How to Protect Your Reputation Online? 5 Steps [2024]

Protecting reputation online is not a piece of cake. Thanks to the Internet and the popularity of social media apps, anyone can express their opinion to BILLIONS of people. Almost 50% of all Internet users post online reviews EVERY MONTH. Missing a question, complaint, or negative review is very easy. Every unanswered question or remark can damage your reputation. So, how do you protect your brand reputation in the online world?

Online reputation protection refers to all activities that aim to monitor, manage, and influence the public perception of a person, brand, or company on the Internet. Protecting reputation, especially online, is crucial, as the Internet is most of society’s main information source.

Table of contents:

• What is online reputation protection? Definition
• Why is it important to protect brand reputation?
• How to protect your reputation online?
  • Step 1: Examine your current reputation
  • Step 2: Build a positive reputation online
  • Step 3: Monitor your reputation
  • Step 4: Respond to negative online reviews
  • Step 5: Constantly improve digital reputation
• Conclusion

What is online reputation protection? Definition

Online reputation protection is actions taken to control, protect, and improve public perception of a company, brand, or individual.

Basically, it means doing things in such a way that the brand has a positive online reputation and stays consistent with its online identity. It includes:

• Brand monitoring, which is:
  • Tracking and analyzing mentions of your brand or company across social media platforms and other online channels
• Proper management of the content, which is:
  • Creating and providing positive content about your brand or company
  • Communicating what is happening in your brand or company
  • Responding to comments, both positive and negative comments
  • Staying in touch with the audience
  • Removing negative content about you from social networking sites and other search results

Why is it important to protect brand reputation?

Nowadays, people check your business online before making a purchase decision. They base their opinions on what they find through social media posts, online reviews, websites, and other results from search engines.

They are especially influenced by the opinions of others, both negative and positive reviews!

93% of customers read online reviews before purchasing (Dixa Report: 3 Ways to Catapult Your Customer Service in 2022).

Every business owner, including you, should ensure the information people find online works in their favor!

Protecting your company’s reputation online directly impacts the success of your business!

There are a lot of benefits of doing this, for example:

• You gain a positive online reputation, which helps establish trust and credibility with your current and potential future customers.
• You prevent a crisis that can lead to harm to your reputation and other significant losses, such as financial ones.
• You build a solid digital presence that makes your brand visible and raises brand awareness.

How to protect your brand online?

Step 1: Examine your current online reputation

Of course, you must start with a deep analysis of your current online reputation. This will be your starting point and reference for further action.

Unfortunately, you are not able to do this manually!

You need to choose the right brand monitoring tool, preferably one that offers advanced AI features like sentiment analysis and others to track the key reputation metrics. I recommend Brand24.

So, choose a tool and do these things sequentially:

Check your Online Reputation Score

Online Reputation Score is the most important metric; check it first!

It shows the overall online reputation of a brand on a scale of -100 to 100. As you can probably guess, the higher the score, the better.

Tracking Online Reputation Score shows you if your brand reputation management is good.

Look at the Online Reputation Score of Getaround (carsharing platform):

Getaround’s Reputation Score goes up or down depending on various factors.

For example, when there are a lot of negative mentions of a brand, the score decreases. And when there are many positive ones, it increases.

Conduct the Sentiment Analysis of your brand

You’ve got the Reputation Score behind you, so now it’s time for Sentiment Analysis.

Thanks to it, you track all your brand mentions and get their emotional tone. You can easily discover negative online, positive, and neutral reviews.

Remember that a high number of negative sentiments indicates that a crisis is coming. You can protect your brand’s reputation by quickly reacting to negative reviews.

Tools like Brand24 let you go directly into the discussion about your brand and take appropriate action.

Moreover, Brand24 lets you detect which source brings the most positive and negative brand feedback.

With another AI-powered feature, the Anomaly Detector, you can quickly discover why your brand’s mentions increased.

Summing it up, thanks to sentiment analysis, you can:

• Automatically detect unhappy customers and turn them into happy ones
• Take appropriate actions quickly to prevent crisis and reduce reputation damage
• Maintain a positive brand image

Discover emotions around your brand

You’re probably wondering why you should discover emotions around your brand since I’ve just shown you the Sentiment Analysis.

Well, they are two different things!

Emotion Analysis delivers more detailed information. It precisely names the emotions (disgust, admiration, sadness, anger, fear, and joy) the target audience feels about your brand.

Advanced AI tools such as Brand24 can analyze which channels are the source of which types of emotions.

Check emojis included in discussions about your brand

People often use emojis in their comments instead of directly expressing it in words. Therefore, it is important to check and analyze them.

Brand24 provides it for you:

Discover whether influencers talk about your brand in a positive or negative way

The next step is to watch how influencers talk about your product or service.

69% of consumers trust influencer recommendations (data released by Matter Communications).

People largely make their purchasing decisions based on what influencers say, so keep your hand on the pulse.

Take a look at the sentiment of the topics

There is another essential point that you need to keep in mind.

Each brand generates discussions in a specific area.

For example, a window manufacturing company will be discussed in terms of different topics than a film production company. I guess this is obvious (?).

So, let’s check out the topics within which Getaround is being discussed:

Monitor popular topics around your company and check what sentiment they generate.

It may happen that only one topic causes negative discussions.

Step 2: Build a positive reputation online

How can you do it? Let me give you examples:

• Provide informative content on your social media and other channels
• Positively interact with your audience and be respectful to everyone
• Present consistent image across all over the Internet

However, the most important thing is always to try to solve customer problems.

Step 3: Monitor your reputation

You need to monitor your reputation constantly.

I recommend you to compare, for example, the sentiment of mentions from the consecutive periods.

You’ll be able to see precisely whether your online positive reputation building is working.

In Brand24, you can make a period comparison of the sentiment of negative and positive mentions. You will find it in the Comparison tab.

Step 4: Respond to negative online reviews

Responding to negative reviews is a key step in protecting your online reputation!

You received a notification – someone is unsatisfied with your product or service.

Don’t panic! It happens to the best of the best.

So what to do?

Here are some hints:

• Respond quickly: The sooner, the better. Don’t wait a week to respond. If you see a negative review, try to respond to it as soon as you can.
• Stay professional: It can always be that the customer lets emotions get involved, is upset, and uses bad language. No matter what, you have to stay calm and professional! Respond with a helpful and positive tone. Show respect for the reviewer. A wrong tone of voice can make things worse.
• Respond to every negative mention: There is no determinant of which bad reviews are the worst. Any negative feedback is bad! Even if you can’t solve the reviewer’s problem in any way, you still have to respond to it!
• Apologize: Always apologize to the customer. You must assume that the fault always lies with you! Even if it is indeed not your fault. Just swallow your pride!

• Offer compensation: Depending on the type of feedback and the severity of the situation, offer the customer compensation. Encourage the customer to contact you, preferably by email. Compensation can be, for example, a refund, an exchange, or a discount on the next purchase.
• Don’t use excuses: When explaining why a problem occurred, do not use excuses. Do not do it under any circumstances! Excuses are often seen as not taking responsibility for the issue that has arisen.

Step 5: Constantly improve digital reputation

Protecting your image online is not a one-time action. It is an ongoing process. That’s why you have to take all the steps I mentioned repeatedly.

Regularly check that what you are doing is effective!

You can also set goals that will be your checkpoints. For example, you can assume how much the number of negative mentions of your brand will decrease in a given period.

Remember to use in-depth analysis. It allows you to understand what is happening within your brand quickly.

Conclusion

Protecting your brand’s online reputation is highly beneficial.

Mainly because people check search engine results before entering any interaction with your brand. For example, before purchasing a product, they check if your website is credible or if reviews about your products are positive.

Do you have an excellent online reputation? You are trustworthy. Simple!

A business that doesn’t take steps to protect its reputation harms itself!

To achieve long-term success, you need to protect your online brand reputation.

Key takeaways:

• Protecting reputation online is an ongoing process, not a one-time action.
• Use tools that track online mentions to protect your reputation online effectively.
• Not protecting online reputations can cause a big reputation crisis.

What are you waiting for? Click here to protect your reputation online!