Defending a brand is as important as building one. Protective Online Reputation Management is preventative in nature. By identifying key phrases that relate to your brand, creating positive online information, and enhancing the relevance of existing positive information, online reputation problems can be reduced or possibly avoided altogether.
Prophylactic reputation management is preventative branding and should be part of every company's communications plan. Years of careful positioning and millions of marketing dollars spent can all be laid waste in a single afternoon by an unethical competitor sipping a latte at Starbucks while systematically using their laptop to destroy your empire.
The average search engine user sees about ten search results for a given search query. If that query is your company name, product, service, or the name of an executive in your company, you have one page consisting of ten search results to convince them you are worth doing business with. Ideally you will want to control all ten of those search results. Since the majority of people only look at the first page of search engine results, owning the first ten search results enables a company to not only craft how they are perceived, but defend against unsavory competitors out to destroy your online reputation.
This type of defensive internet reputation management is best started long before there is a problem as it takes months and sometimes longer to truly dominate search results. By using existing high profile web properties such as Facebook, LinkedIn, AboutUs, YouTube and others, as well as a company website, separate blog, and other types of web content (and some patience), first page domination can be had.
