A successful brand is most likely to have detractors. Those groups could be related to your company in some way or plainly belonging to a rival brand. Online reputation management can help your brand overcome the bad press generated by this faction of people. The group of detractors may also contain your ex-employees who were laid off or terminated for some reason. They may have joined a competitor company or are working in some completely different domain. You will be surprised to note how reputation management finds much of the negative image cultivated by the people who are no more on good terms with your company. The job of reputation management services is to combat these forces and come up with ways to ensure that their negative influence doesnt ripple out over the Internet.

There are some tools at the disposal of online reputation management that can be used for this purpose:

Vigilance: Reputation management experts keep a sharp eye on the posts and reviews made on the brand that they are working for. Internet tools like Google Alerts and Yahoo updates will inform the reputation management services about any posts that are published on the brand. Alerts can be activated with the help of keywords that you are interested in. Social media experts can keep a close tab on the developments on the social networks. Tracking sites like socialmention.com will tell the experts if there are any mentions about the brand. Being vigilant on the Internet will be the ideal way to check up on what your detractors are writing about you.

Assessment: It is foolhardy to dismiss all the bad press as expressions of an imaginative mind. Online reputation management must not take it for granted that all the user reviews are distortions of the truth. A close inspection is necessary for the reputation management service to determine the truth about the reviews. There are instances when the brand had actually not lived up to the high standards that it was expected to meet. The reputation management experts will do a much better job to resolve these pending issues that try to stonewall them. Brand users vent their ire on the online forums only when they dont get the answers to their problems. When they have that sorted out, they may agree to take that post down and you will have a clean slate.

Response: Just like many of the claims encountered by the online reputation management team are true, similarly a majority of them are just baseless allegations. Some of them are so ludicrous that if the reputation management services respond to those, it will lend these rumors a degree of credibility! In such cases, the best way is to ignore the rumors or respond as voices that cannot be traced back to the brand. What the writers of the reputation management team can do is generate content that highlights the truth about the issue on the table. The users are entitled to know the truth and its best that they get it from authentic sources.