White hat methods of protecting a company’s reputation against competitors’ black marketing approaches
And if they find out about you from a negative side, the following problems may arise:
- Falling sales.
- Loss of investment.
- Denial of credit.
- Difficulties with promotion.
- Refusal to ship goods on credit or refusal to Post-pay procedure by suppliers.
- Difficulties in hiring highly qualified specialists.
Белые, серые и чёрные методы — в чём разница
Для управления репутацией существуют белые, серые и чёрные методы. Преимущество белых в том, что они базируются на законных основаниях и действуют положительно в долгосрочной перспективе. К серым и черным методам прибегают, когда вопрос нужно решить срочно, однако результат может получиться непредсказуемым.
Сравним некоторые способы и их последствия в сводной таблице.
|
Methods |
White |
Gray |
Black |
|
PR |
Publication of quality materials in the media: research, interviews, polls, reviews. |
Placing bright materials that divert attention from the topic of negativity: they discussed poor service, but began to discuss the personal life of the director, for example. |
Pouring negative information on competitors. The goal is to influence the opinion that yes, something is wrong in this company, but competitors are much worse. |
|
SEO promotion |
Writing high-quality articles, posting them on authoritative sites. |
Placement of a large number of materials in order to fill the search results with other information. |
Removing links from the search by illegal methods: site hacking, DDos attacks, etc. |
|
Working with reviews |
Quick response to the comments of the authors, elimination of negativity through clarification of details and the method of persuasion. |
Deleting reviews by blocking, asking for help from opinion leaders. |
Paid removal of reviews by agreement with administrators, purchase of reviews from freelancers. |
|
Speed |
Building a reputation can take a long time. |
Relatively fast results. |
Fast result. |
|
legality |
Legal. |
Legal (mostly), but not always fair. |
Illegal. |
|
Result |
Positive result in the long run. |
It is possible to “get hooked on a reputational needle” when there is a need for constant “negative stopping”. |
The result is unpredictable — removing the negative can result in even more negative. |
|
Price |
This requires a large upfront investment, but as reputation is built, the percentage of investment decreases. |
Expensive and few guarantees that large infusions will not be required. |
Very expensive and results are not guaranteed. |
We are convinced that white methods, despite their stability and laboriousness, are more profitable. By the way, you can stop the negative, starting with the internal work of the company. We will also talk about this a little.
But we want to warn that, unfortunately, the loss of reputation can also occur for external reasons — due to the sabotage of competitors. Therefore, we will deal, including, with the channels for the dissemination of negative information and how it can be neutralized.
Channels of destruction of business reputation
Here are the main places where the sources of your problems may be:
- Forums and boards of declarations. Both your potential clients, sincerely sharing the quality of products, and freelancers working for competitors can communicate here. They can form entire communities with blacklists.
- Blogs and microblogs. Influencers have an impact on their audience, and therefore their articles can be both a sales stimulus and a cause for trouble.
- Personal diaries of employees (former employees). Sometimes employees agree to inconvenient conditions for payment or schedule, or do not know how to build quality relationships with colleagues or superiors, and accordingly remain dissatisfied. And after the dismissal, they can sow negativity on the network. Or another — employees have hobbies, bad habits that do not correlate with the company’s image. They frivolously share personal information, opinions in social networks and thus undermine the reputation of the company.
- Comments to the news of the company. Leaving comments directly below posts is not uncommon. Dissatisfied customers react very quickly to any of your innovations. It’s great if you run your own blogs — you have a chance to stop the negativity within your site. It will be more difficult to work with comments on third-party resources.
- Social networks. This channel combines various formats: again, dissatisfied customers can leave feedback, organize communities, and blog. But, fortunately, there are tools for tracking negativity in social networks. And knowing them, you can deal with them effectively. There are agencies that help companies in this matter. In particular, this is what our company does.
People read reviews before buying
Cooperate with companies with a rating of 4 stars
Look only at reviews of the current month
Expect a response within a day
How to remove negative reviews about a company
Perhaps you had to deal with a situation where a dissatisfied customer left a review on the site of an online store? He can be dealt with relatively easily by answering publicly, asking leading questions, or apologizing when necessary. You can also use internal customer communication to offer to remove feedback for compensation.
Other well-known ways to remove negative reviews left by real users:
- Feedback can be removed directly by the author.
- The site administration can also delete a review (if you find an approach to it).
- Negative reviews can be outweighed by positive ones.
- In social networks, slanderous and offensive comments can be removed by complaining about the user or by contacting the platform’s support.
- It is also effective to include “brand advocates” in discussions on forums and create alternative branches.
You can handle these tasks yourself if you have enough experience. Otherwise, we recommend contacting agencies that help quickly and painlessly resolve these issues.
Fighting the black methods of competitors
We all understand that negative reviews need to be dealt with quickly, before the client moves to other sites or until word of mouth is turned on. But what if the negative does not come from the client, but, perhaps, is a “black” marketing ploy of competitors?
In this case, it is better to contact a reputation cleaning agency, as the company may not be able to cope on its own or even harm itself due to the excessive diligence of employees.
Here are examples of working with marketing reviews left by competitors:
- Leaving clarifying questions under the comments. You need to ask the client what specifically did not like. Typically, freelancers hired don’t track comments on their reviews, don’t know the details, and won’t respond. As a result, a review without clarification will look implausible in the eyes of a potential client.
- Lawsuits. If a review, comment, or article has offensive connotations or contains clearly false information, then using this method you can remove comments from many sites. You just need to know how to properly collect information for the procedure.
- Placement of PR-articles in the media. It is very good if the company is engaged in charitable activities — this affects a positive image.
- Writing and posting many optimized articles. This work is carried out in order to influence the issuance of search engines, to give more positive information to customers.
- Appeal to administrators of search engines. If you have a positive court decision in your hands, then removing information from the search is not difficult.
As you can see, in such matters experience and professionalism are needed. This is one of the reasons to trust third-party services. Let’s return to the issues of the internal work of the company as the most effective tool for working on reputation.
External reputation starts with internal work
Any negativity in the network can signal that it is time to start working on bugs and implement improvements. Each company should develop:
- Rules of business correspondence.
- Job instructions.
- Channels for collecting and analyzing feedback.
In addition, it is worth following the rules that contribute to a comfortable climate within the company:
- Show respect in communication. You should not yell at an employee, humiliate him, reminding him who is the boss here, and who is very dependent on the salary. The employee, of course, will obey, but every free minute he will look for vacancies from other companies, dreaming of freedom.
- Do not force people to work on holidays, weekends or sick days. Burnout of employees leads first to irritability, then to depression and inability to perform duties efficiently, respectively, to work adequately with clients.
- Do not encourage gossip and intrigue, snitching. An unhealthy atmosphere in the team leads to staff turnover and leaving relevant reviews about the company, which then have to be dealt with.
Remember, satisfied employees work better, they won’t accidentally be rude to the client, and they won’t forget about the delivery time. They love their company and care about its reputation, both in and out of the workplace.
Reputation side marketing
As we mentioned above, it is much easier and faster to deal with negativity on internal sites. But this requires tools, for example:
- Blog. Keeping your own blog, where you can talk more about products, cover the company’s activities from the right perspective, and share new products is a great solution. And if you provide feedback, you will be the first to know about the shortcomings of your services and will be able to quickly refine them if necessary.
- Social network. Here, feedback from users can be obtained almost instantly.
- SEO promotion. Even though people may see the first review with a low rating, they usually look for other reviews. Probably, in order to understand how many positive ones will meet, how many negative ones. And if there are a lot of positive mentions of the company on the network, then you have many chances to convince the client that you are doing a good job, there are just dissatisfied people, like everywhere else.
4. A platform for feedback from former employees. Whatever mood an employee leaves in, if they are given the opportunity to speak out, there is a good chance that they will not harm the company’s reputation over time. In addition, having a separate feedback platform, you can always show how much satisfied people worked at the enterprise.
Different methods can work in each company, we have mentioned only some of the most accessible ones, so that you can try to influence the situation yourself. But if you need professional help in leveling your reputation, contact us!
Our employees:
- Responsible for the confidentiality of the data you provide.
- They will diagnose the current rating in the network using appropriate marketing tools.
- We will work with you to develop an effective strategy to neutralize the negative.
- All versions agreed with the director of the company will be worked out.
- They will carry out work at a high quality level, using only legal schemes.
- They will provide you with a progress report.
- Likewise, they will make recommendations to maintain the reputation of your company.
Use the feedback form to get a free consultation on cooperation!
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