Author: Alex Thompson
3 Ways to Rebuild a Good Reputation in the Community
Begin to repair the damage by owning up to your behaviour and making amends to anyone you’ve wronged. Admit your mistakes, apologise, and ask for forgiveness. Saying “I’m sorry for not paying back the money I owe” is nowhere near as powerful as an apology accompanied by a good-faith payment, even if it’s not the full amount. Taking an action step proves you’re sincere in your efforts to improve the situation. In some cases, a sullied reputation is based on gossip, lies, and misinformation. If you are innocent of the charges levied against you, start your public damage control campaign by clearing up any misunderstandings.
No one is perfect – perfect results can actually deter users – but if your most prominent results are negative in nature, those are the results that will define your online reputation. Just one negative article or a low average rating on a review website can give users a bad impression of you or your business. Another client, an attorney, had acted as a public spokesperson for a prominent executive and his business. The attorney had low credibility, and he lacked the charisma and acumen needed to create a positive media impression.
Rebuild your reputation in your local community by making amends for your mistakes, taking strides to demonstrate a good character, and surrounding yourself with the right sources of support. The spotlight on a CEO is brightest during and after a company crisis. Stakeholders expect swift decisions and effective solutions. Moreover, the media will judge a chief executive on their actions as well as their post-crisis response.
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A bystander’s objective point of view can offer crucial perspective on your personality and the issue at hand, as well as constructive advice for moving forward. SEO analysts, project managers, content developers, and PR specialists all need to work together to deliver top-quality, lasting results. Although each specific situation is unique, these are the 5 main steps to consider when recovering from reputation issues. Now that you understand the wide-ranging impact of a crisis, let’s talk about how to rebuild company reputation so you can recover and move forward.
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One of the best ways to repair your online reputation is to establish yourself as an authority in your industry. Thus, once you have identified what tools you have, you must identify which you don’t. Websites, blogs, social media profiles, forums, content publishing sites (like YouTube and Medium), and industry-specific websites are all valuable assets when building out your online presence. The more assets you operate, the more opportunity you have to influence your own reputation. Not every reputation-repair strategy leverages the media.
Consider changing up your social circle if the people you surround yourself with are contributing to your problems. Take a break from social media if your digital life has played a role in the poor opinion of your character. With the initial hard work of honesty and communication out of the way, it’s time to begin the next phase of your reputation repair plan. Blast through the cloud of negativity surrounding you with an all-out assault of positivity. On one hand, you need enough preferred content to push the bad stuff down. But you also need to flood Google’s index with fresh content to dilute the density of the negative topic.
The Positives that You Can’t Control
Our team works diligently to identify, create, and promote preferred content in your branded search results. We also develop a strategy to protect your reputation against future damaging events. Instead, you develop your reputation over time through your behavior and relationships with others. If you treat people disrespectfully or behave badly, you can develop a bad reputation. You may also develop a bad reputation if people spread gossip or negative statements about you, even if your behavior isn’t actually bad.
Rebuilding Your Reputation: Steps to Recover When You’ve Messed Up
Although the media storm has ended, your search results are most likely littered with negative media coverage. Thus, if you have negative results ranking on page 1 of Google, they will have an undeniable and severe impact. Another Moz report cited that one negative article on page 1 of search results will cause 22% of searchers to not do business with your company – nearly one fourth of prospective clients.
- Review and social media platforms can be particularly worthwhile when it comes to addressing a negative perspective, as you can engage with the negative comment directly.
- This can work against your efforts – the prominence of a negative result can increase substantially due to a sparse online presence alone.
- ReputationManagement.com doesn’t use quick, temporary fixes to recover your reputation.
- What’s more, sharing other perspectives on your brand can increase trust with current and prospective customers.
- Reputation recovery is more than just getting something removed from Google.
- Some of these negative results may not seem like a reputation crisis.
You’ll need to decide whether it’s smart to proactively issue a statement, craft a message and choose the right person to make the statement. Understanding the pre-work and after-effects of communicating with the media — traditional and online — requires finesse. Which aspects of the situation should she claim accountability for, and which were beyond her control? What belonged to colleagues with questionable moral compasses? We picked apart what happened and the choices she’d made in response to hostile conditions.
I performed a solid perception sweep, considering social media, traditional news outlets and market reputation. My findings confirmed the past incident was “isolated and resolved” in the marketplace and posed no risk to investors, employees or customers. The proactive approach enabled my client to take control of how he and his company moved forward. Whether you made a statement that backfired or got caught up in a scandal, you probably understand how negative choices can impact your public reputation. Bad news makes its way around much faster than good news, so you’ll have to do some damage control to restore a good image.