Reputation Management Jujitsu – Take Advantage of a Bad Reputation For Fun & Profit

Many companies have online reputation management issues.  When you search for them, the top results are often full of criticisms of the company.  Getting negative messages off the first ten results of Google can be critical to a business.  Hence the rapid rise of the reputation management consultants.

So how does this help you?  Check this out:

1. You Need Links:
Your search rankings in part depend on links to your site.  The more “quality” links from “quality” sites the better.

2. Find Companies With Online Reputation Management Problems
There are thousands of large and small brands that are investing in reputation management via SEO.  Find one.  You can usually look at a site and tell if they are doing SEO and you can look on Google and see if they are doing PPC.  These sites are more likely to be doing reputation management if they have an issue.  It couldn’t hurt if the site is somehow related to your industry.

3. Write Something Positive About Them On Your Site
If you think they are getting a raw deal, or even if you think they deserve the bad rep but there is another side of the story, write about it and put it up on your blog.  Make sure the blog is set up with RSS and that Google Blog Search, Technorati and other blog discovery engines know about you.  Make sure that the headline of the post has the business’ name up front and that it implies something positive about the company.

4. The Company Will Notice You
If the company is doing reputation management, there is a good chance that someone is monitoring blog posts via Google Alerts or some other mechanism.  And because the company has a bad rep your positive post will stand out in the feedreader.  The rep management person will probably email this positive post around – and perhaps even claim that it was the result of their diligent blogger outreach efforts ;).

5. The Company Will Get Links To Your Site
If the company is serious about their reputation they will probably start trying to get links to your post with the company’s brand in the anchor text to try and move you up in the results.

6. You Get More Business
Now not only do you stand a chance to rank for searches for the brand, but in theory this should also improve your site’s ability to rank for other keywords.

7. QED
QED