You may have taken steps to establish a good reputation and keeping it that way. The steps above should generally help you, at least when it comes to how well any positive or negative reviews of your company rank when someone uses a search engine to look for your brand name. You may be providing high quality service, engaging in the conversation and updating your blog with high quality content as often as you can. These steps are important and they can help you with a tarnished reputation, but if your company already has plenty of bad reviews or negative feedback it can be a little difficult to get everything up to scratch and you certainly may not be able to do it as quickly as you would like.

Anyone can make a difference when it comes to your company’s reputation and, unfortunately, this difference may frequently be a negative one. When you stumble upon a negative review, you should follow the steps above and see if you can solve the problem. This is frequently all that is needed. Your customer may actually recommend the brand even more after you have solved his problem than he would have if the transaction had been smooth in the first place.

If you are unable to reach the reviewer, you may need to contact the website directly. You should know that review websites usually have a system in place for taking reviews down and it is important that you look at this information before you request for the review to be taken down. Your argument for taking the review down should be airtight and should take into account the website’s rules. For instance, many websites do not allow the same user to write several reviews. If you can find something, then you may be able to latch on to it and use it as a reason. Do not be demanding when asking for this and rather refer them to which rule the original reviewer may be breaking when making his comment.
It is always better to create a conversation than to leave things up that may be damaging to your company. If someone has a blog post with a scathing review and a big following, this may lead to decreased sales for your company, less people willing to give you a chance and, in some cases, the association of your brand with poor customer service. Reaching out to them may mean the difference between this blogger’s followers buying from you and spreading the word about your services or using their blogs to spread the first post that is a negative review of your company to their followers.

In microblogging communities, like Tumblr, this is a very powerful tool that works as word-of-mouth and could lead to your company become a trusted brand that people are willing to take a chance on again.

You need to remember that reputation management is not easy, especially if you do not have the greatest track record right now. It takes quite a bit of time and effort to get it right, and you need to be willing to put in the work of monitoring, replying and creating conversation. Even if you are at a point where you feel like you have resolved your reputation issues, you cannot let your guard down. You need to be proactive about what your company can do to prevent your reputation from being tarnished again.

If it seems like your reputation is too poor and there is nothing you can do about it, consider hiring an expert PR agency that focuses on reputation management. They will help you find the best course of action for your particular scenario and guide you in how to address anything that may come up. You should do this before you take legal action, since it really might be a misunderstanding and you could clean up your name without getting to this point. Your chosen agency will advise you on the best course of action for your particular case.