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Why preventive reputation building trumps reputation repair

If you work in any kind of business that requires you to deal with customers you know full well how important your reputation is. People want to deal with somebody that they can trust and they will research you to make sure that you are trustworthy. This is why you need to make sure that you have a good online reputation. If not there are things that you can do to fix it but it is much easier if you prevent the negative comments from appearing in the first place.

The biggest reason that you are better off preventing damage to your reputation rather than repairing it is that it is simply easier. This is true of almost everything, a little bit of effort to prevent the damage from occurring in the first place will save you a lot of effort in trying to fix it later. This is true with your reputation as much as anything. Once your reputation is damaged fixing it becomes a major job that is going to require a lot of time and effort, preventing the damage is much easier. In prevention-campaigns, we build positive buzz, build links to positive blog posts and keep your name 'clean' on the social media sites. When we have to repair a broken reputation, we have to be much more aggressive.

The other big reason that you are going to want to prevent damage to your reputation is that once it is out there you can't make it disappear. There are certainly things that you can do to fix your reputation but these are mainly about countering any negative comments that are made online about. However in most cases you are not going to be able to make the negative comments disappear. You can bury them under positive comments, you can explain your side of the story but the negative comments are still going to be out there and people will see them.

The more negative comments that there are about you online the more difficult it will be to repair your reputation. One of the great things about the internet is how quickly information spreads, unfortunately if your reputation has been damaged this may not be all that helpful. Once the negative comments start you should expect to start seeing more and more of them as people spread them around the internet and add their own negative comments. Once it goes viral good luck putting a stop to the negative comments. This is why you need to make sure that you protect your reputation right from the start.

Preventive reputation building is actually a pretty easy thing to do, it mainly involves putting a lot of positive comments about you on the internet and then monitoring it for negative comments. Obviously you are not going to be able to monitor every site to see if anything negative is said about you. However in general you only need to monitor the sites where the negative comments are most likely to appear. If any do show up you need to make sure that you address them by offering your side of the story and correcting anything that is not true.