Nothing is more valuable to a business than its reputation. Careful research validates that a sterling reputation increases consumers' intentions to buy a company's products and services, recommend them to other people, buy a company's stock, and recommend the stock to other investors thus companies have to make sure that their reputations are well guarded and monitored from nefarious brand attacks.

Once a reputation is severely damaged by loose tongues, e-mail abuse, and internet fraud, it might take a company 2 years to recover from a reputation blemish and another year to make it sustainable. Companies that take for granted their online reputation are at peril. Once their brands are tarnished, brand integrity will be difficult to restore and conducting online business won't be done effectively.

Ripoff Report, Complaints Board, Pissedconsumer

Why are complaint sites so popular? What purpose do they serve? While complaint sites like Ripoff Report and Complaints Board are supposed to be very good because they warn consumers to be mindful of whom they are transacting with online, complaint sites are also notorious for alleged extortion.

Come to think of it, the complaints may or may not be true. Consider the number of people who can just easily use these complaint sites to thrash their competition, personal enemy, or ex-employers without being accountable for their accusations. The fact that these complaint sites are allowing freedom of speech without editing function or gatekeeping function is bad. The fact that Google ranks these sites highly is even worse. So what can you do to protect your company from these complaint sites?

If the report about your company is TRUE...

If what they are saying is true, then you should learn from the phenomenon coined "Dell Hell". Dell Hell came about when Jeff Darvis, a blogger, documented his bad experience with Dell Computers on his blog. In true blogger style, Jeff Darvis poured all his frustrations with Dell on his blog. Because Dell failed to respond to Darvis' musings and because Dell treated a blogger as "insignificant", several more bad customer experiences continued, as did the negative comments on the blogosphere. Later on, Dell's reputation got even sourer as Business Week covered the entire experiences of Jeff Darvs in print.

What happened to Dell was literally hell because Dell did not make an effort to pacify their whiners. Well, they did, but it was actually considered too late. A recent scientific study done by responsesource.com showed that Dell has sustained long-term damage to its brand image and that the cheerleaders for their poor reputation are bloggers.

If the mention about your company is negative but TRUE, then it goes without saying that you should send your side of the story right away. Do not underestimate any complaint no matter how established and popular your company is. Learn from the Dell Hell phenomenon and don't let a single blogger ruin your hard-earned reputation by ignoring their rants.

Make it seem that you are humble. Try as hard to genuinely seem sorry and are interested in sorting things out. Do not promise what you cannot do, but rather give what you can give. When done right, these things will surely make your company safe from a reputation downfall.

If the report about your company is FALSE...

If the mention of about your company is FALSE, then you should send the blogger (most of the time it is a blogger) evidence that they are wrong, nicely ask for removal or retraction of the particular entry and offer to keep them informed of future news about your company. You don't want to fight these bloggers by thrashing them back. You shouldn't stoop down to their level--the high road is definitely the one you want to take.

Keep negative pages out of the search engines

Preventing negative reports about your brand through honest practices is one thing and keeping more and more people from reading negative things about your brand is another. Once a specific complaint hit the first page of Google, then you are in trouble for you might be losing some potential clients. Imagine your potential clients doing a background check of your brand online just to see you have some ugly listings?--Not good.

What you can do, however, is knock these negative listings out of Google's first page to stop at least 95-percent of people from seeing them. You can do this through Internet Reputation Management. Some companies like BrandRevitalize specialize on Internet Reputation Management. But if you can do basic SEO on your site, then there won't be any need to hire an Online Reputation Management firm.