When you think of reputation management and public relations, you probably think about big corporations and fortune 500 companies. Big budget firms that manage giant PR accounts for the heavyweight companies of the world. But should reputation management matter to small businesses and small business owners?

The answer is yes, now more than ever.

Because now more than ever, personal opinions matter. Not only do they matter, they have more power than ever before. One person now has the power to cost a company an awful lot of money, and sometimes even close it’s doors. I won’t go into specific case examples, but I can tell you that there is no shortage of stories where a disgruntled client, user, or employee has ruined a company online with a few well placed, negative reviews. › Continue reading…

To manage your online reputation, or clean up your online reputation, you are going to need to have a lot of content created. Fresh, original content that comes from many different sources if at all possible.

One of the content creation methods we use for our clients revolves around blogging, bloggers, and the blogosphere. You see, if you can create enough of a buzz in the blogosphere as a whole, you can literally see the search results blasted with new, positive content in a very, very short time. › Continue reading…

So you think that reputation management is only for people that have negative content to cleanup, right?

Wrong.

Because reputation management is really all about search engine optimization, or SEO. It’s about taking control of the listings on the front page of the search engine results, like Google, for a given keyword or phrase. Which sounds simple, but can be surprisingly difficult if you don’t know how to go about it. › Continue reading…