• Personal Branding - BrandSelf from Zise
  • Personal PR - BrandSelf from Zise
  • Reputation Management - BrandSelf from Zise
  • Personal Branding - BrandSelf from Zise

How Bad Comments Online Can Damage Your Reputation

Online reputation management may not be a term you’ve heard of before, but taking control of your personal reputation in the online world is just as important as it is offline, not least because of the statistics below; (these statistics have been taken from a variety of different sources)

  • A third of people will Google an individual’s name as a matter of course before contacting them for business purposes
  • Almost 90% of people think the reputation of a company’s Chief Executive is just as important as the company’s overall reputation
  • 77% of people at some point in their working careers have used Google to find information about an individual or individuals who work for a potential supplier or business contact
  • Almost 80% of executive recruitment companies will use Google to find out more about specific candidates, with 35% of candidates being ruled out of contention for a post based on the information found

It’s clear to see from those figures how even one bad comment about you that features prominently in the search engine results for your name can damage your personal reputation and that of your business.

What’s the cost to you and your business?

It’s very difficult to put a monetary figure on how bad online comments can impact on you or your business.

For example, as an executive you may have applied for a role within another organisation and not been offered an interview by the recruitment company due to your poor online reputation.

As a business, there’s no telling how much potential revenue a poor online reputation could cost you.

Every day people could be Googling the name of your CEO, Sales Director etc and taking their interest in the company no further due to what they are finding out online.

With social media sites such as Twitter now being used so prolifically, bad comments about your company can travel the world very quickly and you need to be able to react immediately to minimise the potential damage to your reputation that one person’s comments could bring about.

Google your own name now and if you don’t like what you see or don’t manage to find any relevant results, it’s time to take control of your online reputation before someone else does.

Aug 2011