Online Reputation Management is a service that you would usually associate with a company that needs to hide bad reviews and complaints online. Since this is the most common reason a business would use reputation management, does it mean that all businesses with bad reviews and complaints are unethical or a scam? In my 6 years in this industry I would have to say NO. I have seen hundreds of good and honest businesses with perfect track records attacked online without warrant and without warning.
Do bad companies use online reputation management? Sure they do. But not all people that hire a reputation management company are shady. If a business is ethical and follows all the rules and regulations, ho do they get complaints and bad reviews? There are several answers to this question but the fact is, there is no way to make everyone happy no matter how good your intentions are or how hard you try. There will always be someone out there that does not like you for some reason or another.
When bad reviews happen to good businesses, the damage is sometimes far worse than if the complaint fell in line with other pre existing online complaints. Some businesses are expected to have online complaints, like a collection agency or pet store, these business come under fire for various reasons. Let’s take a pet store for example, they could be animal lovers and care for their entire “animal inventory” perfectly, but someone will always find something about them they do not like. A perfect example is a pet store in Ohio we worked for that had dozens of negative online reviews about how they sold mice as food for snakes. These complaints came from people that loved mice as pets or were against the idea of snakes eating live mice. This is not a bad business practice, after all snakes are pets and some of them prefer to eat live prey. No matter how well this store was operated someone still complained. It does not make them a scam or bad business, but it does qualify them as needing online reputation management.
Reputation management is not only used by companies that are rip offs and scam artists. A normal business in your own city or town may need this type of service.
If you find your business in need of online reputation management please consider using PositiveBoost.com one of the leading online reputation management firms.