July 2009 – Industry Insight

Why Online is Crucial to Protecting Your Image

By Chris Rosica

A company can spend years building trust and buffing a reputation, but it only takes an instant to tarnish it. That’s especially true now because bad news spreads fast and far over the Internet, a sort of cyberspace equivalent of the Wild West. Glowing Google search results on people, companies or their brands can turn grim as a few negative words spread virally from blog to blog, website to website. And forget fact checkers; many online contributors don’t care whether something they share is true or not just so long as it gets them attention and creates buzz. Many companies recoil in the face of what they perceive as online gunslingers—yet that’s a huge mistake.

Instead, companies and marketers should accept the Internet is here to stay and make it part of an integrated strategy. By engaging others online and becoming part of the ongoing conversation, companies can proactively communicate their messages, defend against an attack, correct inaccuracies and respond in a crisis.

REPUTATION PRESERVATION
First, learn about all available online options. Not every company or brand needs to use everything the Internet has to offer. But having an online presence often helps when problems arise or when information needs to get delivered quickly. Princeton University recently had a lock down after a suspected gunman was spotted on the New Jersey campus. After the state police determined the scare was based on four youths playing with a toy weapon, they sent an all-clear signal to students at the Ivy League school via Twitter.

In addition to sending news releases to online media, posting news to outlets like PRWeb for broader distribution and pick up by article syndication services like Really Simple Syndication (RSS), options to consider cover all aspects of social media.

Having a major presence in the virtual world comes in very handy when potentially damaging news breaks. It can help elevate the visibility of positive news and downplay the negative on the results returned by search engines. Getting high search engine rankings depends to a large extent on the number of inbound links and the link popularity a website builds. In that context, social media is crucial.

Here’s a hypothetical situation involving an imaginary company with effectively integrated social networking profiles. Each time the XYZ Company sends a “tweet” on Twitter publishing a link to new content on its website, the link gets planted on the Twitter page of each of its followers, who can spread the link further by sharing it with their contacts. The company’s tweet would be fed via RSS to a Facebook business profile, the company blog, its LinkedIn account and elsewhere. Thanks to this approach, the link will reach multiple places on the web, all of them pointing back to XYZ Company’s site. Search engines attach greater importance to social media. For instance, the biggest social networks have high Google PageRank, which is a measure of importance in Google that is used in determining position in the list of search results.

Reputations can be destroyed much more quickly than they can be built. Establishing a multifaceted Internet presence can help companies cope especially in times of crisis.

Chris Rosica is author of “The Authentic Brand” (www.theauthenticbrand.com) and CEO of Paramus, N.J.-based Rosica Strategic Public Relations (www.rosica.com).