Protect Your Business Name and Reputation Online
Don’t be casual when it comes to your business name online.
This has been written about many times, but it still happens…
If you own a company and you haven’t registered the domain name as a .com and .net, a disgruntled customer or crafty competitor can grab it and defame your company name and reputation.
I saw it happen just this week. Now these people, who did not protect their business name online, have a huge (and they say totally false) complaint on what should have been their company web site, and there’s not a lot they can do about it without a large expenditure they can’t afford. Even if the site gets pulled down, it’s still in Google’s cache forever. It’s a reputation management nightmare.
If they’re available, at a minimum register your company name for the following (add hyphens if you have to):
- .com
- .net
- MySpace
Jeet, setting up the google alert is a really smart idea. I’m sure there are a lot of cases of domain names being stolen, but I’d have to say, it can’t be helped. We all need to be more proactive.
My company is registered at myspace, twitter and facebook. However, it doesn’t really help. Some other methods should be implied.
The best way to safeguard your reputation is to have quality content..
What do you think about register trade mark or patent with this name?
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I know for this type of theft, but there are many people who are not informed and this post will mean a lot of for them because it is very important to protect the name.
What about if you work for a reputable company, but customers have complained about you individually…… Even if your actions were correct and within the company guidelines but the customer still had a poor experience with the product, is the company responsible for your reputation?
Kay, thanks for the update on the variants of the core domain name a business should be owning. Seems to make sense that once your on-line reputation has good momentum, another cost of doing business is to take preventive measures with one’s brand.
This is so true! I ran across a company recently that does online marketing, but when i “googled” their business name, all that came back was scam reports and complaint reports. Luckily for me, other people were good enough to post their experiences! Needless to say, I didn’t do business with them. For an online company, they don’t do a very good job of keeping up with their online reputation.
This is very important – nothing worse than someone profiting from all your effort building a brand.
I cannot stress how much I agree with this blog post.
ESPECIALLY if you are doing business in the “Affiliate” space – that is, if you or a competitor are compensating for sales on a CPA basis through networks – you have Have HAVE to anticipate all kinds of shenanigans.
I would go so far as to set up pages on scribd, squidoo, YouTube, and so on… just because if you don’t, you might not like how an existing site with existing authority comes up under your brand in the SERPs.
Great work, Diva.
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