Digital age realists know the online world brings great potential and pitfalls. A good reputation can bolster your company’s success—and a bad reputation can spell failure. For entrepreneurs, the lines between a personal and professional life is often blurred. If you publicly make negative comments or start online arguments, it can impact your personal reputation and cause your business to suffer.
Personal reputation management protects your image and ensures you present your best self to your audience. Here’s how to maintain a strong online reputation by creating a positive online presence.
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What is personal reputation management?
Personal online reputation management (ORM) is a set of techniques and strategies to protect an individual’s online image. It uses reactive privacy measures and monitoring tools to find and remove negative content, as well as proactive practices like content creation and search engine optimization (SEO) strategies to promote a positive reputation.
Reputation management is crucial to your larger personal brand management, or how you build and maintain a successful personal brand across different touchpoints. Brand management encompasses everything from crafting a brand identity and unique value proposition to conducting a target audience and market analysis. A personal reputation management strategy promotes a consistent positive perception of your personal brand and safeguards against negative situations.
6 tips for managing your personal reputation online
- Use monitoring tools
- Get proactive
- Evaluate criticism
- Plan for misunderstandings
- Take breaks
- Hire an online reputation management firm
You can use multiple techniques in tandem to manage your online reputation based on the style and volume of your online interactions. People who post daily across multiple social media platforms require a more robust strategy, but even infrequent posters with smaller audiences benefit from personal reputation management.
Use these techniques to help you and your work show up in a positive light and rank higher in online searches:
1. Use monitoring tools
Manage your online reputation by monitoring it. Create a Google Alert—one of the easiest ways to monitor reputation—to see when content featuring your name (or brand name) pops up. Use social listening tools to aggregate posts on social media, blogs, and news relevant to your brand.
Surface and quickly address potentially damaging comments or negative content with reputation management apps like BrandYourself and BrandWatch.
2. Get proactive
You can engineer a resilient, positive online reputation with a combination of paid, owned, and earned media:
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Paid.Paid media is any exposure you purchase from individuals, platforms, or publications. Pay a platform to feature your profile on the first page of search results, for example, or buy banner ad space on the websites your target audience visits the most.
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Owned.Owned media is the content you own and control (blog posts, newsletters, social media channels). Publish a steady stream of high-quality content to build authority, create community, and control your narrative.
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Earned.Earned media is organic coverage or content you didn’t create or purchase, like positive reviews and social media posts inspired by word-of-mouth referrals. Though some earned media is out of your control, you can influence its timing and impact by crafting persuasive, timely press releases that mirror your paid and owned content.
Pair your media strategy with an SEO strategy by publishing blog posts or articles on commonly asked questions in your industry. High-quality content with specific keywords and phrases can help establish you as a thought leader in your industry and ensure search engine algorithms rank your site high on results pages.
3. Evaluate criticism
“Don’t read the comments” is excellent advice most of the time, but some feedback requires your attention. Negative reviews, for example, are a great opportunity to address customer satisfaction or correct errors. Look for recurring themes in negative feedback, especially concerning a product feature or an overall professional style, and preemptively address issues internally. Make the distinction between critics and trolls, and dedicate your time to managing them accordingly.
4. Plan for misunderstandings
Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. We all want to believe the internet will give us the benefit of the doubt, but it’s wiser to engage online with your reputation in mind.
Before posting anything, Alexa Curtis, former Radio Disney host and founder of Be Fearless Inc. and Chief Swag Officer, recommends listening to your gut: If it could be misinterpreted, how will it be misinterpreted? What will your response be?
“It’s hard to do early on in your career, because you don’t know yourself enough yet,” she says. “A lot of really unhealthy, jealous people live on the internet.”
Trust that the audience you’ve built will tell you when you’ve crossed a line—and stick with you if the tide suddenly turns. “It takes a lot of figuring out and refining [your] message to know that if I post this, even if it’s taken the wrong way, the following that I have will not leave me,” Alexa says.
5. Take breaks
Sometimes, maintaining a strong personal reputation is knowing when to step back. Managing a personal reputation—especially one with professional implications—requires perspective. Take stock of your digital footprint quarterly or annually to refresh the content you put out and spot patterns or risks before they become too big to handle.
When Alexa faced backlash over a social media post she made while moving countries and launching a business, she realized she had been stretched too thin. She stepped back from posting for a few months to recover, and her time away bolstered her resilience and sense of fearlessness more than expected.
“To build a personal brand, you have to be good at almost everything: speaking, connecting, empathy,” she says. “You have to be a little bit edgy, a little bit out-of-the-box, a little bit nutty. You also have to be so grounded and down to earth, and that is very hard. That’s why most people don’t become entrepreneurs. What I went through was so traumatic. You can’t be prepared for that, and I hope no one ever has to go through it, but it proved to me that literally anyone can go through it.”
6. Hire an online reputation management firm
If an incident does become too complex to handle on your own or you want help preemptively searching for potentially damaging content, hire a firm specializing in personal reputation management services.
Reputation crisis experts help you mitigate negative press, navigate online attacks, and implement monitoring practices to safeguard your reputation in the future. Management services can cost anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000 a month, depending on the scope and complexity of the negative content.
Though costs vary, a trustworthy expert may be expensive for individuals or small businesses. Build a strong reputation strategy first to prevent most issues, but seek out experts when you most need them.
Personal reputation management FAQ
What is personal reputation management?
Personal online reputation management (ORM) is a set of techniques and strategies to protect an individual’s online image. It uses reactive privacy and monitoring tools to find and remove negative content and proactive practices like content creation and SEO strategies to promote a positive reputation.
How much does personal reputation management cost?
Online reputation management services can help you mitigate negative press, navigate online attacks, and implement monitoring practices to safeguard your reputation in the future. They cost anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000 a month, depending on the scope and complexity of the negative content. If you’re self-managing your reputation, your primary cost would be paid media ad spend to promote positive content and sponsor your sites on search engine results pages.
How long does reputation management take?
For public professionals, personal reputation management might span the length of their careers. For individuals looking to address a single incident, reputation management could take a few weeks to a few years to rebuild public perception.