Why proactive reputation management is critical to your success

There are two main ways to handle reputation management, proactive and reactive.  While proactive reputation management is not something that we always want to think about, it is critical to the success of a brand.  Here are our top four reasons that proactive reputation management is better than waiting to react to a negative situation.

1. You spend time building a great reputation instead of defending a poor one.  Proactively managing your reputation allows you the opportunity to cultivate positive reviews and content, instead of combating negative information.
2. It costs a lot less in the long run.  While there is some up front time and expense to creating content, setting up and managing profiles on social media sites, and getting mentions on other sites, the expense is far lower than having to create and promote all of this content in an emergency situation in order to try to push a negative result off of the first page of Google.  If you have good, positive, naturally created branded content filling the SERPs, it will take a lot for a negative item to reach the first page.
3. You’re less tempted to engage in shady tactics to “fix” your reputation.  Having a variety of reviews that you gain over time that balance out that one bad review makes you much less likely to post fraudulent reviews to counter a bad review that stands on its own.  As we’ve mentioned previously, it is NEVER a good idea to post fake reviews.
4. Trying to turn bad customer service around is far more difficult that simply providing good service from the start.  Providing great customer service from the get-go gives people confidence in your brand, and makes them much less likely to buy into negative commentary they come across online.  

Actively managing your reputation is one of the most important things you can do for the health of your brand.  What are some of the things you do to maintain and improve your reputation?