Reputation Armor

You may run a squeaky clean business and you may have the best intentions in the world, but there are many risk factors when it comes to your Employees and how they can negatively impact your businesses reputation.

Employees shape your reputation everyday and sometimes in a negative way. It is important to implement an internal “Reputation Management” program that informs employees how their actions at work and away from work can affect your businesses reputation. You must hold employees accountable for their actions that may impact your reputation.

Examples of how an employee can ruin your businesses reputation.

1. Confidentiality: You may trust your employees with a lot of information on how your business is ran internally and they may know your profit margins, bookkeeping practices, your personal issues (Private Life). It is important to require employees to sign a confidentiality/non-disclosure agreement. Include details on what information about your business and management can and cannot be shared. An employee may share information that can tarnish how consumers perceive your business.
2. Employee Conduct outside of the workplace. Employees just like everyone else in the world they can make mistakes. If there is negative media attention targeting an employee, it may trickle down to your business. If an employee has a negative 15 minutes in the media it is best to distance yourself from the media buzz by distancing yourself from the employee. Termination of the employee and a press release about the termination might be the ticket.
3. Are your employees being friendly and not fake? One big issue that ever customer service business has is how employees treat customers in person and on the phone. Fake is not friendly! You MUST teach your employees how to be actual friendly customer service agents, no matter what type of business you are in. Nothing angers people more than a sarcastic friendliness.
4. Employees’ online social network participation can be a concern. What your employees say and do on social networks can impact your company’s image and reputation. Many social networks like Facebook allow users (prompts them) to disclose where they work in the occupation section, which will tie your company name in with their profile. Monitor your employee’s online social networking activities.

You obviously cannot control every aspect of your employee’s life and decide who they are outside of work, you can however lay down certain employee conduct rules within your employment agreement or contracts. If anything make certain your employees are aware that the way they handle themselves at work and away can affect their employment status and your businesses reputation.

This is a very important tip and somewhat a warning to those looking in to hiring a reputation management firm. It is VERY important that YOU secure your business name as domain names before someone (including reputation management firms) else does. It is a widespread tactic and practice that competitors, disgruntle customers, and even reputation management firms use.

The reasons a reputation management firm may get your-business.com and why they want it:

As part of our service (for our clients) we may advise them to, or register for them, domain names. Example: yourbusinesname.com, yourbusinesname.net, yourbusinesname.org. The reason we need these domains is that they will easily rank well on Google eventually and hopefully bury the negative links that you don’t like.

The reason it is important to secure these names is several (not all) reputation management companies will buy your-name.com regardless if you sign-up with them or not. Their hopes are that you will eventually have to turn to them to buy your domain name or hire them to do the reputation management job.

If your business domains fall in to the wrong hands it can be very damaging. These keyword rich domains will grab very, VERY strong positions on Google and if you don’t control them you are at high risk for an old fashion extortion scheme.

How to protect yourself and your business:

Register the following domain names and simply replace “your-business” with your business name.

Your-Business.com
Your-Business.net

Your-Business.org
Your-Business.us
Your-Business.name

Your-Business.biz

Your-Business.info

Your-Business.tv

You can do more “dot whatever”, just register what you can and start with the .com, .net, and .org.

If a reputation management firm needs to use the domain for your campaign simply point the domain to their server (hosting). This way if things don’t work out you ultimately control the domain name.

Clients of reputation armor have the option to register their own domain names and if they fail to do so, we will do it for the sake of their campaign. After the first year of service we will email the client to transfer ownership unless they request it prior to that time.

Over the past few weeks, ReputationArmor.com has had great success at having negative information about our clients removed from websites and search results. View the case stats below:

Total Rip Off Reports Pushed Back or Removed: 12
ComplaintsBoard links displaced: 4
Total Review Sites (Yelp, CitySearch, MerchantCircle): 4
Total .gov news links displaced: 2
Total Negative Blogs Removed/Displaced: 6
Total News Stories Removed/Retracted/Displaced/Edited: 7
Negative Image Take Downs: 2
Copyright take downs: 8
Other displacement: 10+

Total Blogs Created For Clients: 129
Total Sites Create: 335
Total Pages Of Content Created: Over 12,000

All of the stats below have taken place over the past few weeks 4-6 weeks for our clients. Reputation Armor can help you with your online reputation management needs. Please contact us at 888-358-2766

Reputation Armor (ReputationArmor.com) forecasts:

The next Google PageRank (Google PR Update)

PageRank values fluctuate from 0 – 10, PR0 being the slightest and PR10 the highest valued.

The first PR update this year was on the 2010 New Year. Reputation Armor observes previous Google PR update patterns, and forecasts that the next PR update will be between March 31st and mid April. There will most likely be 4 PR updates from Google in 2010.

Future PageRank Update forecast by Reputation Armor

o          March 31 – mid April 2010

o          June 30 – mid July 2010

o          September 30 – mid October 2010

o          December 31 – mid January 2011

Reputation Armor note: The above figures are based on supposition, made by Reputation Armor, by observing the previous patterns of Google. There may be insignificant PR updates throughout the year, but the foremost

Over the years Reputation Armor has seen the number of Social networking sites grow very fast. Below is list of the top 175 social networking sites. Reputation Armor (ReputationArmor.com) utilizes a majority of these, along with others, in order to deliver our clients a comprehensive social networking base to their reputation management campaign. *Listed Alphabetically*

Reputation Armor (ReputationArmor.com) wants our potential clients to understand that your name is in all actuality a brand. Individuals identify you by that name when deciding whether to do business with you, at least as far as online. Your name is also what will be drawn on in order to search out positive or negative reviews.

Do you own your name online?

Do you own “YourName.com? For example, “ReputationArmor.com”. What about nicknames and product names associated with you and your company? Also, sub-domains are very important, for example, “ReputationArmor.net”, and “ReputationArmor.org”

Even if you by no means plan to construct these into real websites, having someone else own these sites can be disastrous. Someone out there may decide that they don’t necessarily like you. Or a competitor to your business  may fix on ruining your online reputation. They can put whatever negative information about you they like for millions to see? Reputation Armor has even seen instances were a malicious porn or hate site was built that is made to look like it is associated with r our clients name or business. What do you think the outcome of this was when potential clients Googled their name?

This is actually a bona fide problem that Reputation Armor observes more often than one might think. Owning all of the potential deviations of your domains goes a long way in proactively guard your brand and online reputation.

Reputation Armor takes things a step further for our clients. We utilize the domains by building actual web sites. When anyone searches their name/companyName, they find a Google results page filled with relevant, positive links.

Reputation Armor advises clients that it is best to take an “Own it before there is a problem” approach. Optimistically there problems would never arrive, but realistically they often do.

Reputation Armor notes that with information spreading like wildfire on the Internet, individuals and companies trying to protect their brands need to stay up to date on their online reputation management. The popularity of blogs and forums allow ample opportunities for fake reviews and illegitimate complaints to spoil a brand’s reliability overnight. Also, negative publicity, whether true or false, appear in search results whether someone is searching for it or not. For this reason Reputation Armor (ReputationArmor.com) wants our potential clients to understand the importance of proactive online reputation management.

Here are a few proactive online reputation management tips from Reputation Armor that any company/individual should consider when building their online brand:

Use social networking to your advantage—Social networking sites are enormously popular to people as well as search engines. Reputation Armor suggests that building pages on sites, such as MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, and others, and update them regularly with good relevant content.

Issue regular press releases—Press releases are a very efficient way to spawn interest and announce new products and promotions. Just make sure that they are newsworthy. Reputation Armor utilizes press releases on a weekly basis for our clients.

Produce videos—After just a few years since its inception, YouTube is known around the world. Make the most of the power of that awareness by producing videos about your brand(s), uploading them to YouTube, and embedding them on your site. Some suggestions from Reputation Armor are: DIY videos, demonstrations, or new uses your product—the higher the quality the better it will speak of the brand’s credibility.

Host a blog on the company website—Then update it frequently with topical content that connects your visitors. Use the blog to gain priceless feedback from your customers or update them about what’s new. Blog posts also rank highly in search results. Reputation Armor employs the use of many blogs for our customers as well as maintaining a few of our own(like this one)

Include social bookmarking tools—Place them at the bottom of each blog post. The salient point here is: Make it as simple as possible for your viewers to share your content. This will increase targeted traffic to your site and build brand recognition for small or no investment.

Although this  is just a short list of tips from Reputation Armor, all of them are realistic, economical, and make a good deal of impact on proactive online reputation management. They get your name out, build brand recognition. Reputation Armor(ReputationArmor.com) recognizes that negative publicity can happen to any company/individual, whether it’s justified or not, but following the previous tips can lower the potential impact of negative publicity.

For more information on Proactive Online Reputation Management, Contact Reputation Armor (ReputationArmor.com)  @ 888-358-2766

Reputation Armor understands the importance of Social Networking Sites. So we would like  to share  the Reputation Armor top 20 list. Rankings bases on popularity as of this month

1 | facebook.com

2 | MySpace

3 | twitter

4 | LinkedIn.com

5 | classmates.com

6 | Ning.com

7 | Bebo.com

8 | HI5.com

9 | Tagged.com

10 | myyearbook.com

11 | Multiply.com

12 | friendster.com

13 | Meetup

14 | BlackPlanet

15 | Gaia Online

16 | Piczo

17 | orkut.com

18 | FotoLog.com

19 | Skyrock.com

20 | badoo.com

To learn more about how to use social networking to manage your online reputation,

contact Reputation Armor @ 888-358-2766

Reputation Armor is aware that getting a first-page Google result is more difficult than ever. Not only do Google’s search and indexing algorithms continue to evolve in intricacy, but Google has given over more and more of its search results real estate to intermingled search results, displaying videos and images towards the top of the first page, and pushing down traditional web results that would have otherwise contended for top rankings.

But where most see problems, Reputation Armor finds opportunity. Even though Google’s brand new zeal for video has fashioned more competition for a smaller amount of traditional search results, it has allowed clients of Reputation Armor with video resources to lucratively attain first-page rankings. In fact, Reputation Armor has found that videos were 53 times more likely than traditional web pages to receive an organic first-page ranking.

For more information on Video Search Engine Optimization, Contact Reputation Armor, 888-358-2766

Use the “About” text box to place keyword-dense prose near the top of your Page

Reputation Armor suggests that a key SEO strategy that should be employed on your Facebook Page whenever practicable is placing keyword-dense text as close to the top of the Page as possible. Because Facebook limits where Page owners can place large chunks of text on the default Wall tab of Facebook Pages, the “About” box, in fact, represents the uppermost position in the CSS structure of the page to add custom text.

In order to add text to your Page’s “About” box, click the “Write something about [YourPage]” in the box underneath your Page’s profile picture. You’ll then be able to enter custom text in the input box – there is a 250 character limit, so choose your words wisely.