For many businesses, online reputation management is no longer optional – people will talk about brands online regardless of whether that brand is participating in the conversation or not. Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) are becoming a increasingly influential as a ‘snapshot’ of a particular brand or company. Now as social begins to define the nature of the web, it is not just the results that come up in search engines that are of concern. Social media platforms such as YouTube and Digg are becoming search engines in themselves.

However, there are some steps you can take internally to create a positive picture of yourself in these Search Engine Results. There are three fundamental principles you should adhere to when engaging in online reputation management: monitor, optimise, engage.

Monitoring

Having effective monitoring systems in place is crucial for successful online reputation management. You can only act once you have clearly established the current state of your reputation online. If there are already a lot of negative articles populating the first few SERPs, then this requires a lot of very proactive PR in order to displace these links. In this it would be advisable to engage a specialized PR agency. Aside from this situation you can certainly take steps towards your own online reputation management. Tools such as Google Alerts, RSS Feeds and social media tab aggregators will help you keep track of what is being said about your brand.

Optimising content

There are some small, fairly easy steps you can take to populate your first few SERPs with links that positively reflect your brand. Firstly, by setting up social media profiles on sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Profiles on these sites all come up near the top of Google SERPs. Setting up a blog is also a great way to have control over your own content. The key though is to treat all online output from these channels as professional content. So this not only means establishing a professional tone that reflects your brand, but also ensuring you optimise your content in terms of keywords, links and tagging.

Engage

Once you have located any conversations taking place online about your brand, you can assess the situation and gauge whether to join in. If the conversation is positive, engagement is fairly simple once you have established a clear brand voice. However, the situation becomes more complex if the comments are negative. Analyse the comments carefully. Are they wrong? If so, provide facts and ask for corrections to be made accordingly. Do they have a point? If so, offer to discuss it further. Most importantly with both these situations, you must be polite, honest and wholly transparent.