There's been a fair amount of buzz recently about online reputation management and how to do it, but one thing I don't think anyone has really discussed is how a negative reputation can manifest itself online. After all, not all negative reputations are created equal. Sometimes it's a page that looks innocuous but contains mildly negative things once you click through, or sometimes it's a page ranking 3rd calling you a C**T......

So rather than talking about a negative reputation as if it's an abstract concept, I'm going to show you what this evil beast actually looks like in the wild. The list below is a sliding scale, with the most innocuous stuff at the top sliding down to "Oh my god, let's change our company name and move countries!" at the bottom.

No reputation at all

While this is at the top of the list, in some ways it's the worst of all. This is when you can't find any mention of the company at all online.

What you should do about it: Get a freaking web presence! It's not rocket science....

Negative reputation by association

This is the most annoying negative reputation in many ways, as your name gets tarnished simply by being associated with a negative story without doing anything wrong. This can happen with news stories where simply because your brand or personal name was somehow mentioned, you can have a story ranking for your name, which seems to implicate you with the negative event. Since news sites often rank well, all it takes is being mentioned in the wrong article and it'll rank for your name. Consider David Linley (edit - when I wrote the post this page was ranking first, but it's not there now! stupid Google) - who maybe isn't quite so innocent, but regardless of whether he is or isn't that royal, the search results have been messed up for quite some time!

What you should do about it: Do something else newsworthy and promote that instead. Often, while this page which ranks may have lots of links (if it's a big story), it often won't have your name in the title or header. Get a story all about you on the same website and promote that so it ranks instead. Depending on how strong the negative page is, you might need two of these so the negative one doesn't still rank indented.

Someone wrote something bad about you in a forum

Unlike the consumer complaints forums (see item below), regular forums can often rank as well for obscure queries. If a company does something bad (or someone *thinks* they had a bad experience) and they hang out in an online community, they're likely to post about it. Depending on how well optimised the forum is, these posts can often end up ranking.

Here's a quick example: a forum post about mfi on a PC forum and mfi's rankings.

What you should do about it: Promote positive pages above the negative ones. This should be at the easier end of the spectrum as these forum pages often don't have too much link juice.

Someone wrote something bad about you in lots of forums

Maybe they blog about it, post to consumer action forums. At this stage though, they're probably simply trying to spread the word - they're not trying to make something rank for your name.

Note that these kinds of pages can be legitimate (the search results for Zenith Windows are littered with these kinds of things) or fake.

What you should do about it: If it's just one person writing bad things about you then your best bet is to get in contact with them directly and sort the issue out. Engage with them - have a frank conversation with them and see what their problem is and fix it. Even if there's more than one person upset with you, fixing the issue is the best course of action. Fixing the issue and letting people know you've fixed it can often provide the positive content you need to outrank the negative listings.

A bunch of people hate you

They can create a website like www.who-hates-seomoz.com and put all their anger into it. Sometimes this will cross the line into libel (Sarah? Care to write about how far you can push that line without getting into trouble?), but if they do it sensibly and so long as they don't make too many false claims they'll be ok. This kind of site will often rank very well and is hard to shift.

Here's a couple of fun examples where there's some serious malicious intent. Firstly, screw you, fasthosts. Secondly, someone really doesn't like barratt homes!

What you should do about it: Engage and try and get them to take the site down. If this doesn't work you can consider moving the conversation onto a property you control, e.g., testimonials.seomoz.org (note how sub-domains allows you to gain more real estate in the SERPs), which might still be negative, but at least you can spin the content easier. Note that if done well, this area will start off negative as the people who don't like you will be commenting. By letting the conversation turn negative (but keeping the conversation on your site), you should be able to talk them around, engage, respond, and deal with the issues, and you'll find the conversation becomes more positive until you have a healthy and vibrant testimonials page.

You're a negative reputation magnet

Some people can't do anything right! Almost the opposite of the midas touch, everything they touch just seems to turn to shit. This could simply be a product of the industry you work in, however. As Will mentioned in his Whiteboard Friday video, politicians are constantly suffering attacks on their character as well as quite often putting their foot in it!

Need an example? Just Google any mid-sized politician or celebrity and you'll see what I mean!

What you should do about it: If you're a negative reputation magnet then you're probably getting a lot of press, both good and bad. Will covers some good tips in his WBF for just this situation.

Reputation Management - you're doing it wrong

Ok, something bad happened. It happens to everyone. Maybe you really did screw up - after all, you can't control all your employees all the time, and you can't always quality test every single product. What you should probably avoid, however, is making the situation any worse than it already is. Ways you could do this include, oh, I don't know - perhaps using the angry customer's email address to create fake online dating profiles!

How you should respond: Well, not committing fraud and signing anyone up to online dating would be a good start! But seriously, the best thing to do here is to engage the community head on. Apologise and be up front about what has happened - don't try and cover things up. Make steps towards fixing the underlying issue or the root cause of the problem. Once this is done then you need to engage with the community - go above and beyond the issues and make your users like you again. This takes time and can be a painful process but can be extremely rewarding. Look at what Dell has done engaging with their customers - it's paid them back many times over and actually won them a lot of fans.

On a related note - check out this list of the 5 most hated companies online for a nice example of how bad it gets when you really screw things up!

Disclaimer: To make the points in this article, I've had to link to some offensive and critical posts. I've used nofollow where appropriate and would like to emphasise that I am not endorsing the negative comments.

The title for this post comes from a great tune: Xploding Plastix - Treat Me Mean, I Need The Reputation (the dub version of the same track is worth checking out too!)