Truthfully, there can be quite a few things online that are harming and damaging your company’s online reputation. But you’re likely to come across some very common ones; here are some of the most common problems:

• The industry’s perception of your company: if trusted professionals in your industry don’t respect you, they may be likely to say so and give negative publicity to your company. And if that’s the case, customers may come across that when searching for you, and might believe what they read.
• Scandals or salacious stories involving your company: if your company has been involved in a scandal (tax fraud, customer disputes, etc.) even if it happened years ago and when the company was under different ownership, it could still be lurking out in cyberspace, and it could be potentially damaging for your company.
• Third-party hate sites: if you have ever had a disgruntled employee leave your company, or you’ve ever had a run-in with a particularly unhappy customer, it takes nothing for them to start a website and start posting all kinds of negative reviews about your company. Hate sites can be extremely detrimental to your company’s reputation, and it’s important that you do what you can to get them taken down as soon as you can.
• Attacks from competitors: if your competition doesn’t believe in fair business practice and doesn’t hesitate to play dirty, they may openly attack you on their own website in order to lure customers away from you and start working with their business. This is something that should never be done and if someone is using these tactics against your company, there may even be legal action that you can take. The important thing is that you find these online attacks and take care of them as soon as you can.
• Complaint sites: complaint sites are different from hate sites in the way that they don’t have to be created by a specific individual or group that is unsatisfied with your company. Instead, they may be sites such as the Better Business Bureau, where consumers are encouraged to leave third-party reviews and testimonials are certain products and services. It’s important when you’re searching for negative reviews and comments about your company that you also look to any organization that works with public consumers.
• Bad press, literally: if something hits the news, the chances are good that it’s going to be everywhere, and that negative news story could follow your company, and your online brand, wherever it goes. So even if someone is shopping for your product, they may come upon a negative story about you or your company at the same time. Bad press is one of the most common problems businesses run into when managing their online reputation.
• False information: Word of mouth can be a company’s best friend, but it can also sometimes be like playing the telephone game. Someone says something slightly negative about your company (or is simply misunderstood when speaking about your business) and that information gets passed from person to person. As it does, it gets changed a little each time, and that can end up to a lot of misconceptions and false information being published about your company. On the other hand, you could just have someone with a grudge against the company that publishes blatant lies. Whatever the reason for the false information, it’s a big problem, and one that needs to be fixed immediately.

So once you know what the biggest and most common online reputation management problems are, and you’ve identified where these problems lie online for your company, how do you go about fixing them? The first step is to hire a good marketing consultant who knows the ins and outs of online reputation management. These professionals are extremely familiar with these, and all other problems regarding online reputations, and they’ll be able to help you find and fix them.

As a business owner, you probably already know what your online reputation is. It’s common sense, isn’t it? It’s the impression your company gives, and what people think of you, when they’re surfing the Web. But, your online reputation is much more than just that. And just like your reputation offline, your online rep is something that you can control pretty easily.

Do you really know what your online reputation is? Do you know what customers are saying about you and your product or your service? Do you know how to fix it if there is bad publicity out there about you or your company? And, maybe most importantly, do you know how to protect your online reputation from being tarnished?

There are now thousands, even millions, of ways for complete strangers to communicate and talk to each other online. Without your knowledge, these people could be posting negative comments about your company, writing negative reviews about your product or service, talk up your competition, or possibly even create a hate site regarding you and your company. How does this affect you?

The first and most obvious way is that other customers could see this and be turned away from your product or company based on just one thing they see online. But there’s even more to worry about than the customer. What if business partners saw a review posted on your alleged bad business practices? You could lose investors, and maybe even future income should that partner be so put off by what they saw that they pull out of your company. What if prospective employees researched your company and decided not to apply because they read a negative blog post posted by a former, angry employee? You could lose a great asset for your company simply due to a disgruntled employee.

Yes, your company’s online reputation affects it, and everything it does. And once you really stop and think about it managing, protecting, and building your business’ online reputation can be a pretty messy matter. But it doesn’t have to be. There are plenty of resources out there that are available to help you and your company, and this report is one of them. Taken step by step, and little by little, your business’ online reputation can be managed, protected, and built into what you need it to be.

Assessing your online reputation is easy, really. Just search for your company online and see what you find. Make sure that when you’re looking, you check with different search engines. The different engines have different requirements for keywords and work slightly differently than the others. Because of that, you need to make sure that you’re searching not only general search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN; but also the metasearch engines such as Info.com, Dogpile, and WebCrawler.

So what should you be searching for? Well your name is an obvious one, especially if you’re the CEO or the President of a company; and you’ve probably already guessed that you should search for your company name as well. But along with those, also search for your brand, your product, your employees (especially those that deal with the public a lot,) as well as your brand and any usernames that you may use in association with your business.

Also remember while you’re searching your company that search engines are very often personalized right now, meaning that the results you see will probably be based on at least your location, as well as you or your company if you’re signed into that particular search engine. For example, if you’re signed into Google and search for your own company name while you’re signed in, you may only get to see results of material you’ve written, or material that you already know is out there. What you want to find of course, is the material you don’t already know about and that could be negatively affecting your business.

Once you’ve done some searching and found some results, what are you supposed to do with them? You need to track them! Create a spreadsheet that you can reference at any time, and put the following information on it, in this order: position in the search engines (was it the first, second, fourth, etc. result); the URL that has the publicity; the type of publicity (whether it’s good, bad, indifferent, or not about you); and the general sentiment behind the posting. Perform a search on each keyword (your name, your company’s name, etc.) As you search, record the first 30 results that you found on your spreadsheet, regardless of the sentiment behind them.
After that, it’s just a matter of finding the positive results and utilizing them to their full advantage; and finding negative results and fixing them as quickly as possible.