Minding my own business, and doing some trolling very important research, I came across this post from Search Engine Journal.

It appears that SEJ had posted some form of politically charged blog entry regarding the availability of firearms on Google, which turned into a flamewar about firearms and politics.

These types of posts are rarely well received following traumatic events like the shootings of the past weekend, but they are more prevalent than one would expect.

Of note in this turmoil is the effort taken by SEJ to control the situation, they removed the offensive material, apologized to the readership and have allowed open discussion amongst their reader base on their Social Media outlets like Facebook. These first steps are crucial, as most readers will appreciate the opportunity to vent their frustrations and have them addressed personally.To anyone who is interested in how reputation management works, I would suggest following this event at Search Engine Journal

The post Example of Reputation Management from SEJ appeared first on 435 Digital.

You’ve taken the time to verify your local accounts (Google Plus Local, Bing Local, etc.), optimized your pages with pictures and complete business information, and you’re excited to watch the reviews roll in. Despite all of your effort so far, this is usually where things can get caught up for various reasons, including:

1. You have a hard time getting customers to review your business.

2. A customer reviews your business, but it’s a very negative review and not something you really want other potential customers seeing.

Asking for Reviews

Encouraging customers to review your business online can take some work, especially if you’re a smaller business without a massive client base. Here are some ideas to get started:

• Have your employees verbally remind customers to review you online, as well as providing them with some sort of written instructions on how to find your local profiles on the web (create an instruction sheet or include your local profile URLs on your receipts).
• If you send out newsletters to your customers, include a blurb about reviewing them online and provide the local profile URLs.
• Encourage them to write about specific examples of why they enjoyed your services (2-3 sentences). “They were awesome” isn’t very descriptive and won’t be valued as much by other potential customers reading your reviews.

Dealing with Negative Reviews

We’re often asked why a business should open the door to reviews if there’s a chance that a customer might post something negative and scare off other potential customers. The honest answer is this: People will talk about your business online whether or not you decide to be a part of the conversation. It’s a much better strategy to host the conversations and be able to respond to negative comments, rather than try to pretend they don’t exist.

When you see a negative review on a profile that you’ve claimed, you have several options to address the negative comment. The first step is to sign into the account that controls the local profile with the negative review. From this dashboard, you will find the option to respond next to the review. Now you’ll need to consider how you want to respond. Here are a few tips that we like to share with our clients:

• It’s usually best to let them know that you’re sorry that they were dissatisfied with their experience, but that you’re committed to excellent customer service and would love the opportunity to speak to them about whatever occurred.
• Take the conversation offline as soon as possible by providing them with a customer service email address or phone number.
• If you can tell that the review is completely fraudulent or that you’re being spammed by a competitor, you can usually report it to Google or Bing for review. Follow the reporting options that they display within the dashboards if you’d like to try and have them remove fraudulent or spammy reviews.

As with many aspects of digital marketing, some work is involved in paying attention to your reputation online. It’s easy to think that if you don’t create a profile on the local listing sites, you won’t have to worry about people saying negative things about you online. Unfortunately, it’s simply not true. Being a part of the conversation, monitoring what is said about you, and responding in a professional way is the best strategy in combating negative comments about your business online.

Ideally, you’d also be doing your part to build the amount of positive reviews posted to offset whatever negative comments might pop up. It does take some time, but it’s crucial to protecting the reputation of your business online.

The post The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Dealing with Customer Reviews Online appeared first on 435 Digital.

A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures.

The rate at which things spread on the Internet is jaw dropping.  Due to multimedia,  a meme can be a hyperlink, video, photo, drawing, hashtag, word, audio recording or something that hasn’t been invented yet. And because the Internet is primarily social, it spreads quickly via social networks, blogs, email, news sources or other websites.

In the past few weeks, we’ve had a great one — The Pepper Spray Cop. As you undoubtedly know, Lt. John Pike decided to pepper-spray protesters the Friday before Thanksgiving week.  Evident in the original video is his nonchalant sharp-shooting aim and the protestors gentle acquiesence on the University of California at Davis campus.  Other videos take issue with the editing and presentation in the original, offering a different POV. Social sharing network reddit is said to have been  the cradle for the Pepper Spray Cop meme’s genesis, and much conversation is still going on there, as well as formation of some incredible archives of Pepper Spray Cop Memetic Art.

Whether you agree with the Occupy movement or not, a memetic moment like this makes you sit up and take notice.  Here’s a link to a collection of art, videos and parodies curated by Antranik, Anto for short, who says his  “main drive for cre­at­ing and main­tain­ing this blog is for my friends.” It’s a pretty amazing collection. There’s also an interesting collection over at Boingboing.

Mr. Pepper Spray’s popularity is riding the bumper of another powerful meme. This one came in the form of a petition advanced by a 22-year old college grad, Molly Katchpole, who was a force that helped to bring  Bank of America to its knees over debit card fees.

Katchpole started her petition on Change.org, She says in this piece for the Guardian UK that as many as 40,000 people signed her petition in one day and ultimately 300,000 people supported her pledge.  Brian Moynihan, Bank of America’s CEO, was forced to answer her charges on national television, Katchpole says.

As to the Occupy movement, there’s much intellectual bantering about what it means, whether it will endure and what it could become.  In a recent piece on the Pepper Spray Meme, Nieman Journalism Lab wondered:  “It will be interesting to see whether the image’s viral life will affect [the] question of “what’s next” for Occupy Wall Street in the world of traditional media.“

We are looking for answers to the wrong question. In my observation, Occupy is unlike anything we’ve seen before because it comes to us during the social blossoming of the Internet.

Occupy is born from the Internet and acts like the Internet. Occupy is the Internet manifest on Main Street.  To say Occupy is predominantly social is not to say that it is not serious or powerful. It is to say that “social” is what it is about. It is about having a conversation about what is  important, what is essential in our joint public lives.

When two people meet at a cocktail party, our conversation is about understanding what we have in common so we can see whether we have ground to continue the conversation in a personal relationship. With Occupy, ground is assumed because that initial conversation has already occurred online and it is time to move onto the next phase of conversation.

Many on the Occupy frontlines come from  a background of  economic privilege under stress [you must borrow large sums have a college degree - but there's no jobs!]  they don’t see a way forward that makes sense. They are saying “Let’s get on with it!”as well as “What can we build together?”

Conversations like this are organic and necessary for moving into the Digital Age and they will put stress on old style organizations — note the initial blindness of leadership at  Bank of America.  Industrial age organizations that resist the evolution to the new social  both online and on Main Street will have much to catch up to later.

So rather than resist, it’s best to mind the memes.

The post What’s my meme? appeared first on 435 Digital.

Solis has been in technology public relations since 1991. He began working with message boards, communities and early blogs in the 90s and started his own firm, FutureWorks in 1999. In March 2011,  he joined Altimeter Group, a research-based advisory firm that says it offers “pragmatic strategies to help companies thrive with disruptive technologies.”

You can pop in on Solis blog, which includes a series discussing the concepts in his new book, The End of Business as Usual, or  catch his insightful TV series, Revolution, on YouTube.

Solis has written perhaps the best book on online marketing for beginners, Engage: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web.  The End of Business as Usual is targeted toward emerging leaders, those change agents who want to revitalize the culture of business around customer experience.

The End of Business discusses traditional consumers, digital consumers and connected consumers, those experiential curators who feel it is their work to share their experiences. I’d say I’m one of them.

Solis has 109,000 followers on Twitter and was among the first to announce Google+ brand pages. Check out the “Ripples” to below see how influencers shared his initial blog post, which in a way embodies his view of how the connected consumer influences others.

I talked with Solis about how his work has evolved from the marketing department to the C-Suite [CEO level] and what the rise of the “connected consumer” could mean to the future of business.

Q: How do you see the principles outlined in The End of Business as Usual spinning forward in the future?

A. From years of working with my own agency, I realized that if I kept working with marketers and kept innovation within the marketing department I was never going to make an impact within the business.  I had aspirations of reaching the C-suite to say “Look at what is taking place here.  If you could lead the entire organization in this direction, you would not have to spend so much time reacting to markets but you could lead them.”

This was after the second revision of Engage, which was my homage and farewell to all of my private resources going to the marketing department and the customer service dept.

Then I started writing “The End of Business as Usual’ and joined Altimeter so I could get right into the C-suite.

Q. What’s the thrust of the book?

A. The idea is to take the principles of everything that we are learning from social media — authenticity, transparency, engagement, peer-to-peer interaction — and develop organizational empathy. This the ability to take insights away from customer activity and behavior and not just measure sentiment, but instead feel empathy, and inform business direction in a way that would be actually meaningful and relevant.

That was the idea.

After spending time with my agency over 13 years, I realized was getting sucked into the technology aspects of it. And I realized that with every new technology and  every new network I was applying the same types of principles.

In the end, I realized that these principles are less about the technology and more about the sociology. I realized that what was taking place was a new kind of customer emerging,

It is clear that this connected consumer shares real world experience. This is actually an important  inflection point for me personally.

I didn’t even realize that I was that new type of customer.

Q. What are the three types of customers?

The book breaks customers into three segments.

There’s the traditional customer. They read newspapers and magazines, watch television and go to real world events.

Then there is the digital or online consumer, This is is the person who begins all their searches on Google. They are very comfortable shopping from CraigsList . They are fine with eBay and fine with getting information from websites.

Finally, there is this idea of the connected consumer. This is what the first half of my new book really centers on.

And, no, connected consumers are not just millennials. And, no, they are not just the young person with a cell phone. The connected consumer is a person who realizes the benefits of connecting to other people like themselves. Over time, I saw that how the connected consumer finds and shares information, how they make decisions, is fundamentally different from the other two categories of consumers. Very little is shared in terms of similarities among the three.

So, it’s not because of social media. It’s not because of Facebook and Twitter.  It’s because the connected consumer has created an egosystem.

The egosystem is the result of interacting in these networks. Connected consumers have created their own egosystems where they’re creating this online experience based on who they are, what they know and what they value.

The fuel to egosystems — the thing that keeps them vibrant — is shared  experience.  What this means, what’s really profound, what really struck me is that if I am planning travel or have another decision to make, as a connected consumer I am not going to go to Google first.

I am going to go to my social networks and see what people are saying. I am going to read social review sites and see what people are experiencing and see if I can make a better decision that way.

There’s an example in the book of researching an airline. If I were the connected consumer, I am going to search it in Twitter and Facebook.

In this case as an experiment, I took the search results feeds from Twitter and Facebook, and put it into Wordle, which creates a word cloud of the most commonly used terms. The word cloud that came back based on these shared experiences was incredible. It was full of swear words. It was pretty unbelievable.

So then I did a funny thing. I went to the website and set the company’s website URL into Wordle to see the word cloud and I compared the two side by side.  What I saw was this: Here is what the company says about themselves. And here is what the connected consumer is experiencing.  The disconnect between the two is the future of business.

Q. But what about sample error, maybe the folks who complain are unusual or not representative of the customer experience?

A. I love that question!

There’s a multiple that was used before the Internet. If somebody hates an experience bad enough that they write a complaint letter they represent an X multiple of people who feel the same thing but just don’t write the letter.

With social networks, if I am asking the question [about sample error] I might not be able to get to the right answer. The right answer is not about what the customer  represents and whether or not they are the mass customer experience. Instead the question is about how important they are to the business based on who they are connected to. To the extent these businesses touch people that is what is important.

The digital native and the traditional native are actually decreasing in number and the connected consumer is increasing in number. So the connected consumer touches more people, and the more people that they touch become people who touch even more people. I call this the concept of the audience of audiences with audiences.

Solis uses this photo by Mollie Sterling of her class at the Missouri School of Journalism to illustrate the audience of audiences with audiences.

But what’s important to takeaway is that I’m not saying that we have to disengage with the traditional and the online consumers. They are important.  I am saying that we have to engage with different kinds of consumers differently. We have to augment our approach.

So for example, ATT has to recognize that unhappy customers are shaping people’s impressions. They might not be so willing to go in with the ATT iPhone next year. Maybe they will consider Verizon and Sprint because they want a better experience.

It forces companies to be a little bit more transparent, a little bit more honest to maybe say things like, “We hear you,” and “We are working on it, because we want you to enjoy the experience. “

Saying, “What problem? What are you talking about?” “We are the number one rated network” doesn’t help the company.  Empathy, however, does help the company. And so does creating a culture within the organization that can encourage empathy and employee engagement and honesty and then innovation based on that honesty, once the customer sees the company has kept its word.

All of these principles tend to humanize a business and the connected consumer is not the only who is going to benefit from that, everyone is going to benefit from that.

Q. What’s to stop an organization from pasting over the impression that it is changing when it is not.

A. Now that I am on the business side of things, working in the C-suite, I spend a lot of time in change management. I help the organization rethink its approach to the culture, the philosophy, down to the mission and the vision. And I ask how do we bring teams together that will lead change because it is really bigger than any one person.

This is where the Occupy movement took off.

It’s not about Facebook and Twitter getting credit for bringing about revolutions, the Egyptian revolution, the Libyan revolution and now the Occupy Wall St.  movement. Really these networks are one of many catalysts for change. They are just tools.

At the heart of change is any number of  things: repression, oppression, depression. The zest for change — that’s at the heart of the revolution.

It’s that change is facilitated much more quickly and easily because of social networks. People will share and get together and do something about it.

At any moment. the Occupy movement could fall in anyone’s lap. Whether change takes ten years or whether it takes five years doesn’t matter.  Because what has to happen is change, or at least a semblance of change, because change is what people want.

People will vote with their dollars and with their decisions. That’s why I call it Digital Darwinism because anybody who is going to wait it out is going to fall victim to natural selection.

Q. Change takes time ….

A. It is sand through an hour glass.  It is a matter of timing. This is why I believe we are at a crossroads.

This book is not for the social media champion, that person within the organization who is going to champion Facebook and Twitter internally. They will lead some great campaigns. But this book is not for them.

This book is for the change agent. This book is for the person willing to rile things up. It gives them fuel to do so, teaches them how to align the right people in the organization and how to make the case, how to bring about change because it is the right thing to do.

The last half of the book is about and for the change agent.

Q. What specific advice do you have for these leaders, these change agents.

A. You are at a crossroads.

You are on one of two kinds of people. First, you are really interested in new media and how it impacts them. Then, you are a person who really wants to bring about change.

These leaders have the  strength, the passion and the tenacity to make it happen.

This is where you see the new Brian Solis emerging.

I spent many years inside organizations and I was not satisfied seeing really important evolutions and revolutions taking place in the business world or in real life and having these insights and recognitions stuck in the silo of marketing, marketing communications and public relations and, to a lesser extent, customer service.

I just said, “Enough! You don’t need me to tell you social media is important.”

For those who want to keep growing and keep going on the path and see this through, then let’s bring about real change in the organization.  Here’s your book.

If not you can stop with Engage, which is still the best book out there to help people do online marketing the right way.

Q: What does all this mean for the local business world in neighborhoods?

This is an easier story to tell. In your neighborhood you will find three different type of people to come to your restaurant.

One is the traditional – the word of mouth. Then you will have the digital customer. They will find you from a Google search in the neighborhood.

Then you will have the connected consumer and they will ask their friends in FourSquare or their geolocal network Yelp . They will rely on their social network to tell them where to go.

What happens next? Someone goes to your restaurant and they have a horrible experience. Then the online customer will find some traditional review sites and say: “Don’t go there.”

They you get the connected consumer – they will leave something on Yelp, they will blog about it, they might even say something on YouTube.

Whatever the networks they use, the connected consumer will leave eggs there because that’s what they do.

They feel almost like an experiential curator. They feel it is important and up to them to make sure that their social graf understands their experience. This is true for good experiences as well.

All these customers are important to your business and you cannot reach them all one way.

So the question is how are you reaching and engaging the connected segment.  In an example in the book, I talk about a chocolate shop that decided to take out print ads.

Oddly enough the print ad brought in 1 person and it cost $200. Foursquare brought in 24 customers in the first week.

The traditional and digital customer will find us the way they have always found us. But if we are trying to grow our business, we need to reach people where they are.

To be honest with you, Facebook is the homepage for a local busienss social web. Now it’s the place for the traditional and the digital customer. You can design Facebook to be your website.

That why I don’t drink the kool aid anymore. I get the why. Now show me the how.

The post Brian Solis: What the C-suite can learn from connected consumers appeared first on 435 Digital.

A few questions to ask yourself. Could your company be this radical? At this point in time, do you see value in these ideas? Or do these ideas sound crazy? Viewed on a spectrum of publicness from 1 through 5, where would your company place for each value?

The Radically Public Company would:

• Encourage all of its employees to use the tools of the public net to have direct and open relationships with customers – answering questions, hearing and implementing ideas, solving problems and improving products.
• Open up as much data as possible about its products and processes, including even design specifications, sales and repair data and customer feedback as well as provenance of the ingredients and parts it uses
• Become collaborative, opening up design, support, marketing, and even strategy, to its public, releasing plans and beta products in process.
• Possibly all but eliminate advertising, relying on customers to sell products for them.
• Reveal and explain everything it does with customer information, giving customers a simple means to opt in and out and to correct data.
• Make all customer data portable, letting us leave and take our information — emails, purchases, preferences, connections, creations, friends everything — elsewhere.
• Open its books, even its salaries, to public view.
• Operate under open standards. That way it could run more efficiently, using off the shelf parts and software, benefiting from others innovations.
• See itself as a member of an ecosystem more than as a conglomerate that wants to control all that it surveys.
• See itself as a platform or network, more than the owners of assets.
• Institute new kinds of governance. What if it had a constitution and a bill of rights that everyone — employees, customers, suppliers and executives— could rely on.
• Have a CEO who is the leader of something more than just a company: perhaps of a community, a movement, a mission?

Let me know what you think.

The post Public Parts: Rules for the Radically Public Company appeared first on 435 Digital.

Cmp.ly makes it easy for a brand to signal the presence of a material connection — payment of any sort— between itself, bloggers and other digital producers through a system called iconic compliance. Using Cmp.ly,  a brand sets up an iconic tag  at the beginning of a social media campaign and then invites its influencers to participate. All social media elements materially connected to the brand running that campaign — from Tweets to blogs — clearly signal the degree of their relationship — from promo to sponsorship — by using the appropriate icon. Consumers will see immediately whether a blog post, Tweet or video is materially connected.

Cmp.ly was created as a solution when the FTC updated  its guidelines related to testimonials and endorsements Oct. 5, 2009, extending them to the digital sphere.

Industry observers say the FTC update  was past due.

“The FTC has not done a terrific job of protecting consumers,” said Joe Cappo, who was a publisher for 20 years at Crain Communications, and who now consults and teaches at DePaul University, Chicago. “There are no rules to govern all this stuff. “

“When a media becomes as important as network television, I think someone needs to step in and set up the ground rules. “

“I believe that a lot of bad information creates the demand for good information,” Cappo said. “There are too many bloggers who don’t care, who are just doing it to make money or to make trouble. Can we regulate it? It would be very difficult.“

The FTC update caused an uproar among bloggers at the time. Some felt the Internet rules  stomped on their rights to free speech and they criticized the rules for being impossible to implement.

Internet marketer and social media guru Chris Brogan responded  to the FTC by calling out to bloggers to provide voluntary full disclosure.  Brogan’s marketing company specializes in developing social media marketing campaigns for brands. At the same time, a blog disclosurepolicy.org was launched to help bloggers  develop their own full disclosure rules – the site has not been updated recently.

“Traditionally journalists had certain ethical standards to abide by, while Joe Shmo on the street — did not necessarily,” said Daliah Saper, a Chicago-based attorney at a recent session on the FTC rules at Social Media Week Chicago. “The traditional definition of journalists does not exist necessarily any more and that is why the new media guidelines were added,” she added.

But brands, not blogs, are the focus of FTC scrutiny and the solutions developed by Cmp.ly meet FTC regulations exactly, said Ruth Wagner, VP Sales/Shareholder for the company who was also present at the Social Media Week session.

Wagner says cmp.ly is the only commercial solution available and that it is at the vanguard of a move toward transparency and full disclosure.

“The adaption of social media transparency and cmp.ly are identical. “ she said.

The FTC has indicated it will be increasing its watch for brands that are engaging in deceptive practices. In one recent case, Legacy Learning Systems was required to pay the FTC a $250,000 penalty and is subject to monthly audits for 20 years. Other cases include Reverb Communications.

On its website, Cmp.ly says it has three goals:

Simplify and standardize regulatory compliance and disclosures so businesses can contribute to an open, transparent marketplace and build trust with consumers

Enable companies of any size to meet regulatory and disclosure challenges in an efficient, cost-effective manner

Provide consumers with a simple way to recognize and understand business relationships, affiliations, and marketing practices

For brands, the first two goals ease operations under FTC guidelines.

From my perspective as an individual who uses the Internet to research products, the third is music to my ears. The lack of transparency on the Web has undermined the ethical fabric of all our transactions there. I simply don’t know who to trust and I’m not alone in that. Free blogging tools have been around for only ten years, but I shudder to think what the blogosphere will look like in another ten without some oversight.

Using the Cmp.ly solution are LinkedIn, EBay, Hewlett Packard, Infinity, Ford, JC Penny and Ugg Australia, among others, Wagner said. Cmp.ly is also developing solutions for the highly regulated financial and health industries.

While brands must pay to use Cmp.ly, individuals can use the cmp.ly system for free. In addition, Cmp.ly links provide appropriate social media analytics to measure the success of a campaign.

Although brands have found an exciting new marketing channel in social media, it’s time to slow down and refine  practices used in word of mouse marketing.

To my mind, tools like Cmp.ly could significantly quiet the marketing stream for consumers.

It’s getting very loud out there on the virtual continent that is the Internet. Some days I’d just as soon listen to a jackhammer as look at my email so clogged is it with email newsletters reciting the charms of something I don’t want. In its outermost public circle, Twitter is blatting out marketing messages that pollute my stream of must see information. Google+ is great for my more thoughtful friends – thankfully a little quieter than Facebook, where a feed now calls out at every tiny touch between entities – brands, friends, causes, colleagues and family. Give me some earplugs and a blindfold or better yet it’s time to turn off the Macbook and go outside.

This would be shortsighted, however, because the social web is here to stay. If we can all hold on, the next wave of disruption promises to offer some help for ordering this chattering assault into something resembling harmony.

I am on the lookout for tools that will help with this transition.  I think one such tool could be Cmp.ly.

If you know of others, please let me know.

The post Is squeaky clean for FTC next wave in social media branding? Hope so. appeared first on 435 Digital.

I recently presented at SES Accelerator San Diego, where I discussed how to use Amazon Mechanical Turk as an SEO tool to improve online marketing. Below is my complete presentation.

As part of my role at 435 Digital, I lead training seminars on SEO for both the public and private organizations. My seminars are constantly updated to include the latest SEO trends and strategies. To learn more about our SEO seminars, as well as our seminars on social media and web development, please visit 435 Digital’s seminars page. We will soon announce the dates of our first seminars for the public.

Questions or comments about my presentation at SES Accelerator San Diego? Reach my via Twitter at @BrentDPayne or email me directly.

The post Lessons from SES Accelerator San Diego: Advanced SEO tools appeared first on 435 Digital.

You might ask why you would want to NOT show up on the first page of Google. If negative information about you or your company exists, you’ll want it as far from the first page of Google as possible.

Let’s use a restaurant as an example. I’ll make up the name of the restaurant and call it Graziano’s Italian Eatery. Now, maybe when Mr. Graziano launched his Italian website with his wife they had a rough start. They miscalculated the demand for Italian food in their small Connecticut town, and Mr. Graziano didn’t account for the amount of help he’d need in the kitchen. Perhaps they also chose the wrong list of wines for the menu.

After struggling through the difficult first six months, they made the proper corrections. Now the Grazianos’ restaurant is the best establishment in Connecticut. Unfortunately, the reviews on Yelp, Google Places and a prestigious blog have already torpedoed the Grazianos’ restaurant into the abyss–at least online. This online negative reputation could be one of the main reasons newcomers aren’t checking out their restaurant.

So what options for reputation management do Mr. & Mrs. Graziano have? They have several.

1. Ask the webmasters of the sites with negative sentiment to remove the content. This usually proves to be less successful, but it’s always the best first attempt. I’ve found that some sites will remove the negative sentiment posts if there is justification to do so.

If the Grazianos were to write an email explaining how their restaurant had a rough start and why, a compassionate blogger or site owner MAY remove the content.

2. Reply with sincerity and solutions to negative sentiment. This one is pretty straight forward, yet it’s often executed poorly. Don’t make excuses! Own the mistake and admit it, but also use the opportunity to explain what you’ve done to correct the problems. Be specific.

In the Grazianos’ case, they could mention how they hired additional staff and added new wines and other drinks to their menu’s alcohol section. The goal is to provide assurance that corrections have been made without making excuses. You want to convince readers to give you a chance despite the negative sentiment.

3. Positive sentiment injection. There are several ways to create positive content about you or your company. Some ways are perhaps more reputable than others.

The most honest way would be for Graziano Italian Eatery to simply provide quality food, service and alcohol selection, and then encourage their patrons to check in on FourSquare or Facebook, to leave a comment on Google Places or write a review on Yelp.com. Perhaps they also offer an incentive for doing so, such as 10 percent off of today’s visit to Graziano’s or a coupon for a free desert.  To tell customers of these incentives, the Graziano’s might leave cards at the tables or have the waitress hand them a card and explain the offer in person.

Less reputable ways would be for the Graziano’s to pay people to write a positive review or even less reputable, have their staff do so from their personal accounts. Where the Graziano’s choose to draw that line is a personal business decision that may have quicker results for some options but also higher risk.

4. Take legal action. Generally a letter from a lawyer requesting removal of the content (sometimes in the form of a DMCA request if copyrighted material can be cited as being infringed) can be quite powerful in getting negative content removed. At times things like  libel can be cited if an upset customer starts making completely false allegations that may hurt the personal integrity of the business owners or the Graziano restaurant itself (fraudulent activity, DUI, theft, etc.).

The goal is not to go to court but to convince the content owner/creator that it is easier to just remove the content rather than to deal with a possible lawsuit. Be careful how aggressive you are and make sure there is justification for your request. There may be some significant liabilities to your company if you were to file an unjustified claim against the content owner. Always seek the advice of a qualified attorney before taking such actions.

5. Request removal from the search engines directly. Google, for example, offers a way to remove content that may be dangerous if released publicly. This includes: social security numbers, bank account or credit card number, image of handwritten signature, adult site spamming your brand or name.

In this case, maybe a customer of Graziano’s posted a  photo that includes the handwritten signature of an individual (perhaps a copy of a signed meal check). Mr. or Mrs. Graziano could file a request with the search engines directly. They could also do so if some anonymous person left a comment in a blog with such content or a link to such content. It’s rare these situations would occur, but the search engines take such matters very serious and I’ve seen them remove content that falls under this category in a matter of hours.

This is just one example of how reputation management is powerful in protecting a company’s brand online. There are also many other ways reputation management comes into play.  Those alternatives include creating additional content to simply rank higher in the search results or the content page while pushing the negative sentiment to an area of the Internet where less people will see it. That, however, is less about ‘reverse SEO’ and I’ll save that for a later post.

Every Monday, 435 Digital will feature news and strategies from leading SEO experts. Check out our previous posts, including How a small business can use Google Analytics and How to make your local business rank higher on Google. You can also follow @BrentDPayne on Twitter for even more SEO news and tips.

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