Reputation management is the effort to influence what and how people think of a brand or person when viewed online. Put another way, character is who you are. Reputation is whom other people think you are. Search engines like Google have inserted themselves as determiners of brand reputation. Online reputation managers work to change the sentiment portrayed by Google about a brand.
Reputation management services include:
Costs depend on many things. For example, a simple removal may be free, $3,000, or much more — one time. The cost of pushing down a search result in Google may run $3,000 to $15,000 per month or more and may require many months to complete.
A typical reputation campaign includes five stages:
Not included in the above list are things like campaign setup and sentiment monitoring, but they’re important as well. Within each stage are various actions. For example, during the research stage there may be competitive analysis, content gap analysis, SEO analysis, persona development, sentiment analysis and more.
Removal of problem content can take as little as two weeks, or much longer. Sometimes reputation management companies have a relationship with a website from a prior campaign which makes things faster. Other times a more drawn out timeline occurs when attorneys or negotiations must ensue.
The length of time necessary for reputation repair versus review management is significant. For example, small businesses can begin to see their star-rating improve within a couple of weeks. But the time needed to push down a negative search result will almost certainly be many months.
Software cannot be used to solve most online reputation problems. Only reviews and ratings can be improved with software. Software to remove an article from a prominent publication does not exist. Nor does any application exist to push negative search results down (reduce visibility in search results). We do use many types of software, some proprietary and others public.