Whether you’re leasing out commercial or residential property, it pays to have online reputation management to protect your name from bad publicity which could affect business.
At some point, the inevitable dispute between landlord and tenant will arise for any number of reasons. There are many ways to settle such disputes; but unfortunately, some people think airing their grievance online is one of them.
Negative publicity can have long lasting effects on your ability to find new tenants if you don’t have the proper safeguards against malicious attacks on the Internet. As some landlords have found out, having a knee-jerk reaction to negative publicity can do more harm than good. It’s far too easy to be perceived as a bully trying to silence a tenant in the court of public opinion. It can even fan the flames of bad press so that an issue lingers instead of fading away into the background over time.
Likewise, attempting to have an offending post taken down is a tiring and often futile effort since information spreads so rapidly online. Bad news has never traveled so quickly as it does today with the popularity of social networking media like twitter.
The safest and most reliable solution to ensure that your and your company’s good name stays clear of bad publicity is to make sure the first impression people have of you is the image you want to project.
To do that, must gain control of the first couple of pages on the search engine results page (SERP). People who use search engines to look up a name will very rarely go beyond the first 2 to 3 pages of results. Anything beyond the third page practically doesn’t exist or is given less credibility. In fact, over the past few years, this tendency to rely purely on the top results has been growing and is now at the point where 92% of online research never goes beyond the first two pages on Google. Reputation management for landlords is all about controlling those first few pages on the search engines so that a casual search of your name reveals information you control.
But beyond being prepared for any negative publicity that might blow your way, you should also consider an interesting side benefit of online reputation management – promotion. By taking an active role in creating your public image online, you’re also promoting yourself and your business. Your name and brand becomes highly visible on search engines making it that much easier for people to locate and contact you in case they’re looking for a place to rent.