Wed Apr 21

The Ways Your Reputation Can Be Tarnished Online

Written by NewsCo

Trading online can be a precarious business when it is so easy to lose your reputation to so many people sharing such a global marketplace. If you discover negative posts then they need to be dealt with quickly before too many people find them. Glassdoor reviews are the answer to removing negative content that threatens your livelihood by resulting in fewer sales.

So, this article will look at just who might want to put a negative comment online about us. To know our enemies is to protect ourselves. Once we are aware that this is a possibility, we should hire a professional firm to find out what negativity has been written about us online and then seek to have it removed. It is all very well saying that we can sue for libel, but by that time a lot of business has been lost, and it might not be possible to again trade under the same company name.

Disgruntled Employees

Sometimes employees are just not up to the job and so have to be dismissed. It can be as a result of gross misconduct or not their fault and due to a pandemic resulting in there not being any work for them. An employer has to choose someone to go or risk their business failing altogether. The decision is never going to be a popular one, even if they throw all the names into a hat and choose one. The result can mean that the chosen employee seeks revenge by posting negative comments online about the company they used to work for in retaliation for being the chosen one. Okay, nobody might believe what they are saying, but then again they just might. The individual with inside knowledge might choose to give away secrets about your business that a competitor might see. Reputations and sales can be lost in the process. So, we have to bear this in mind as a company and be ready for it by knowing who to contact to remove the content should it appear.

Competitors

Sadly, our competitors will sometimes resort to what can only be described as “dirty tactics” to gain an advantage in business. They will commit an act worthy of a red card if they were a player on a football pitch. There are examples of rival businesses paying firms and individuals to leave negative comments about another so that the customer chooses them to do business with instead. The small outlay to people writing the articles is nothing in comparison to the number of extra sales that can be generated by gaining an unfair advantage on a rival business.

To keep our competitors in check, it is important to manage our reputation effectively online. We should regularly check for signs that we are losing our reputation.

Internet Trolls

Internet Troll is a slang term that is used to describe someone who will intentionally upset people by posting negative comments on the internet. This is bad enough when against an individual, but when it is about a company it can have devastating consequences in terms of future sales. Sadly, these faceless and anonymous creatures do exist to make the lives of responsible internet users a misery.

We can deal with trolls by ignoring them in the hope that they will give up, but they are normally quite persistent creatures and a lot of negative content will have been left by the time they stop targeting your company or your good name. The answer is to hire a professional firm that can find and quickly remove the content before it does too much damage. This will be worth the business expense compared with how much it could cost unchecked and not properly dealt with. Once a troll knows that you can easily remove their content, because it has disappeared and wasted their efforts, then they are likely to give up and move on to someone else. There is sadly little to stop them in terms of online regulations, so we have to be the ones that stop them, with the computer know-how and help of others. All we can do is deal with each trolling incident as it happens, by knowing digital marketing companies that can help us to restore our online reputation.

So, there are three situations that might see negative feedback being left about a business online. In every case, the solution is to hire a specialist company who can find and remove the content promptly before it has a chance to do too much damage to the reputation of an individual or business.