the business’s reputation and its bottom line.

11. Promote good governance and leadership.

Actions speak louder than words, especially when they come from the highest level. Avoid unethical behaviors and strive to be the kind of leader you want your executive team, directors, and managers to be. Your example and the resulting trickle-down effect will work wonders for everyone’s reputation and satisfaction.

12. Always be innovating and generating ideas.

CEOs who get too comfortable and who don’t keep up with changing times tend to have the shortest tenures. By always thinking ahead and being willing to adapt, you keep your job and build a robust company reputation.

Corporate Reputation Management - 06/28/2013

Unethical Corporate Online Reputation Management Tactics to Avoid

Just like some forms of search engine marketing are considered spammy and unethical--known as “black hat” SEO--some tactics you might use as part of your corporate online reputation management strategy are also spammy and unethical.

While brand ethics vary from business to business, unethical online brand management tactics prevent the transparency you need to gain trust and encourage sales. To become a corporate online reputation management wizard, avoid the following spammy techniques like the plague.

Creating Fake Reviews

Publishing reviews under false personas is the same as lying. Creating fake testimonials and success stories is wrong too. Both will make customers, stakeholders, and others close to your business upset.

While creating your own positive reviews about your brand may help push negative content down in search engine results, once the search engines figure out what you’re doing--and they usually do--you can be sure your site will be penalized.

Instead of creating fake reviews and testimonials, call or email satisfied customers and invite them to leave a positive review on a review site you would like to influence, such as Yelp. Regularly reach out to your audience on social media and through email to gather success stories and happy testimonials, and make sure customers know you might use their words elsewhere.

Buying Links

Natural inks help indicate a website’s relevance and authority by telling search engines that other audiences find your content useful. The more links you have, the theory goes, the more relevant you must be.

When you buy links, you interrupt that process and abuse the power links should have.

This black-hat corporate online reputation management tactic has gotten many corporate websites penalized by Google before. It will get your penalized too.

Creating great content and spreading positive content about your brand around is the better way to get links to your main website. Instead of paying for the link, you put in the work yourself. Owning the content linking out and the content being linked to is honest and gives you more control anyway.

Creating Fake Social Media Accounts

Corporate online reputation management has become so crucial in the last few years because social media has made it easier than ever for anyone to say what they think about a company. Because of this, many brands may be tempted to create fake social accounts praising the company to try to balance things out.

Like writing false reviews, this tactic is the same as lying.

If you came across a social account that did nothing but praise a certain company, you would probably be suspicious. You wouldn’t want to follow or connect with them because you know you couldn’t trust anything they said.

Because social networks are designed to help people connect remotely and express their true opinions, they definitely frown on fake accounts and do everything they can to remove the account and ban the user who created it. Social media can be powerful. Fake accounts aren’t worth losing access the social networks where your target audience hangs out.

Instead of falsifying praise for your company, create official accounts for the brand and for each major executive. Be so honest on your official brand accounts that it almost scares you, while being true to the brand voice and message. Encourage employees to include their employment information on their accounts and to share positive things about the brand. Doing these things is the right way to harness the true power of social media.

Corporate Reputation Management - 03/08/2013

Where are the Drug Commercials on YouTube?

Pharmaceutical companies tend to do a poor job managing their online reputations, especially on YouTube. Major drug companies like Otsuka America Pharmaceutical, AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals, Eli Lilly, Abbott Laboratories and GlaxoSmithKline spend millions of dollars each year developing and marketing new pharmaceuticals to the public. After the cost of developing these drugs, millions of dollars are spent on television advertisements. Just watch an hour or so of primetime TV any night of the week and you’re bound to see a handful of drugs ads that promise to reduce your cholesterol, relieve chronic pain, reduce inflammation, help you sleep better, be happier, and generally improve your life.

Finding official information on Google for drugs with unique names like Abilify, Nexium, Crestor, Cymbalta, Humira, Celebrex and Advair  is pretty straightforward, and the SERPs will show the official corporate drug website in the top spot. But search any of these drugs on YouTube you’ll discover it is almost impossible to find even one of the broadly televised commercials. YouTube is the second largest search engine just after Google receiving upwards of 3 billion searches a month. Considering the millions spent on TV advertising it would benefit drug companies to spend a small fraction of this amount creating effective YouTube channels and promoting the online videos.

Obviously the biggest roadblocks for pharmaceuticals are the legal and regulatory requirements and restrictions. Many are related to side effects being spelled out in communications, but this problem is solved when an “official” commercial is being used online. If fact, both drug benefits and side effects can be listed additionally in the description area set aside for YouTube videos. And if there are issues related to the barrage of uncensored comments made by video viewers, this can be solved by simply not allowing comments to be made on a video.

Clearly there are opportunities for pharmaceutical companies to improve their online reputation by exploring how YouTube can help them extend their marketing and education reach. Here are some recommendations:

1)    Look for ways to benefit from the extremely large audience using YouTube (2 billion videos viewed every day)

2)    Produce unique longer form commercials for online use only

3)    Promote YouTube videos through other social media (Twitter)

4)    Develop an SEO strategy for videos so they’ll rank higher in both YouTube and Google searches

5)    Make videos available so they can be embedded in other drug review type websites

6)    Properly title, describe and tag videos so they can be easily found, and so they rank higher in both YouTube and Google results

7)    Use the description area of the video to link to the main drug site

7)    Use annotations within videos to help viewers find additional information

8)    Create localized versions of commercials in different languages such as Spanish

YouTube Pharmaceutical and Medicine Advertising Policy

AdWords Healthcare and Medicines Policy

Corporate Reputation Management / Search Engine Optimization / YouTube Reputation Management - 02/26/2013

Pharmaceutical Reputation Management

The reputation of a pharmaceutical company is a precarious thing. Any negative press about your company or a new medicine can spread like wildfire online, so it’s important to make the most of all the positive content you do have.

Because bad news can spread so quickly online, reputation management for drug companies depends on maximizing all the positive content you can.

“Positive” content is anything you want to show up on the first page of a search, such as an announcement about a new medicine or promising trial results. Maximizing that content so that it is more likely to show up on the first page of a search is a two-step cycle you can repeat endlessly:

  1. Gather positive content (existing and new)
  2. Publicize it

Gathering Positive Content

First, gather all the positive content you already have about your drug company and about each drug you offer. Positive content could include but is not limited to:

  • testimonials
  • success stories
  • results of a survey or trial
  • case studies
  • feedback from partners and vendors
  • certifications and other marks of quality

Continually strive to get more positive content you can maximize for your online reputation management. Ask pharmacies and doctors for feedback and use lots of surveys and trials for research and data collection.

Publicizing Positive Content

Once you have all this positive content, the trick is to get it online in as many places as possible so it shows up in the first page of search results.

Start with a Testimonials page on your website.

On this page, publish the positive feedback you’ve received from customers, doctors, pharmacies, partner companies, and others. Any comments that show your company or specific drugs to be high quality and trustworthy belong on this page.

How to maximize your Testimonials page: Incorporate testimonials into your social media strategy with links to this page. Publish them in press releases, articles, and other online and offline materials.

Next, set up a Press, Media, or News page.

Anytime you have an announcement or press release, publish it here first. Then all other online press releases will link back to the original on your website as the source of the information.

How to maximize your News page: Anytime you have news, link the online press releases or social media announcements to the originals on your News page. If you have lots of news or announcements, you can create additional social media accounts dedicated just to getting the word out. Twitter is especially good for this.

Third, publish success stories often.

While testimonials demonstrate doctors’ confidence in your company, success stories illustrate how one of your drugs helped an individual struggling with a problem. They build your online reputation with the power of storytelling while appealing to a different segment of your target audience.

How to maximize success stories: Dedicate a page on your main website to these stories, only publishing short blurbs with a link to a different website completely devoted to success stories. That way the positive content takes two spots on a search engine results page. You can also create an additional social media account dedicated to sharing these stories.

There are plenty of other ways to maximize positive content for your drug company’s online reputation management, but these are the basics. Maintain good search rankings and press with these pharmaceutical online reputation management techniques.

Corporate Reputation Management - 02/12/2013

Don Sorensen, Online Reputation Management Expert, Addresses Direct Selling Association Conference

PRWeb

San Francisco Chronicle

Salt Lake City, Utah (PRWEB) December 28, 2012

Don Sorensen, online reputation management and protection expert and president of Big Blue Robot, presented at the Direct Selling Association and Communications Marketing Conference held in Rancho Palos Verdes, California this month. Sorensen addressed the changes Google has made ranking websites, and educated attendees on how to keep and maintain a strong web presence.

“In recent months Google has dramatically changed the way it ranks websites and now methods for online reputation management that have worked for years are no longer effective.” said Sorensen. “In light of these changes, companies need to adapt and create an effective social circle using Twitter, Google+, Facebook, Pinterest, and YouTube in order to remain relevant.” Sorensen joined David Sattler, Digital Marketing Manager for Scentsy, Inc. for the presentation.

Sorensen addressed attendees about why keyword domains are not the best reputation management strategy. He explained that in the early days of search engines, most engines ran on simple keyword match algorithms, so the websites with the most number of words that matched the search (including the domain name) ranked very well. In fact, in the early days of the web and up until a year or so ago, having keywords in a domain name seemed to be a factor that helped people rank better in the search engines. Both exact match domains (EMD), and partial match domains (PMD) showed up regularly and highly in most results.

“In terms of reputation management, it was good strategy to buy EMDs and PMDs to get them to rank for branded searches,” explained Sorensen. “And it worked pretty well for a long time. However, since the Google Penguin update over a year ago, the strength of keyword domains has been faltering.”

Sorensen said it is not that Penguin targeted EMDs specifically, but that a number of EMD owners participated in spammy and manipulative tactics to get their sites to rank well. And, as a result, they were hit hard by the Penguin update. He explained that Google was only trying to reflect the real quality of websites in their rankings.

Sorensen pointed out that there are also a number of legitimate businesses that have EMDs, so Google—up to this point—has not targeted EMDs simply for being EMDs. The drop in rank for many spammy EMD sites over the past year has been as a result of their own spamminess. But Google has now decided to take a stronger stance against EMDs. Back in late September, the algorithm update went live and a number of EMDs fell dramatically in the search results.

“For your reputation management strategy, don’t go out and buy a bunch of expensive EMDs that you think will rank well for your business searches,” concluded Sorensen. “Not only are they being devalued but they also have a reputation as bad sites in the first place. Instead, focus on building a solid brand, improving your customer service, build a positive social strategy, and getting noticed for being a positive company with a great product. When you can do those things successfully, you won’t have to worry about your online reputation, because it will already be positive.”

More information can be found at http://www.BigBlueRobot.com.

About Don Sorensen
Don Sorensen is a recognized authority on online reputation management whose expertise and insights have most recently been featured in the New York Times, CIO.com and numerous other industry publications. His more than 25 years of corporate communications and marketing experience for companies including Novell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Netscape, Sun, AT&T, and AOL, are the foundation upon which he built Big Blue Robot, a leader in the online reputation management industry. A frequent presenter on corporate reputation management, his most recent speaking engagements include appearances at the Direct Selling Association, the National Conference on Student Assessment, and the Association of Test Publishers. His book “Online Reputation Management: Corporate & Personal” was published this year and is available through Amazon, an addition to his numerous academic articles. He holds a Communications Degree from Brigham Young University and is a published academic author.

About Big Blue Robot
Founded in 2003, Big Blue Robot (https://www.bigbluerobot.com), works with corporations and their executives around the world to improve, protect, repair and manage their online reputations. Big Blue Robot has developed state-of-the-art online reputation management strategies for companies doing business around the world, including USA, Germany, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, and France. During the past nine years, Big Blue Robot has helped numerous companies fix their online reputation problems.

Corporate Reputation Management - 01/02/2013

Nobody Wants Your Reputation Management

In a 2009 article on his blog, Steven Pressfield (writer, creative extraordinaire) writes about his first job creating copy at an ad agency. And the #1 lesson he learned from that job is, to quote Pressfield, “Nobody wants to read your s**t.” Although you may think that you’ve just written the most amazing Trident commercial ever—no one cares. At the end of the day it’s just gum, or detergent, or floor wax. And most people are too busy with their everyday lives to even bother watching your genius commercial, let alone pay any attention to it.

But, he continues, the idea that your work doesn’t matter to anyone else is one of the most important things to learn about being a writer—that the only way people are going to stop and listen to what you have to say is if you can think like them, offer them something they’ve never seen before, and do it in a way that speaks to their experience.

Although Pressfield is talking about writing, his words could be applied to just about any profession, including reputation management. Think about it: in reality, no one cares how many links you’ve built, how many social profiles you’ve created, or what kind of infographic you were able to get to rank for a branded term. If the link to your client’s Facebook page moves up one slot in the SERP, the world does not stop.

So what do people care about? And why does that even matter to reputation management professionals?

Doing reputation management, you have to think about two audiences, your clients and the people who will be searching for your clients’ names online. Clients just want results. They don’t really want to know how you did it, they just want to be able to search their name online and see that no bad press comes up in the SERP. And users who are searching for your client’s name online don’t care about how search engines work, they simply want to see a fair and balanced result when they search. They just want access to actionable information about the brands or companies they looking for.

In essence, both clients and users want to feel a sense of relief. Clients want to be relieved that they don’t have to worry about their online reputation, and users want to be relieved that they don’t have to go to the second page of results to find the information they’re looking for.

As such, the job of an online reputation manager is not so much about numbers and ranks and algorithms as it is about creating a positive feeling in those that you work for and those that will see your work. This is perhaps the goal that we lose sight of as we go about our daily activities.

Keeping our eye on the fact that no one cares about what we do—as long as it is helpful and useful—can help us focus our daily efforts and prioritize our strategies. The next time you’re in the middle of a campaign, ask yourself, “Is someone go to care about the result of what I’m doing right now? Is this going to make my client and their users feel relieved?”

No one may care about what we do. But if we care about what they want, we’ll be able to build better reputation strategies, execute better campaigns, and ultimately, be more successful at what we do.

 

Corporate Reputation Management - 08/26/2012

Expert Advice as an Online Reputation Management Strategy

Over the last year, the online search world has been pretty drastically shaken up, and Google has changed a lot of its policies to weed out what it has determined are low-quality linkbuilding practices. As such, reputation management used to be a pretty simple game to play, but it has become harder and harder to shape a perfect SERP, and it is taking more effort to do so effectively over the long term.

But the war can still be won. Just because Google has changed its policies doesn’t mean that it is impossible to create a great SERP for your brand. It just means you have to change your strategy. And Google is continually leaning more toward “quality” as the biggest ranking factor. In other words, Google is moving in a direction where they are trying to determine the highest quality websites—not based solely on the number of links that point to them, but rather their overall quality as a website. This means that the best strategy from here on out is simply to have a really awesome website. And if you can have a really awesome website, Google will rank you higher and more people will link to you and publish favorable content about you, creating the great SERP you always wanted to build with your reputation management strategy.

So what does that mean for your strategy? Well, one way to build an awesome website is to become an expert and set yourself apart as a leader in your field. Although that sounds hard, it’s actually much easier than you may think. Here are a few ideas to get you started.

1) Blog

Putting a blog on your site is a great way to bolster your online reputation. If you run a business, you are an expert in some sort of field. And there are people out there who want to know about that business and what advice you have to give them. So publish posts about what your company does, tips and advice on best practices, lessons you’ve learned over the years (or months) that you’ve been in business. If you can become a hub of knowledge for people in your industry, you’ll get people quoting your blog, linking to your content, and writing about you in other online publications—all giving you great fodder for your reputation management campaign.

2) Give away your knowledge

People love free stuff, especially if they find it useful and valuable to their lives or professions. Whatever field you are in, you have the opportunity to take your knowledge and turn it into tangible pieces of content that can be shared and posted throughout the internet—excellent for your reputation management. For example, you can create downloadable guides to your industry or publish embeddable infographics or slideshare presentations that give useful advice to people in your industry. As these useful resources are promulgated through the web, your devotees will build links to your website and push your content all over the place, building a great online reputation for you.

3) Guest blog

Its easy to publish resources on your own website, but in order to really create a great reputation online, you’ll need to reach out and start building relationships. One way to do that is through guest blogging. Find blogs that have to do with your industry or profession and offer to write a blog post for them about your experiences. For example, there may not be a lot of websites out there devoted to the cosmetics industry, but you can seek out a number of blogs about professional leadership and management and blog about your experience as a manager or your list of top leadership skills. Then you can mention your company in the post and link that blog post back to your professional profile on your company website. People will then see you as a reliable source and your company as a positive influence.

4) Discuss

Another way to build relationships for reputation management is by participating in professional online forums for your industry. For example, LinkedIn has a number of professional forums for all kinds of industries and professions. Join these groups and be active in them. When you do this, you’ll be building relationships with other professionals who are excited about your industry. And if you can give good advice, you and your company will come to be seen as a resource. When you are seen as a resource, you’ll get more links to your site, people will cite your company online, and more—all adding to the strength of your online reputation management strategy.

The secret to making your brand an online expert is simply getting out there and publishing information and building relationships. You don’t have to be the leader in your field in terms of sales—you simply have to be willing to share your insights with others. And when you can become an online expert in your field, your reputation management strategy will take care of itself.

Corporate Reputation Management / Personal Reputation Management - 07/24/2012

How to Do Reputation Management for “Boring” Industries

At its essence, reputation management isn’t that hard. The basic principles sounds easy enough: Push bad and damaging search engine results off the first page of a Google search page by getting positive content on the web to rank higher. But it’s more complicated than it seems. For instance, what kind of things do you want to rank well? Do you make content yourself, or do you build links to help others’ content rank well? And how positive is too positive? At what point will your audience think they’re being fooled by overly positive search results?

If you’ re in cool industries, like technology or entertainment, you probably can think of a million ways to get positive information to rank well in your SERPs. But what if the company you are doing reputation management for is “boring,” like they make blenders or tax preparation software? How do you create good content on the web that people will want to link to so that it will rank high for your branded terms?

First of all, there is no such thing as a “boring” industry, only boring reputation management professionals. If you’re going to help a boring company clean up their SERP, you just have to get a little more creative. Think outside the box. Do something different.

In fact, here are some great examples of boring companies that have managed to build a great online reputation just by being creative with what they share on the web. So creative, in fact, that most of them have come to be seen as leaders in their industries.

BlendTec

BlendTec makes blenders. Not the most exciting industry in the world. But not only do they make blenders, they make industrial strength blenders. And they were a virtually unknown company until they started an online video series, called “Will it Blend?” Each video has a simple concept, they think of an object and then they throw it in one of their blenders to see if it will blend. They’ve done books, super glue, glow sticks, and even a iPhone. Now when you search for them by name, two of the top ten results are links to their videos (both on their own website and their BlendTec YouTube channel).

SEOmoz

One of the top search engine optimization companies in the world didn’t start out as the most well known. In fact, how do you get people excited about all the technical mumbo jumbo involved in search engine optimization? Well, SEOmoz took that challenge and created an awesome online reputation with it. Instead of trying to appeal to a mass audience, they decided they were going to be a great resource for the SEO industry. So they created downloadable SEO guides, videos, blog posts, and more. Now they have over 50,000 social shares on Twitter and Facebook and a search for their name reveals videos, social media profiles, articles, pres releases, pictures and more.

Dollar Shave Club

Dollar Shave Club is a company that sells disposable razors over the internet for a dollar a month. Not exactly front page material, right? Well, to jumpstart their reputation management efforts, they created a hilarious video about their company that currently has over 4 million views on YouTube. Now when you search for them online, you see a myriad of reviews, videos, articles and more all about them.

TurboTax

What about tax preparation software, you ask? Certainly one of the most boring industries ever created. Well, for the 2011 tax season, TurboTax took to social media to interact with its customers and raise their online reputation. And it worked. They had thousands of responses and now their social profiles rank number 2 and 3 after their main site, showing anyone who searches for them that they are a company who cares about its customers. And that’s the kind of reputation you can’t buy.

Remember, reputation management doesn’t have to be all drudgery. If you get creative not only will you build a solid online reputation but you’ll cut down on the work you do because everyone else will be building links to your great content for you. So don’t be boring. Be creative and build a better online reputation.

Corporate Reputation Management / YouTube Reputation Management - 07/24/2012

Building More Effective Reputation Management by Focusing on Your Core Audience

All too often, companies wait until they have a crisis on their hands before they start thinking about online reputation management. Once a crisis hits, damage has already been done to their corporate image and they’re more like the little Dutch boy—plugging the hole in the dam with his finger—than they are construction workers who reinforce the dam with concrete and rebar.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Building a positive online reputation before a crisis hits can help you shore up the dam against future leaks and make it impervious to virtually any attack. And one of the best ways to do that is to focus on your core audience. If you focus on building an online reputation for your core audience, not only will you be building a positive online reputation, but you’re building a reputation that’s more likely to convert your best prospects into your best customers.

Aristotle and Reputation Management

Over 2000 years ago, Aristotle came up with a system that he used to teach his students how to be better orators in the public square. He said each speech is made up of three parts: the speaker, the audience, and the content of the speech itself. He taught that if you can understand your audience, you can better tailor the speech to their needs and they’ll be more likely to listen to what you have to say. Today the process is not much different, except our audience is online and our websites are our speeches. And our search engine results are our audience’s first impression of who we are. Thus, is we know who we are trying to target, we can better tailor our online reputation to their needs and desires.

Who is Your Audience?

Understanding your audience can be difficult, especially if your company is just starting out, but through some preliminary research your can find out the demographics of your audience: their average age, gender, interests, and more. As well, you can take a look at your own product and your value statements and come to an understanding of who your audience should be. For example, if you run a hotel rate comparison website and your audience is mainly over 50 years old. You’ll know that they aren’t impressed by articles about your company in Mashable, but they might be interested in you more if you’ve been mentioned on the AARP website.

Once you know some basic demographics and personality information about your audience, this is called a persona. In the example above, your person could be as simple as the list below:

Harold

  • 55 years old
  • Retired
  • Likes to travel
  • On a budget and looking for the best deal

Tailoring Your SERP

If you know who Harold is, you’ll have a better understanding of the kind of things that will impress him in the SERPs. As mentioned above, he might be impressed by a mention of you on the AARP websites. He also may like to see positive online reviews about your site in the SERPs that contain words like “best deal” and “great value” in the titles. Additionally, he may be very interested in an downloadable PDF your company put out about how to find the best hotel deals on the internet. If all of these links and more are showing up in the SERPs, Harold is more likely to have a favorable attitude about your company.

You Can’t Please Everyone…

Keep in mind that every audience and customer base is different, and you can’t try and please them all. Because if you do, your reputation management campaign becomes scattered and fractured—not helpful to anyone. But if you can focus on your core customer, you can build a more effective online reputation every time.

Corporate Reputation Management - 07/21/2012

Using YouTube for Reputation Management

Online Reputation management takes a number of forms. Most online reputation management strategies revolve around Google and the other major search engines. However, did you know that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world? And if there are a number of negative videos posted about you on YouTube it could adversely affect your online reputation. Not only could those video appear in branded SERPs and give your customers the wrong impression, but if you’re not optimizing any YouTube content, anyone searching the video hosting platform for your name will be given a series of negative videos about your business or brand.

So, how do you combat negative videos on YouTube? You have to create your own positive videos and push those negative videos down further in the results. Here are a few suggestions to get you started.

1) Create Great Videos

First off, you need to create some video content yourself. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy. It could be a tour of your offices, a product demo, a short message form your CEO, or anything else related to your brand. Then post your video to YouTube.

2) Optimize the Titles

Just like optimizing for other search engines, your title counts. Make sure to include your business name in the title and any other keywords that would be helpful for people to find information about your company. YouTube uses titles to match search relevancy, and you’ll have a higher click-through-rate if the people who are searching for your videos can find you easily.

3) Write Descriptions

Again, use your brand name in the video description, preferably within the first sentence, along with other keywords that you want to rank for. You’ll only need a sentence or two—because the first three lines are the only ones that are shown to the user by default. Then tag your video with your business name and other relevant keywords. YouTube videos with longer descriptions and even links to your corporate website will generally rank higher than videos with minimal description. Don't  be shy.

4) Get Views

Unlike Google search, YouTube counts views as a ranking factor. The more views you have—and the most recent views—the higher your video will rank in the YouTube search results. Of course, this is the real heart of the matter. Because if you can get your videos to rank high in the search, then people who are searching for your business name will see your videos before they see the negative videos that anyone else might have posted about you.

5) Build Links

Just like a regular reputation management campaign, you need to build links to the videos that you want to rank well for in the YouTube results. You can build regular links to the videos, but you can also embed the videos in other places across the web. YouTube recognizes embeds as links and they count toward your search rank.

6) Get Positive Ratings and Comments

Another ranking factor for YouTube is the number of positive reviews and comments you have. Just like Google, YouTube is trying to serve the highest quality content to its users, so videos with a high user rating and a large number of comments will rank better—because they generally are better. For your reputation management efforts, this means that you need to get a high number of people to watch your videos on a regular basis, rate them, and comment on them. If you have a large organization, you can leverage your existing employees and co-workers.

Running a reputation management campaign on YouTube is not much different than cleaning up your SERPs in Google—in fact, it might be a bit easier. Just keep in mind that what you are trying to do is simply get your videos to rank higher than the negative videos and focus all your efforts to that end. If you can do that, you won’t have a problem creating a better reputation on YouTube.

Corporate Reputation Management - 07/18/2012

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