What do you do if you’re a Reputation Management company that gets slammed with a bunch of negative reviews online?

Well, that’s what happened not too long ago to several companies in this business, myself included. Somebody had posted negative comments and reviews targeting reputation management companies, and those websites started showing up on the search engine result pages.

But it was an obvious ploy by some individual with a grudge -- or maybe he was just testing us. You see, all the postings were nearly identical, and it was clear he had just copied and pasted the same comments, only changing the company names. And no, I don’t think the comments had any merit.

So the lesson is that this can happen to anyone -- you just have to take it in stride.

I know I keep harping on this, but managing your reputation is an ongoing effort. Think of the story of the race between the turtle and the hare.

The turtle keeps plugging away, doing a little every day or every week to make sure that potential customers find only good reviews or positive comments when they do a search online. But every once in a while the hare passes him.

Some negative reviewer feels the need to blow off a little steam, or maybe the competition has hired someone to post negative comments, so these comments and reviews pop up on the first page of a Google search. But these people aren’t in it for the long haul like you are.

Eventually they lose interest and go on to other things -- or, like the hare, get a little too confident or lazy -- while you keep up the steady efforts of managing your online reputation, steadily progressing forward like the diligent turtle. The positive web pages about your company keep ranking higher and higher, and everyone else gets pushed off the first page or two of the search engines.

Remember that the turtle wins the race -- because diligence and persistence are the most powerful and successful strategies in all aspects of business and life.