Your professional image, whether that of your personal information as a person or that of your company’s information- is critical to how your business will evolve in the future. Many companies and professionals have allowed themselves to fall prey to losing control of their own identity online. This can occur through simple things such as news coverage, online reviews of your performance, your own interaction within portals and communities, and many other situations.

Controlling your destiny is not an impossible task however. In fact, it is usually very straight-forward and should be considered an insurance policy for your future. Having a plan in action today will help protect you against future issues, and forward thinking now will keep an effective online presence affordable (if not free!)

If you wait for your online brand to fall prey to detrimental problems in the future, it is comparable to letting your house burn to the ground before you inquire about insurance to cover your loss. If a bad occurrence has happened already, waiting silently expecting the problem to go away will only ensure that it never does.

The truth is simple math. Regardless of how perfectly your business runs, it is only a matter of time before a disgruntled consumer, client, or past employee comes into existence. While you may have hundreds or even thousands of happy people dealing with you professionally, the one squeaky wheel may cause your finely tuned machine to come to a grinding halt.

“In the real world, one consumer with a bad experience may affect twenty prospects. In the online world, one bad experience may spread to fifty thousand.”

With the way the web works today, many community sites and consumer portals have extremely powerful presence and influence online. Sites like Facebook and Linkedin have millions of users, industry sites are filling into niche marketplaces, and they all have a combined footprint in search results that dwarfs your name on a thousand-fold scale.

If you do a search for “your name” or “company name” what comes up? Hopefully only good things. If something negative shows up in the first page of results you can painfully know that IT IS affecting your business. Depending on your industry and market, as high as 85% of the people doing business with you have looked at the search results for your information. (Example: In 2006, 77% of purchases for consumer electronics were first researched online.)

Things that may create negative search results:

• Hostile customers
• Disgruntled employees
• Competitors
• Idealistic rivals
• Court rulings
• Biased critics
• Negative publicity
• Inflammatory communities

Some of the more common problem sites:

• Wikipedia.org
• Amazon.com
• Yelp.com
• RipOffReport.com
• Complaints.com
• ConsumerAffairs.com
• TheSqueakyWheel.com
• ConsumerwWebWatch.org
• Bloggers- many bloggers have enough presence to cause significant impact.

The end result of this commentary can have a near instant result on your bottom line, or can linger into a decrease of your brand and reputation over months of exposure.

Most professionals and companies don’t have any strategies in place to protect or manage their “online brand”, and even worse is that a significant number do not realize they may (or may not) have a problem today.

The purpose of search engine and social media branding is to have a proactive strategy: creating positive information about your brand online and leveraging current information, to displace negative reviews and push results down in search engines or social communities.

It isn’t to say these things do not exist. In fact, they always will. A good strategy just needs to know when and where it occurs, and move the limelight and press coverage to more beneficial information.

EXAMPLES OF ONLINE BRANDING ISSUES FOR COMPANIES

Fisher-Price + Lead Paint = Bad Online PR

Silicon Valley Watcher - Wells Fargo Still Ignores the Conversation

Pacesetter Windows- As of early May, Ken and Latrice Innes, in Redding, Calif., had told some 318,082 visitors to their Web site, PacesetterSucks.com, about their less-than-satisfactory experience with the Omaha-based Pacesetter Corp.

EXAMPLES OF ONLINE BRANDING ISSUES FOR PROFESSIONALS

Wired Magazine - The See-Through CEO - Jason Goldberg (X-CEO of Jobster) and Glenn Kelman (CEO of Redfin) get the review from sharing themselves online.

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10 Steps of Online Branding and Reputation Control

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