Corporations today may feel the impact of an impending crisis before news agencies report it, but only when they experience a loss of reputation will businesses begin to experience a measurable effect to their bottom line.
As demonstrated by various brand reputation management case studies, recovering from a reputation loss is about much more than the usual public relations efforts.
It will be determined by repairing the reputation of the company by removing any and all negative search results, suppressing or removing multiple instances of negative social content, and creating positive public sentiment through consistent online business and social media interactions.
How to Measure Reputation Loss
A company can detect a negative public relations incident within 30 minutes or less; therefore, they can react quickly to mitigate and respond to them before a narrative fully develops.
The limitations of the ability to suppress the negative aspects of a reputation are that removing a link from the first page of Google usually restores baseline levels of metric performance, though the ability to fully eliminate a negative link will require either a legal approach or action through a particular social platform.
Other types of business interactions have focused on the utilization of user-generated review platforms to bring their overall rating to an interaction level where they will attract more positive customer reviews and subsequently improve their foot traffic and sales through higher conversion rates.
The following case examples illustrate how leading reputation management agencies and technology platforms are currently addressing this type of damage to the reputation of a business.
9 Brand Reputation Management Case Studies and Tool Examples
1. Reputation Prime: B2B Software Company Leak
The B2B software company that suffered a leak saw a 25 percent decrease in the number of product demo requests received. The negative blog post received a lot of attention and began ranking #3 on Google as the cause for this crisis that caused a 25% drop in sales for this rehabilitation non-profit.
When analyzing brand reputation management case studies, we see that once it launched a campaign to suppress this post and create a whole bunch of new, positive content, the post fell off the first page of results to position #11 in less than four months. This led to an increase of 10% more requests for demos in addition to recouping the leads it lost.
This represents a total of $24 million in revenue, a swing of nearly 35%.
2. Reputation Prime vs. The Viral TikTok Attack Against Burger Bliss
As of the writing of this guide, a post has been made about the restaurant chain Burger Bliss following a viral video that went viral and reached 5 million views on TikTok in 24 hours. After this viral event occurred, the restaurant lost over a third of its rating, dropping it down to 2.5 stars.
Reputation Prime responded to this situation with a strict two-hour response time and created a positive counter-campaign generating over 10,000 positive posts for the 6-months following this event. Ultimately, regaining the 4.1-star rating of Burger Bliss.
This case exemplifies the importance of creating enough volume of content to combat a fast-moving social media attack.
3. Avita Group and Executive Search Suppression
Executives face numerous challenges that can put their careers at risk and jeopardize the financial stability of their respective companies. Avita Group partnered with a high-profile executive, using a campaign strategy over the course of three years and successfully removed eight negative links from the first page of search results.
In addition to removing these negative links, they pushed the primary negative article to position #27. The top 10 searches for the executive have consistently shown all 10 positions have not had some kind of adverse result in three years due to management related to the five most important keywords for which he operates.
4. NetReputation and Local Reputation Turnarounds
In managing volume-based accounts, NetReputation has focused only on creating first-page results (on Google, for example) for their clients in their first 90 days of operation. Through proprietary datasets, they have demonstrated how fast a local brand can come back to prominence.
An example would be that they helped a Michigan-based real estate agent increase their positive presence on Zillow by 60 percent in just two months. NetReputation also assisted in improving a local service company's overall rating from 4.1 stars to 4.7 stars by indexing 280 percent more positive content about their business.
When there is an overwhelming number of positive items to read about a local business, the negative reviews are pushed down the list of results.
5. Brand24 and Ralecon: Crisis Detection System
Speed is the best defense against poor publicity. To achieve that speed, Ralecon used Brand24 to monitor what was happening in the social space regarding their industry and track early warnings of negative sentiment.
They installed automated alerts within Brand24 so they could identify when something was about to happen and respond faster than before. In the past, their research period lasted from two weeks to two hours.
Most importantly for these brand reputation management case studies, their ability to respond to the negative sentiment quickly decreased their crisis detection from three days to 30 minutes. They also reduced the amount of manual effort required to capture "bad news" by 80 percent due to the time savings of being able to identify it before it spread.
6. Birdeye: The Growth of Moss & Co and IMCU
Multi-location brands cannot manually manage reviews. Moss & Co used Birdeye to combine reviews from 300 individual locations. They created an automatic system for requesting reviews by integrating the Birdeye software into their property management software to provide a consistent flow of newly updated reviews.
A similar scenario occurred when Indiana Members Credit Union used Birdeye to generate reviews from their 30 locations. In less than a year, more than 2,500 new ratings were received with a volume strategy.
This volume strategy has raised the Google rating with a trusted rating of over 4.0+ stars to nearly four and a half stars!
7. ReputationX and White Label Content Removal
Many digital agencies use quiet partners to obtain specialized services. ReputationX provides these services for other digital agencies as part of their long-term campaigns.
During their long-term campaigns, they remove 25% of negative content through outreach or policy violations and move the remaining 75% to page three of search results.
The continuous removal of negative content has resulted in $1 Million+ of revenue for ReputationX's agency partners.
8. Terakeet and Financial Services Asset Networks
Negative search results cause immediate drops in trust in the financial industry. Terakeet partnered with a large financial services company to mitigate reputational damage from negative search results.
They did not only rank the best two or three positive articles, but built a huge number of owned asset networks to completely take control of the top search results.
By creating a large number of company pages (with high-authority links), they successfully prevent the listing of false or misleading external sources of negative content.
9. DefendMyRep and the Bayesian Crisis Model
Treating every negative review as a true crisis can waste time and resources. The company DefendMyRep uses a statistical approach to determine whether negative publicity is truly damaging.
They monitor the sentiment of people and will declare a true crisis when average negative publicity exceeds two standard deviations from the norm. This metric triggers a six-hour response for the DefendMyRep crisis team.
The monthly price for handling a serious executive crisis ranges from $25,000 to $25,000. The costs of waiting too long to address the issue can quickly mount up to much higher amounts.
Return on Investment in Brand Reputation Management Case Studies
Case studies provide evidence that successful brand reputation management can generate a positive return on investment (ROI) with respect to star ratings and search visibility.
Increasing a local rating from 3.9 stars to 4.4 stars means far more than just a nice number on the screen. It represents an increase in potential customers clicking and visiting web and physical locations.
When a brand has complete control over the first 10 results in the search engine results page (SERP), it protects its sales funnel. A single negative article appearing in position one on a search results page instills doubt in potential customers.
As soon as that same article is pushed down the page to position 2 or 3, potential customers will lose their hesitation and will consider the brand.
If a brand is losing 25% of its leads due to a negative review, the monthly cost of using a company, such as Status Labs or WebiMax, costing $5,000 will easily pay for itself. The ROI would simply be the monthly agency fee compared to the amount of revenue lost monthly due to a negative search result.
Own Your Digital Story
Hoping to fix an issue after it occurs is not a legitimate business strategy. Brands must take immediate action to counteract, eliminate, or bury any newly posted negative information.
The agencies and tools described in the previous section show that it is essential to have a mechanical approach to monitor and manage your online reputation. In order to successfully deal with negative news or issues in a timely manner, companies need to monitor their reputation continuously; send automated reviews to customers; and have an easy method for removing harmful content.
By doing this, businesses will be able to manage any situation that arises quickly and effectively, while saving money on unnecessary cleaning up efforts.
Questions on Growth and Limitations
Why Search Suppression Campaigns Lose Momentum
A search suppression campaign creates an instant lift in rankings due to the optimization of existing positive search engine assets for the purpose of boosting organic search rankings. This spike in results is usually caused by a company implementing search suppression practices to improve rankings on the first page of Google search results.
The higher the ranking, the more likely it is that the link will be found by millions of people and cause a spike in traffic.
In order to move a negative link from the fifth position on the first page of Google to the fifteenth position on that same page, you will need to consistently create new, high-quality authority content. This is required in order to push the current negative link to the bottom of the first page until the negative link eventually reaches the back of the second page.
As seen in multiple brand reputation management case studies, if the agency creates no new content, the negative link will slowly begin to rise back up towards the front of the Google search results on the first page.
How AI Changes Response Times
Now that search engines are able to summarize the entire internet using an AI model, it is possible that if a negative news story breaks about a person or business, the search engine's AI will pull the negative article data into the direct answer section as a summary for that event or person.
Therefore, if you are only able to suppress the negative article from appearing on the first page of Google, it will not suffice because you must either remove the source from the internet completely, or in an alternative way you must flood the internet with verified positive facts about the company or person that created the negative article to override the summary from the AI model.
If you wait until after the initial response to millions of users about this story occurs, then you will not be able to have your source data corrected in time to make your company or person look credible.
Removing Content vs. Suppressing It
In order to be able to remove a piece of damaging data on a third-party website through the use of search engine suppression, there must be a clear violation of the applicable terms of use for that particular website; there must also be either a legal order or a violation of copyright.
Typically, companies fall victim to the trap of spending weeks sending demanding emails filled with anger to website owners in an attempt to gain the right to remove their content without true success.
It is critical to understand the exact terms of service for the site or sites in question (e.g. Google and/or Glassdoor) to determine if the content violates any specific rule. If not, then you should immediately transition your funding into suppression instead of wasting further time requesting the removal of the content.
Why Centralized Dashboards Fail to Raise Ratings
A centralized review dashboard will only work if the review dashboard contains accurate local data for all locations. If a review request is sent to the customer via an automated system, but the customer data does not match what the location manager has submitted, then it is likely that the review request will be sent at the wrong time due to incomplete information from the location manager.
In addition, if the location manager does not respond to a review quickly, the customer may feel that the location manager is ignoring them, which can lead to a negative customer experience.
Therefore, in order to avoid this, a business must ensure that its review software is connected to its point-of-sale systems to ensure that the review request is sent to the customer at the time the customer completed the review.