Bad stories used to last only as long as it took someone to throw out their newspaper. These days, that’s no longer the case. Thanks to the internet, these stories have a much longer shelf life than they used to, and can bounce around and gain attention years after they originally appeared.

But what would that look like? Well, let’s look at Joe. Joe, of Joe’s Coffee Shop, once responded to an angry post on his company Facebook page with an angry post of his own. Other customers saw the post, which led to more angry responses. The dust-up went viral, with #nojoe trending on Twitter and a boycott being staged. Eventually, Joe apologized, but not before losing customers and several news stories about the incident appearing in local papers. Every now and then, someone stumbles across one of the articles, neglects to check the date it was published, and believing it’s just happened, shares the page online. Now, this has gone from a problem Joe had to deal with to a problem Joe continually has to deal with.

What should Joe do? If you find yourself in a similar situation, what should you do?

If you search for your company’s name on the web and you’re not happy with what you see in the results, you may want to consider reputation management. What that means is creating a strategy and a process designed to develop web content that tells your firm’s good stories, and then placing that content where it’ll be seen. Like crisis communications, you want to be proactive before there’s a problem.

We can help you develop other reputation management strategies as well. What these look like will largely depend on the specific issues you’re facing. We won’t lie to you. Some organizations face big problems and have to work hard to regain the public’s trust. And because these problems, whether large or small, can keep popping up, you should think of reputation management as a maintenance drug. It’s something you’ll want to continually think about and work on. We can help you do that.