‘Publicness’, as the new-age phenomenon on the all-encompassing Web now is commonly known, comes with significant consequences or implications for political speech, for commerce, and for people’s right to privacy.

Counter a surge of negativity on the Web

• Your steadfastly and steadily built good reputation can go in smoke and brand image can get destroyed in just a matter of days by anyone purposely or inadvertently posting damaging material about you and your business on the Internet. The person may perhaps be dissatisfied customer or even a disgruntled competitor who would go the extent of manipulating reviews, comments and feedback against you.
• Once such content appears in the relevant search engine results, people start getting apprehensive of your products and services. A surge of negativity that spreads online could cost you not only money and business opportunities, but also its reputation that cannot be repaired easily. So when it comes to online reputation management, prevention is always better than cure, as they say.
• Even as you promote your business on local review websites in hope of impressing the prospects, also simultaneously see to it that no one is misusing the sites to harm your business interests. Under such circumstances, legal action is not always feasible since it can get extremely time consuming, costly and thus infective, in most cases.

Take steps to restore business credibility

• While it might not be easy and feasible to take out damaging text from a third party site, user forum, review platform and domain specific search engine results, there is a fair scope for you to minimize or even nullify its negative impact.
• This is possible through online reputation management techniques. Experts can help you to revive your business credibility and brand perception. They see to it that you are able to restore your image with proven techniques and tools.
• Businesses – irrespective of their sizes; large, small and medium – need to be proactive in protecting their brand value names back by quickly responding to any adverse information such as negative feedback in review forums, bad postings in consumer sites, negative blogs, poor testimonials and allegations.
• If such content that appears prominently in the search results pages is smearing your reputation, you cannot afford to be mute spectator. Sans any proactive steps in this regard, these potentially harmful content can translate into a major irritant so you must nullify its impact as quickly as possible.

Even in context of the fast-evolving complex communication landscape, you can definitely make social networking work to your advantage. But it all depends on your ability to leverage its vast potential, which obviously needs specialist’s knowledge and expertise.