Imagine yourself on a soft, sandy beach by the ocean. Relaxed, eyes closed and smelling the salty, warm ocean air. Opening your eyes, you decide to build a sandcastle in a spot you think is a safe distance from the water. Not thinking much of it, you get busy building your sandcastle without a care in the world about rising tide lurking.
As you are beginning to lay the groundwork for your magnificent castle, out of the corner of your eye, you see the tide slowly creeping in. The thought runs through your mind briefly that your sandcastle could be reached and washed away. However, you keep piling up the sand to become a castle fit for the king crabs of the ocean…
Now, what if you were to think of your brand as a sandcastle? In this case, a majestic castle fit for a king! Would you want such a prized work of art to be reached by the ocean’s whooshing waves? Probably not, especially if those waves represented the negative comments, reviews, and unwarranted mishaps that are exposed online relating to your brand.
Are You Letting the Ocean Wash You Away?
Knowing what negative input is coming at your brand online is crucial to identifying whether or not your brand is in jeopardy of being washed away. Little waves coming at your brand might look like an internet surfer who just wants to be heard, so they say something rude or nasty in disagreement with a post you made. Whereas, a large tidal wave might look like a scandalous or horrifying act done by, or associated with, your brand. Those large waves will wipe away your existence if corrective action to address the issues isn’t taken.
No matter the severity of the wave heading towards you, you need to be prepared to handle, remove, address, and understand its consequences. Just as important as understanding the consequences, you also need to be equipped with the right skills and solutions to best handle them.
Did you know that 81% of participants in a recent survey noted that online search results influence their perception of a company and brand?
With that percentage of influenced individuals seeking positive and negative content to make an informed decision about a brand, formulating a strategic approach is necessary to build, maintain, and save your sandcastle from crumbling.
Your Approach to Building the Best Sandcastle
While we can’t control the tide of negative input coming at our brand, we can be more strategic in our approach to building and maintaining its safety. Specific reputation-building tools such as:
Assess the negative content washing ashore for its value. Is it ready to take down your mighty fortress to the very last morsel of sand, or, is it just there to slowly wear away at you?
Your reaction to negative feedback should be to address its severity with integrity and openness, be a voice of reason and understanding, or entirely remove it altogether from the visibility of the public.
So, how do you keep your brand protected from the incoming tide? What if instead of building a castle out of sand, you built it out of concrete? The question isn’t even relevant to whether or not a tidal wave of negative content could wash you away in a matter of seconds. Another approach is simply to be more strategic in where it’s located. Building your sandcastle further from the tide’s reach allows the impact to be far less when it does reach you. Inevitably the tide always has the potential to reach your brand no matter how “safe” the distance is.
How You Design It Matters
Designing your sandcastle to withstand waves washing ashore can be done with strategies that our team at Reputation Rhino has meticulously tested, refined, and utilized for years. Here are three of the top approaches to building a solid online reputation:
Build Strong Relationships
A strong foundation that withstands the test of time and elements is proven to be necessary. By building trust with your community, you not only have a group of individuals who believe in what services you provide, but they believe you to be a resourceful, knowledgeable business and figure to lean on when needing an answer to their problem. Strong relationships with your customers build your rapport not only with them, but with their network of family, friends, and colleagues. As this network gets to know your business more and more, their trust continues to grow.
Considering Content Others Share About Your Business
Actively monitor web and online conversations, noting any reputational issues that require immediate attention. It’s better to stay ahead of the game as best you can to be proactive in how you handle the content that is being pushed out about your business. Both negative and positive content can have impacts greater than we can sometimes see coming. This includes press articles, review sites, forums, blogs, social media, and more.
Create Content to Boost Your Visibility and Trust
Creating high authority positive content, such as news articles, press releases, business profiles, executive interviews, blog posts, and link building strategies will help positive content gain the highest search engine attention while pushing any negative content down or replacing it entirely.
The Tide Is Washing Closer, Who Can Help Me Save My Sandcastle?
At Reputation Rhino, we help businesses build and maintain sturdy online reputations that outlive the competition while creating long-lasting relationships with customers in the online space. Everything from helping eliminate bad reviews, to building SEO-driven content, and gaining positive sentiment from current customers, Reputation Rhino is the company to help achieve your PR and online reputation goals through our strategic approach to online reputation management.
Online reputation management encompasses a wide range of online brand management tools to boost a business’s reputation with the online community. Choosing a fast, efficient, and effective business that specializes in all of this will in turn increase your business’ likeness and trust levels with customers as well as boost your overall profits.
We believe every business must carefully craft its online image with the same intentionality as how it would in real life. This includes ensuring business profiles across the internet are accurate and complete, that they are proactively seeking and responding to reviews promptly, and taking action based on customer feedback to create a positive space for their community.
We are a solution-driven organization helping build a solid foundation for businesses in a wide category of industries. We do this by effectively strategizing and implementing the best practices proven to produce optimal results through the steps and actions referred to above. If you are ready to build a sandcastle that can handle the tide rolling in, reach out to Reputation Rhino today for online reputation management services.