Corporate reputation management is crucial because a company’s reputation can significantly impact its success, customer trust, and overall brand value. A good CRM strategy will allow a company to cultivate its public image, address negative issues, and influence public perception to build and maintain a positive reputation.

Understanding Corporate Reputation Management

Corporate reputation consists of 5 key elements. We’ll discuss each individually to help you understand why corporate reputation matters and why managing it is crucial to your company’s overall brand perception.

• Social Responsibility: Every company has an impact on its community, whether that’s environmentally, socially, or both. To keep a positive public perception, your company should be taking steps towards growing its community. These initiatives often involve giving back to the community through volunteering, offering career or mentorship programs, and even getting involved in local events. This is a great way to spread brand awareness while making a positive change.
• Vision & Leadership: The leadership team at your company sets the standard for everyone else. If an employee sees that their boss does not try to spread brand awareness or serves as a poor representation of the company’s values, how can you expect that employee to care? When leadership stays engaged in the company and sets high standards of representation for the company, the rest of your staff will follow. This puts a positive light on your brand and encourages a positive work environment where each team member is equally engaged in the company’s overall goals.
• Products & Services: Regardless of what type of product or service your company offers, it’s crucial that the company, as a whole, stands behind it. Listening goes a long way when something breaks. Don’t think one negative review is nothing to worry about; with the state of online reviewing today, one negative review can snowball into hundreds if you aren’t addressing the core issue. Take time to understand why things went wrong, look internally for the root cause, and take whatever steps possible to confront it. All companies mess up, but your audience will notice if you take accountability and steps toward change, which can help repair their trust in your brand. 
• Workplace Environment: Building a healthy, positive, growth-focused workplace is essential for any company’s reputation with its employees. Employees want to feel seen and heard, not just like another cog in the machine. Conduct anonymous feedback reviews often, take time to speak to your employees face to face, and facilitate growth opportunities and conflict resolution. Keeping the leadership team involved in these things will go a long way in showing your employees that the company cares about its people.
• Online Presence: In today’s digital age, your online reputation is at the top of the pyramid when it comes to influencing your brand’s perception. Keep tabs on your review sites (Glassdoor, Yelp, BBB), and check for consistent complaints or negative comments. If you see the same issues brought up repeatedly, this may be a sign that you’ll need to look internally for a root cause. You’ll also want to keep tabs on social media mentions, whether they are direct comments under your company’s posts or secondary comments where your name is mentioned but the company profile wasn’t tagged. Staying on top of these things will help you determine what your online audience truly thinks of your company and can even help you catch a potential reputation crisis before it grows.  

The How-To’s of Effective Reputation Management

Measuring Corporate Reputation

How do you gauge your company’s current reputation status? As you may have noticed in the section above, many factors contribute to the public perception of your company. 

Let’s start with your online reputation. Look into common review sites like Google, Yelp, and BBB. What are the star ratings there? The number of reviews? Common themes of negative reviews? These should give you an idea of what online audiences think about your company, services, or products. Next, look at employee review sites like Indeed and Glassdoor and ask yourself the same questions. Doing so will help you understand your staff’s perception of specific management practices, team members, and the company as a whole. 

Now, take a look at the search results for your company name. What type of news articles are you seeing, and do they speak positively or negatively about your company? Are these articles about your company, or are they focused on your competitors?

Lastly, take a look at your mentions and comments on social media. Although social media is online, it can help you understand what regular people think of your company. Perhaps they aren’t upset enough to leave a negative review, but many people will turn to social media to vent about a poor experience. 

Looking at all of this together can help you understand whether people see your company in a positive or negative light and also helps identify potential core issues that you and your leadership team should be addressing, both with the public and with your staff.

Improving Corporate Reputation

Now that you have a good understanding of your corporate reputation, what can you do to improve it? 

• Craft Quality Content: If the core issue for your company’s reputation is a lack of positive press and third-party articles, it’s time to start pumping out content. Content could include blog posts on a third-party site (separate from your company blog), asking news outlets to write press releases, building new, relevant profiles such as Crunchbase, or improving existing profiles like LinkedIn. As long as you prioritize quality over quantity, you can create well-optimized content. After sharing this content, you’ll want to track your company’s search results to monitor when and where this content is ranking. Promoting the new positive content can also help suppress any existing negative content.
• Managing Reviews: If negative reviews and star ratings are the main issue, you’ll want to build a team solely focused on review management. With everyone trying to go viral these days, it’s not uncommon for a company to be hit with a review bombing attack at least once. Having a team dedicated to responding to all reviews, facilitating customer service escalations, reporting reviews that violate guidelines, and requesting new reviews will prepare you for a review-based reputation crisis.
• Social Media Monitoring: Even if you think your audience isn’t on social media, it’s still a good idea to monitor various platforms. We’ve seen with many clients that it only takes one viral Tweet, TikTok, or Facebook group to launch a company into a reputation crisis. Monitoring your social media comments and mentions can help you keep tabs on your online reputation, identify common complaints or issues your audience has with your company, and lots of other helpful data. You should have at least one or two team members dedicated to weekly social media check-ins to help keep an eye on things.

At the end of the day, you’ll want to have a corporate reputation strategy and a team ready and capable of implementing that strategy. Don’t wait until your company is actively in a reputation crisis to build out these strategies; at that point, the fight to fix your reputation will be more challenging. If your team needs more support building out and managing strategies, check out our services, and don’t hesitate to reach out!

Addressing and Solving Reputation Issues

Common Reputation Issues

At Go Fish Digital, we’ve seen new clients face the same reputation issues time and time again. Some of the most common issues we come across include:

• Poor Review Site Ratings
• Negative Press 
• Viral Social Posts Gone Wrong 

Our clients are often overwhelmed by the negative sentiment or are confused about why they are receiving such negativity in the first place and aren’t sure about where to start. While each strategy is unique to the client and their reputation issue, here are some of the damage control strategies we typically provide regarding these common issues:

Poor Review Site Ratings

You’ve noticed that several of your business’s online review sites have poor ratings. How do you fix this? To manage online reviews, we recommend verifying their accuracy and appropriateness first and flagging those that violate review guidelines. 

You should also respond to all reviews, especially negative ones, addressing specific concerns to demonstrate attentiveness. Avoid generic responses, ensuring reviewers feel acknowledged. Additionally, consider initiating a review request strategy, adhering to site guidelines, as it can garner positive feedback but also requires proactive handling of any negative comments that may arise.

Negative Press 

A new article came out about your business, great! Except… it turns out to be not so favorable. What do you do now? One effective strategy we recommend is suppressing the negative article. Suppression involves identifying any positive content ranking in the SERPs just below the article and promoting it. 

Another effective strategy is creating new content or profiles on third-party sites to increase the number of positive URLs ranking in your business’s SERPs.

Viral Social Posts Gone Wrong 

A video or social media post is going viral online, and you begin seeing negative comments and reviews pour in for your business. However, you quickly realize the company mentioned in the video is not yours! How do you put out the flames? 

First, put out a public statement on all platforms that states your company is not associated with whatever the viral social post is discussing. Next, set up a team dedicated to monitoring and responding to comments and flagging any reviews left on your review sites that were not intended for your business. 

While each review site has its filters, they unfortunately don’t catch everything, so it’s up to you and your team to flag any reviews that violate the site’s guidelines. These two strategies are not foolproof, but they should help slow down the negativity and remove inaccurate negative reviews over time. 

So, how can your business avoid these common reputation crises? Well, it’s important to build out CRM strategies like the ones above before your business lands in a crisis. We’ve mentioned this multiple times because proactive, social, review, and reputation management strategies are the most effective way to shorten the length of a crisis and potentially prevent it.

Navigating Corporate Reputation Management Jargon

The phrases and acronyms surrounding corporate reputation management can be confusing, so let’s break down the most common terms you’ll find when reading up on CRM:

• CRM – Corporate Reputation Management: the management and monitoring of your business’s overall reputation and perception.
• ORM – Online Reputation Management: the management and monitoring of an individual’s overall online reputation and perception. 
• SERP – Search Engine Results Page
• SEO – Search Engine Optimization: the analysis and optimization of a website or webpage to increase the quality and ranking of that page. 
• CTR – Click Through Rate: the process of increasing the number of organic clicks and engagement on a specific link in the SERP. 
• Page Rank – The number assigned to each URL result’s rank in the SERP, typically in chronological order.
• Sentiment Analysis – The process of assessing each part of your online presence to determine whether it can be marked as positive, neutral, or negative. 
• Sentiment Score – A 100-point algorithm to help you calculate the overall sentiment of the first page of your business’s search results.  
• Social Listening – The process of monitoring and analyzing your business’s social media mentions and comments, to determine if your overall social media footprint is perceived as positive, neutral, or negative. 

Our Services for Corporate Reputation Management

Are you overwhelmed by the thought of taking on all of this work to manage your business’s reputation? Don’t sweat it, Go Fish Digital is here to help! The following services can be customized to each unique reputation situation, ensuring that you and your business are covered on all bases.

• B2B SEO
• Online Reputation Management
• Content Marketing
• Social Media Management
• Digital PR
• …and more! 

Don’t let a lack of knowledge or manpower prevent you from taking control of your corporate reputation. Our team is filled with experts in each of these fields, ready to guide you through each step, take on the heavy lifting, and get your reputation back into the green zone. 

Effective corporate reputation management (CRM) is vital for shaping a positive brand image. Understanding the key elements of CRM, how to measure your reputation, and learning which proactive steps you should be taking are crucial for long-term success. Don’t wait until your business is in an active reputation crisis to seek help. Contact Go Fish Digital today to proactively safeguard and enhance your corporate reputation!

Unlocking the Potential of Corporate Reputation Management is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

Related Articles:

• Online Reviews Management
• Search Suppression Services
• Yelp Review Management

What Is Online Reputation Management? 

Online reputation management (ORM) is the process of monitoring the mentions, reviews, and overall sentiment surrounding a specific business or individual. The goal of reputation management is to create a search engine results page (SERP) that features positive owned and 3rd party content, managed review sites, and optimized social media profiles, in order to give potential clients a great first impression. ORM also aims to help clients in addressing and responding to negative feedback, in order to improve business practices and resolve client issues.  

What Are The Benefits Of Online Reputation Management? 

Online reputation management has become just as crucial to businesses and individuals as word of mouth, perhaps even more so. A recent Go Fish Digital data study revealed that dropping from a 4-star to a 3-star review rating can result in a -70% decrease in consumer trust. 

But consumers and clients aren’t just looking at reviews these days. These individuals will look into recent news stories, social media comments, Reddit threads, and even watch non-sponsored video reviews before deciding to purchase a product or service. 

Additionally, if you or your business are hit with a reputation crisis, it’ll be much harder to recover from if you don’t already have your online reputation in good standing. These are just a few reasons why online reputation should be a top priority for you and your business.

How are SEO and Online Reputation Management Related? 

Online reputation management and SEO generally have two different goals. With reputation management, you’ll oftentimes be looking at ways to suppress negative articles in the search results. The goal in these situations is to decrease the visibility of specific content. ORM also looks at improving things such as online reviews or social media mentions, which SEO does not. 

With SEO, you’re generally looking to increase the visibility of owned-content. This is done through a combination of content, link-building and technical initiatives. SEO is a commonly used tactic when implementing an ORM strategy.  

Steps To Improve Your Online Reputation: 

1. Audit Your Digital Reputation

There are a number of sources that factor into your online reputation, including review sites, rich snippets, social media pages, and more. 

In order to narrow down the top priorities, you’ll want to first search your business name in Google and see what type of content appears on the first 1-2 pages. Take note of review sites and their ratings, social media pages, owned and 3rd party content, and any rich snippet features that may appear. 

Ask yourself the following questions: 

• Which review sites have below a 4 star rating? 
• Is there any negative press about my business? 
• What type of questions are being asked in Google’s People Also Ask (PAA) results? 
• Where is Google pulling its PAA answers from? 

Once you have a general idea of the sentiment of your business’ SERPs, you can begin by taking a deeper dive into the most popular reputation sources. These can include the following:

• Review sites: Yelp, Google, Trustpilot, BBB, Glassdoor, Indeed
• Social media: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Reddit, Instagram
• 3rd party content: Press releases, news stories, blog posts, opinion pieces, long form reviews

After you’ve reviewed your SERP results, you should have a good understanding of the negative, neutral, and positive content that surrounds your business. Any negative content or low review site ratings should be your first priority in improving your overall online reputation. If you’re still unsure about what your overall sentiment looks like, check out our SERP sentiment score calculation. 

2. Calculate Your Reputation Score

We’ve created a simple calculation to determine your overall SERP sentiment score that can be applied to each page (or every 10 results) of the SERP. 

We’ll start with a 100-point ranking system, where each rank is assigned a numerical value. Next, you’ll determine the sentiment of each URL in each rank, marking them as positive, neutral, or negative. For each neutral URL, you’ll subtract half that rank’s points from the overall score; for each negative, you’ll subtract all of the points from that rank. 

Once you’ve done this for each URL on page 1 of your SERP (or 10 total URLs), you’ll be left with an overall sentiment score. The higher the number is, the more positive your SERPs are. 

Calculating your SERP sentiment score can be a great starting point if you are looking to improve your online reputation but aren’t sure what to tackle first.

3. Define Your Online Reputation Strategy

Now that you’ve identified your overall sentiment score and what negative content you’ll need to target, we can start building out a reputation improvement strategy. Your strategy should be based on what specifically you’ll be targeting. 

For example, if you’ve found that your Yelp, BBB, and Google reviews have low star ratings, you’ll want to build out a strategy focused on gaining new positive reviews, flagging negative ones, and responding to customer complaints. 

If you’ve discovered several negative news articles or blog posts, you’ll need a content strategy focused on creating new, positive content surrounding your business name and related keywords. 

While your online reputation strategy will vary depending on your situation, below you can find some examples: 

1. Suppress negative articles ranking well in the search results
2. Improve Yelp star ratings
3. Remove negative Yelp reviews
4. Clean up social media mentions
5. Improve the rankings of branded pages in the search results
6. Improve your Glassdoor rating

4. Suppress Negative Search Results

You’ve identified the negative URLs ranking on the first 1-2 pages for your business name, but how do you get rid of them? One method is to optimize positive content ranking below the negatives, so that it has a better chance of outranking those negative URLs. Take these search results for “pete davidson” for example:

We can see here that there are multiple articles discussing a controversy between Davidson and PETA. The Rolling Stone result is ranking above the more favorable People result, so how do we get those to switch places? 

The first thing we’d recommend is to go in and make updates to the People article. Perhaps it’s a bit outdated at the moment, or there are new accomplishments in Davidson’s career that can be added. We can also update things such as the photos, meta description, and even title if possible. Changes like these send signals to Google that this page is fresh, relevant, and accurate. 

Next, we’d focus on increasing positive engagement to the People URL. There are several ways to increase engagement, which include sharing to social media, creating backlinks from owned assets, and optimizing the page content for Featured Snippets. All of these methods can help increase visibility and organic click through rate (CTR) to the positive URL. Once Google sees more positive engagement is going towards the People URL vs the Rolling Stone URL, it may determine that users value the People URL more, thus pushing it above Rolling Stone.

Apply this strategy to each positive URL that is ranking just below the negative results, and be sure to track your SERP sentiment score and URL ranks to catch any changes. It will not happen overnight, but eventually you should see things start to move around and the positive URLs rise above the negatives. 

5. Create Positive Content

Content creation is another great strategy for suppressing negative search results. However, you shouldn’t limit your content creation strategy to things such as your primary site’s blog posts or press releases. When working with clients to create new content, we look into any unclaimed social and business profiles as well. 

The first profiles we’ll look at are typical professional ones, which include Crunchbase, LinkedIn, and Inc.com. These sites typically rank very well for a business brand search, and provide positive, owned content regarding the business that’s separate from their primary website. 

If social media plays a significant role in the client’s business space, we’ll look into optimizing those profiles as well, including the bios, captions, and keywords. 

If you do want to create new blog content, try looking into posting that content on a microsite instead of your business’ primary website. This is because typically a business’ website already ranks in the top 10 when searching the business’ name, and any additional content on that site may not be pulled out as a separate result by Google. 

Microsites are typically one-page sites that have positive content that can rank independently in your SERP. You’ll want to make sure that any content posted on these microsites (or any 3rd party site) is unique from your existing content. 

For example, if you took a blog post from your primary site and simply reposted it on your microsite, Google would most likely see this as duplicate content and therefore not rank both. This would defeat the purpose of having a microsite. 

Content creation should be considered a long-term strategy if you’re hoping to keep those negative results suppressed. It will also come in handy if any other negative press comes out about your business, as you’ll already have your SERPs filled with fresh, positive content. For more ways to suppress negative content, check out our blog post on How to Remove & Suppress Negative Search Results. 

6. Find Third Party Contribution Opportunities

Another effective way to create positive content is to find third party sites that are completely independent of your business’ website. These can include sites like IdeaMensch, Medium, your LinkedIn blog, and any other niche blogs that are relevant to your business’ field. 

This new, positive content can be just what you need to suppress negative search results. Take Chris Orsaris’ SERPs for example:

Despite the New York Post article being 10 years old, it still ranks in Orsaris’ top 10 results. However, it appears Orsaris created positive content for IdeaMensch, which shot to the top of his SERP and outranked the negative article. 

As always, you’ll want to make sure that all your content on these various third party sites are independent of each other and of the content you post on your business website. Be creative with this strategy; you can write content about the CEO on IdeaMensch, thought leadership content on Medium, and content featuring tips or recent achievements on LinkedIn. Just be sure to remain consistent with posting amongst these sites, whether it’s once a week or once a month, you’ll want to show Google that these sites are frequently updated with valuable information. 

7. Generate More Positive Reviews

Before going out and requesting new reviews for any review site, you’ll want to be sure to thoroughly read each review site’s guidelines. 

For instance, Yelp has very strict guidelines when it comes to review requests, whereas Google is a bit more lax. 

After understanding the guidelines of the review site you’re targeting, the next step is to decide what review request strategy makes the most sense for your business. Below are a few options that our clients use for review sites other than Yelp:

1. Ask in person or over the phone after a positive interaction – “We’d love to hear feedback about your experience today, please take a moment to leave us a review on [review site]”
2. Create a new email campaign with links to your different review sites, or add links to your existing email campaigns
3. Add a QR code that links to a review site on your print media that can be handed to in-person customers or posted on flyers and other promotional materials
4. Share positive customer feedback on social media channels, with a link for other users to leave a review as well
5. If your site uses a chat functionality, request reviews after positive customer experiences

8. Remove Negative Reviews

Similarly to requesting reviews, each site has its own guidelines when it comes to flagging reviews. 

In order to have the best chance at getting a flagged review removed, you’ll want to only flag reviews that actually violate the site’s guidelines. If a review site’s flagging process has the option to leave additional context or messaging, try to point out the specific guideline that the review is violating. 

Here are some of the most popular review sites’ guidelines:

• Yelp 
• Google
• Trustpilot 
• Indeed 
• Glassdoor

Not all review sites send updates about a flagged review, so you’ll want to create a tracking sheet of all flagged reviews and check back in periodically to see which ones have been removed. Sites like Yelp and Trustpilot may also limit review flagging, if a review was already previously flagged or if you’ve flagged too many reviews at a time. 

Avoid appearing spammy to these review sites by sticking to the guidelines, flagging only a few at a time, and avoid spamming a single review with multiple flag requests. 

9. Respond To Negative Reviews

While it’s not always pleasant to respond to negative critique about you or your business, it’s important to always respond to negative reviews when possible. There are of course exceptions to this rule, as there are some negative reviews that are purely insulting, spammy, or make serious accusations that your business may not want to make a public response to. However, for the standard negative reviews, here are a few tips on responding to them:

1. Thank the reviewer for their feedback. Yes, even negative feedback can still be just as important as positive feedback, as it can give you an idea of possible changes or improvements you can make to your business. 
2. Address their complaints directly (when applicable). There’s nothing more frustrating for reviewers than leaving a genuine complaint on a business only to get a robotic, generic response that doesn’t acknowledge the issues. You should specifically mention their concern if possible and make it clear that your business takes any and all complaints seriously. 
3. Share customer care contact info. This can be email, phone, or a link to a contact form on your website. This allows the reviewer to decide if they’d like to follow up on the issue with your team directly, and provides them an avenue to come to a resolution. 

Below is a great example of a well done response to a negative review of Meow Wolf Denver:

Remember, responding to negative reviews is not just for the individual who left the review, but it also shows other users who may be reading the reviews that your business genuinely cares and considers customer/client feedback. By leaving unique responses that acknowledge the reviewer’s concerns with an offer for further contact to resolve the issues, you’re showing how much integrity and care your business has for its customers. 

10. Monitor Your Brand Mentions

There are several tracking tools you can use when it comes to monitoring mentions. A few of our favorites at GFD include Keyhole or SproutSocial for social media, Google Alerts for SERP mentions, and Ahrefs or Google Keyword Planner for keyword tracking. 

However, it’s important to note that while these tools are extremely useful, they may not capture everything. 

This is why you should have a team dedicated to manually monitoring mentions as well. They can do this by searching your business name and relevant keywords on various social media sites, comment sections, Google, relevant blogs or forums, and anywhere else you may have a presence. 

Remember that someone may be talking about your business without using your full name or tagging the business directly.

11. Proactively Manage Your Online Reputation

You don’t need to have an active reputation crisis to manage your online reputation. In fact, you’ll be in a much better position to handle a reputation crisis in the future if you already have your day-to-day reputation under control. This includes consistent monitoring of your online review sites, creating fresh content optimized for your target keywords, and tracking your SERP sentiment scores. 

These tracking and monitoring duties should be assigned to specific team members to check in on at least once a month. The easiest way to keep track of things is to create tracking sheets of data such as your month to month SERP sentiment score, social mentions, new content ideas, and review site ratings. 

If you know you have something big coming up (yearly sales, press releases, C-level staff changes, etc), then your team should keep an extra eye on things during that time. Even when announcing something positive about your business, there is always a chance that the extra visibility may motivate any unhappy parties to share negative sentiment online. 

If you know the current state of your reputation, and are actively monitoring for any new mentions or press, then you should have plenty of time to respond to and handle any new negative sentiment that comes your way.

Online Reputation Management Tools

Google Autocomplete API

When a person enters a query into Google’s search box, Google Autocomplete provides predicted phrases to finish that query. Most searchers can only see 4 out of 10 Google Autocomplete results, which does not provide a full picture of the predictions associated with that query.

The Google Autocomplete API online reputation management tool allows users to see all ten results, making it possible to strategize if any negative phrases come up in the predictions associated with your business, such as “scam” or “complaints.”

Complaint Website Search

Complaint websites are as they sound: websites for people to leave negative feedback about businesses. If left unaddressed, seeing these complaints can lead other consumers to avoid your business. Though you can look through the SERPs manually to find these reviews, there may be complaints on the web that aren’t ranking yet but may in the future.

This complaint search tool searches 40+ complaint websites to see if your site appears so you can tackle negative feedback head-on.

Yelp Improvement Calculator

Yelp is one of the top review sites currently on the web. These ratings can significantly contribute to the well-being of your business. Our Yelp improvement calculator lets you evaluate how your ratings play into the overarching average. Use the tool to determine how many five-star reviews you need to bump up your rating. If your goal is five stars, this calculator makes it easy to see how close you are.

Whether you’d like to be proactive about your online reputation, or you’re currently facing a reputation crisis, our Online Reputation Management team is ready to help. Reach out to get started today!

Related Articles

• How to Remove & Suppress Negative Search Results
• How To Repair Your Online Reputation
• How To Calculate Your Online Reputation Score
• How to Increase Your Yelp Rating Using Yelp’s 7 Content Guidelines
• How to Remove Negative News Articles From Google
• Preventative Online Reputation Management

The Ultimate Guide To Online Reputation Management is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

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• Online Reputation Management
• Online Reviews Management
• Search Suppression Services
• Yelp Review Management

How many consumers turn to online reviews before making a purchasing decision?

Around 98% of consumers answered that they are likely to utilize online reviews while making a purchasing decision. More than half of respondents specified that they are “extremely likely” to use online reviews.

Takeaway #1: Online reviews have become a large factor in helping consumers decide whether or not they are willing to make a purchasing decision. 

Do online reviews have any affect on consumers’ purchasing decisions?

Just over 99% of consumers answered that online reviews are at least “somewhat important” when making a purchasing decision, while 84% of consumers specified that online reviews are “very” or “extremely” important to their overall decision. 

Takeaway #2: When researching a product or service, consumers value the feedback in online reviews, and take that feedback into serious consideration before making their final decision.  

How comfortable do consumers feel about a product or service based on the star rating?

1025 surveyed said they would trust a 4 star product or service. However only 307 said they would trust one with 3-stars. This results in a -70% decrease in trust when moving from 4 stars to 3 stars. This number drops even further to less than 1% with a 1 to 2-star rating.

Takeaway #3: Dropping just one star from a 4 to a 3 star rating on a product or service can drastically affect a consumer’s comfort level when it comes to making a purchasing decision. consumers value customer feedback and begin to question their decision when seeing that the overall sentiment surrounding a product or service is less than a 4 star rating. 

Can age factor into the likelihood of a consumer researching a product or service before making a purchase?

Based on the data from our survey, age does play a role in the decision to research before making a purchase. Consumers 18-40 years old answered that they would research a product or service at any price point before making a purchasing decision. Conversely, over half of consumers 57+ answered they would not research before making a purchasing decision, regardless of price point.

Takeaway #4: Despite some older consumers not taking time to research a product or service online before making a purchase, it’s clear that the majority of consumers still rely on online reviews to help make a decision. For many consumers who took part in our survey, the price point does not matter as much, as they are interested in reading online reviews regardless of how expensive a product or service is. 

How many negative articles would it take to stop a consumer from making a purchase during their research of a product or service?

55% of consumers answered that it would only take 2-3 negative articles in the search results for them to decide against purchasing a particular product or service, while 2.6% said it would only take 1 negative article to stop them. 

Takeaway #5: Reviews are not just in the form of star ratings or Yelp listings. consumers look at the top ranking articles as well when researching a product or service, and seeing multiple negative articles can bring their research to a halt, ultimately deciding to not follow through with their purchase. 

Methodology

We surveyed 1,070 people to ask their opinions on online reviews and how much they influence their purchasing decisions. We analyzed this data to find key consumer insights based on their survey responses as well as key demographic information.  

As this data confirms, online reviews can heavily influence a consumer’s ultimate decision when considering purchasing a product or service. This means that it’s important now more than ever to keep your online review sites well managed and optimized. This includes responding to reviews of all sentiment, understanding each review site’s guidelines, creating a review request strategy, and more. At Go Fish Digital, our Online Reputation Management team is well-versed in online review management. To learn more about our services, contact us today!

3-Star Reviews Result In A -70% Decrease In Trust [Data Study] is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

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• Online Reputation Management
• Online Reviews Management
• Search Suppression Services
• Yelp Review Management

In recent years, we’ve seen that review bombing has no limits. From media like Marvel’s Eternals to local restaurants, it seems nothing is safe from review bombing. 

What Is Review Bombing?

A review bomb is an internet phenomenon where a large group of individuals, sometimes referred to as trolls, purposefully leave negative reviews on rating sites with the intent of tanking ratings of businesses, media, or individuals. These negative reviews often contain false information or misinformation, and come from users who have not had a personal experience with the entity they are reviewing.

Does Review Bombing Actually Hurt Businesses?

To some, a few fake or exaggerated negative reviews may not sound like a big deal. However, online reviews can make or break a business, and can be a deciding factor in whether or not a consumer wants to engage with that business. In a standard review bombing, especially when amplified by social media, there can be hundreds if not thousands of negative reviews pouring in at once. This can easily tank a business’s online ratings, even if the reviews are false, and negatively affect its online reputation as a whole.

How Can Social Media Apps Like TikTok Amplify Review Bombing?

It seems that there is a new viral video or post on social media almost every day. Sometimes this virality is due to the creator already having a large following, but other times a video can be so enraging, polarizing, or downright unbelievable that viewers share it like a wildfire. With mass amounts of views comes mass amounts of comments, allowing both information and misinformation to be shared very quickly. It only takes one comment to drop a store location, an employee’s full name, or a phone number to create a snowball effect that can lead to a review bombing. 

One of our ORM clients experienced this firsthand last year. A TikTok creator posted a video of a rogue customer at their place of work, and the video quickly went viral. Within the comments, someone incorrectly stated that the individual worked for our client, hinting that other users should leave our client poor reviews. As is typical across the comment sections of most social media platforms, TikTok isn’t known as an online environment where fact-checking commonly occurs. 

Once other users saw the name of our client, they rushed to Google, Yelp, and other review sites to leave negative ratings. Luckily, our client brought this to our attention before the review bombing got out of hand, and we were able to take action on the spot to put a halt to the attack, as well as publicly correct the misinformation. It also helped that the individual in the video did not in fact work for our client’s company as of present day, so the false reviews were even easier to remove.

Do Review Sites Allow Review Bombing?

Review bombing typically violates most popular review sites’ guidelines, as the reviews are false, hateful, or otherwise ingenuine in nature. Let’s see what policies are in place at the most popular review sites to combat review bombing attacks.

Google

According to Google, review policies were updated to better protect businesses after the company saw an increase in reviews criticizing businesses’ COVID-19 protocols. Google stated that once a new policy is implemented, “it’s turned into training material — both for our operators and machine learning algorithms.” Even with training, the algorithms cannot always flag every single review from a review bomb attack, so it’s important to learn how to manage and report Google reviews as well.

Yelp

Yelp followed in Google’s footsteps by updating their own review policies. Yelp stated that their moderators have a system in place to notify when mass amounts of reviews are hitting a business’s page in a short period of time. “If warranted, our team of moderators will investigate and may temporarily disable the ability to post as we place an alert over the business’s reviews.” Yelp will also make an effort to “clean up” the review page once incoming reviews have returned to their normal rate, aiming to preserve only the accurate and truthful customer experiences on the page. 

Facebook

Facebook does not appear to have a specific policy in place to prevent review bombing, but they do offer the option to disable reviews and recommendations. You can also gather all the reviews from the review bombing attack and report them for violating Facebook’s guidelines. 

Help! My Business Is Getting Review Bombed—What Can I Do?

While it may feel like everything is on fire, it’s important to take a moment to calm down and analyze the situation. First, try to identify the following: 

• Which sites are the negative reviews coming through? 
• Is there a specific location or individual who is being targeted within the reviews? 
• Which employees or managers have the login info for the targeted review sites? 

After gathering this info, follow these five tips to save your online reputation:

1. Prevent new reviews from coming in. Some review sites, like Facebook, have an option to temporarily disable reviews. If you have other social media accounts, you may also want to disable comments and direct messages to prevent those pages from being bombarded as well. In extreme cases, you may find it necessary to temporarily private your social profiles all together. 
2. Verify that the review bomb is actually meant for your business. Like the case with our ORM client, users incorrectly stated that the individual they were targeting worked for our client, and so our client was wrongfully attacked. Misinformation can spread quickly online, so it’s important for you to figure out the reasoning behind the review bomb and if it’s even meant for you or your business. You can usually figure out what the issue is based off of the reviews themselves, as users will often name a specific employee, location, or describe an incident they saw take place in the video or post.
3. Make a public statement addressing the issue (if appropriate). Whether or not to make a public statement should be decided on a case by case basis, as it is not always appropriate or necessary for every review bombing. If you decide it is right for your business to make a public statement, be sure to take the time to create a well-thought out and intentionally worded statement. Be aware that there is always a risk the statement can be used against you. In the case of our ORM client, it made sense to make a public statement saying that the individual in the TikTok does not currently work for the company. Our client also felt it necessary to publicly denounce the behavior of the individual in the video as well.
4. Make note of how reviewers are writing about the individual or incident that took place. TikTok and other social media apps tend to have a younger audience, so it can be easy to identify which reviews were part of the review bombing and which reviews are genuine. Some of the reviews from our client’s review bombing incident even stated that they “came here from the TikTok video.” Statements like this will be very useful when it comes to attempting to remove negatives, so keep an eye out for them.
5. Gather a team to begin identifying and flagging reviews that came from the review bombing. This team can be composed of trusted employees, friends, or family members with an account on the targeted review site. You’ll want to specify the date and time that the review bombing started to help narrow down the list of negatives your team will need to flag. You’ll still need to follow appropriate guidelines when it comes to requesting employees to take on this task (i.e. employees should not feel forced or in fear for their job security if they choose not to participate in flagging). Likewise, don’t offer incentives to friends or family for flagging a review, as this could negatively affect your reputation as well.

Under an active review bomb attack, making the wrong move can reflect poorly on your online reputation, so you’ll want to carefully evaluate each suggestion to decide what will be best for your business as a whole. 

Need Help With Your Online Reputation?

Our online reputation management team can help to optimize your review sites, gather new reviews, and give you the tools to fight future review bomb attacks. To learn more about what online reputation management can do for your business, contact Go Fish Digital to get started today!

Review Bombing: 5 Tips to Save Your Online Reputation is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.