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Pre-emptive Reputation Management (PRM) Comes of Age

by Jeff Quipp.


Have you ever considered the possibility that you have within your power, the ability to prevent most negative stories about you or your company from reaching the first page of the main Google search results?

Its true!

Pre-emptive Reputation Management Dartboard - Protect Your Face From Appearing Here

It just requires some effort in advance. Such actions referred to as “Pre-emptive Reputation Management” (PRM) techniques, are designed to prevent negative stories from ranking high for key terms before they are even written. Actions taken after the fact to ‘remove or push beneath the fold or first page’ are referred to as “Reactive Reputation Management” (RRM) techniques.

Obviously, it is better to communicate with customers continuously to ensure that such posts do not appear. With this I agree! That said, I also think that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. Why risk the possible resulting damage when you’re not necessarily dealing with rationale behaviour or people?

PRM Steps:
In most cases, PRM techniques mean:

    a. identifying the term or terms that pose the greatest risk to the person or company
    b. ensuring that a number of other powerful pages rank for those selected terms
    c. maintaining and strengthening those pages continuously over time.

PRM Benefits:
By doing so, SEP calculations suggest that:

    a. roughly 90-95% of negative stories about a company or person can be prevented from appearing in the first page of search results for the given terms
    b. in the other 5-10% of cases where a negative piece does make it to the first page, it

      - either appears below the fold, or
      - disappears from page 1 of the search results much much faster that it would have without engaging in PRM

Reputation As a Balloon

If these calculations are correct, how can a company that has spent years building its reputation, not engage in Pre-Emptive Reputation Management? There is just too much at risk! . It just takes one really bad piece, and your pristine reputation can be popped like a balloon.

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As posted in Reputation Management on June 23, 2008.

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16 Responses: 11 comments and 5 trackbacks

  1. Jeffrey Henderson (3 comments.) Says:

    Hi Jeff,

    Thanks for the great post. We’ve been making a lot of effort in building awareness to the necessity of preemptive campaigns ourselves.

    www.doneseo.com/blog/preemptive-search-engine-reputation-management/

    I think we’ll see this becoming more and more common over the years, it will just take the right packaging to get it to click for people.

  2. Jacques SEOman (16 comments.) Says:

    So you’re saying that one effectively has to ID potential problem areas and build up a buffer of content / pages to shield against that. Interesting concept, although few people will be able to easily identify potential troublesome areas in their operation. The exercise will actually help to ID potential problem areas in one’s operation, and enable you to address these before they become real problems.

  3. search agent (4 comments.) Says:

    Reputation management is certainly a very important and relatively new feature in the internet world. Now you guys are talking about preemptive Reputation management, wow.

    Fascinating article

  4. Comparison Shopping (16 comments.) Says:

    Why not be more positive? Why not do everything possible to stay with the highest of reputations? One fights fires only when there is a fire. Take such precautions as humanly possible to prevent a fire from taking place.

  5. Marketing Man (20 comments.) Says:

    When I read your heading I was quite interested to see what you had in mind, some ideas to what you do to pre-empt a companies or persons reputation.

  6. Graeme Thickins (1 comments.) Says:

    Pre-emptive Reputation Management (PRM)…
    great concept, one that deserves attention

    cheers,
    Graeme
    www.newmediawise.com

  7. Metaspring (39 comments.) Says:

    This is great for when you acted in genuine error and are trying to make amends for it. But what worries me about PRM, when it is misused to obfuscate the truth that could better highlighted in the public interest.

  8. Justin Seibert (1 comments.) Says:

    Jeff - good stuff. It’s definitely a concept organizations need to be aware of. Although it’s still baby steps for most…I’d be happy to see more just be forcefully reactive instead of ducking their heads in the sand.

  9. Utah SEO (105 comments.) Says:

    ya i see way too many companies only executing reputation management after it’s too late. it should be a part of everyone’s strategy to pre-empt issues from occurring. good post.

  10. Lily (7 comments.) Says:

    I consider that PRM is a perfect concept, we should spend time on

  11. Webconomist (1 comments.) Says:

    Excellent guidance Jeff.

    I’m partner in a Social Media consulting firm, and we’re launching a monitoring tool in beta shortly; MediaBadger.

    Monitoring for reputation personally and for a business is vital, and can be part of how a company manages its Corporate Conversations as a whole. Managing social media for public companies can also help investor relations.

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