There are many methods for improving a company, individual, or organization’s online reputation. Those methods range in popularity depending upon how successful they are at a particular time. Search engines change their algorithms on a regular basis, so it is simply a matter of utilizing those methods which are most successful at the time.

More than that, though, online reputation management is about presenting positive publicity about an unfairly maligned person, business, or organization. When individuals need to use online reputation management, it is often because search engines are displaying negative results for them. The way to fix this is to replace those negative links or comments with more positive ones.

Simply replacing negative content with neutral or positive content is not good enough, though, you have to allow searchers to find not only positive information, but positive and true information! This is currently accomplished by many individuals, businesses, and organizations through the use of online testimonials.

A testimonial is a quote from a customer or former customer about the effectiveness of a particular product, service, or company. This is an effective way to present a positive image because it is not a cultivated statement by a public relations firm or a statement from the President of the company about the way he runs his company, but a review from a customer about the business, product, or service. This makes an impact, as customers tend to trust each other more than the businesses they are frequenting (or considering frequenting).

Those online reputation management campaigns that make use of testimonials will be most successful. This is because a testimonial is what people really want to see when they Google a company, product, or service. Rather than empty rhetoric, they want to see what their peers think about the company, service, or product.

There are many ways to improve testimonials and make them more attractive–such as having people send a scanned signature instead of a text signature at the end of the testimonial. Similarly, having online videos or recordings posted as online testimonials can be advantageous, though it is not always what is good for your online reputation management campaign. It is up to you and your online reputation manager to figure out how best to handle issues like these.

Online testimonials are a powerful way to communicate from a business to a prospective consumer that they can be trusted. There are a host of things to consider when doing online reputation management–one of the main things is considering how you want your “Google Front” to look. Your Google Front is the first page of search results that come up–the links and comments that every single person see.

This is a great article about the power of online testimonials. It is well worth reading:
http://reputationhawk.com/ThePowerofTestimonials.html

Product reviews shown to be effective by research. This entire article is very informative:
http://www.marketingcharts.com/direct/online-product-reviews-most-helpful-in-purchase-decisions-offline-too-3437/

Ways to make use of online testimonials. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it’s good nonetheless:
http://blog.noriskhomebiz.com/2011/01/29/a-number-of-helpful-hints-for-making-the-most-of-the-impact-of-testimonials/

The online reputation is something to be coveted–once ruined, it cannot easily be fixed. Unfortunately, people often do not recognize the important of an online reputation until theirs has been ruined. If you think it could never happen to you, you’re quite wrong. Any enemy you make could turn and make a webpage that cites your name and says terrible things about you. Worse yet, even without making enemies you can be defamed online. The Internet is full of random malcontents who would love nothing better than to ruin someone else’s day.

What to do in order to stop this from occurring? Well, the truth is that you can’t really stop the anonymous miscreants from making their negative comments. What you can do is protect yourself from the entire situation by engaging in preventative online reputation management. If the problem has already occurred, then online reputation management can help after the fact.

Online reputation management doesn’t remove the offending comments, but it does replace it with positive content. This positive content will, thanks to online reputation management, climb its way to the top of the Google search results, which pushes the negative content down. Once the negative content is pushed off the 2nd page, it might as well not exist for how many people are going to see it.