Planning a run for office? Learn how political online reputation management can help reach more voters than ever! Contact us today to learn more.
Reputation Management has always been important for politicians.
But in today’s hyper-connected political landscape, it can seem that managing your reputation as a politician is harder than ever, and maybe even impossible.
Political reputation management is a challenge. That has always been true, no more now than ever. But the ways to do reputation management have changed as well.
The good news is that as a public-facing personality, there are things you can do to guide and protect your public image that would have seemed like science fiction twenty years ago.
Marketing, branding, and reputation management professionals have developed powerful tools and techniques that can make a big difference for you.
At NetReputation.com, we deliver effective online political reputation management methods that can:
- Repair negative search results
- Grow your positive message
- Improve supporter engagement
- And mitigate negative messaging
The tools, techniques, and technologies we use to help business owners protect their brand images. It works for organizations of all sizes, industries, and areas of focus, and it can work for you.
Visit us online to learn more about how we can repair, bolster, and heighten your positive image today.
For our purposes here, we’re going to discuss what reputation management can do for politicians like yourself to gain and keep support, promote your causes, and win elections.
The Importance of Online Reputation Management for Politicians
You probably noticed that reputation management is very similar to public relations, or “PR.” We’ll you’re right, it is.
But reputation management is not just about PR, it’s about your digital footprint, your online shadow. It’s about how your image, as a public official or would-be public official, sits with online culture. After all, politics has always been downstream of culture.
Today, it’s downstream from Internet culture.
1. Protect & Promote Your Desired Image
As a would-be or acting leader, it’s your job to inspire and lead by example. If negative messaging is damaging your reputation, you can spend enormous amounts of time and money just trying to push back on it.
Our job is to do the pushing back for you, to target negative messaging and unfavorable commentary in a strategic manner.
All too often, just a single message can have a viral impact, and carry the weight of an entire smear campaign. That can be bad news for anyone standing on the business end of such messaging.
But the good news is that our methodologies enable us to locate and counteract such viral messaging before it becomes viral using the same methods we use to promote profit-driven businesses.
Business leaders trust us with their hard-earned money, but in politics, that’s far from all that’s at risk. They also trust us with the future of their organization, and so can you.
2. Drive Back Negative Messaging
Human beings and message boards have one thing in common, a limited bandwidth for information. In psychology, we refer to the perimeters of this bandwidth as primacy and recency.
In forums, the limitation some in the linear form messages appear in often called a “feed.” When a message appears in a feed or a comment section, it will retain a place of primacy as long as it goes unchallenged.
As we work to respond with solutions and positive messaging to negative posters and commenters, these actions naturally push other comments further down the stream. This is a secondary consequence of offering constructive responses, but it is a welcome one.
But there is yet another tool in our toolkit to achieve this goal. It’s called negative SEO, (NSEO). NSEO is a methodology that uses the same techniques involved in ordinary SEO.
But instead of using SEO to drive traffic toward a client target, NSEO can draw traffic away from sites and locations where messaging that harms you has a home.
3. Every Message Matters
Reputation management for politicians is a challenge, and every step we take, every click, every comment, every positive twist can make a big difference. You’ll understand why when we describe how we do this for enterprise organizations.
Our goal is to do this work for you so that you and your team can focus on doing the important work of leading and campaigning. We deal with online negativity so you don’t have to.
Online Reputation Management Strategies for Politicians
These tools and techniques have been developed to mitigate the effects of bad reviews and negative commentary for merchants online. That’s great news because it means the technology is proven. It means there are actionable metrics you can judge its effectiveness by.
It also means that we can use the lessons learned by reputation management professionals over the last decade and apply them to your needs.
The process begins with a reputation audit. Our professionals conduct an extensive survey of your branding imprint on Internet culture.
We pinpoint which sites, forums, social media pages, and video hosting site channels are most concerned with your career. Then, our social engineering experts move in and respond to achieve a number of goals.
For a start, we want to offer positive responses and solutions to individuals and groups that have complaints. The purpose of this is to give those who are not yet decided reasons to refrain from turning against you.
They will see the argument against your detractors and choose to support you or to remain neutral.
Then comes reputation repair
The next step is reputation repair. In this part of the process, we address the most far-reaching and effective arguments against your campaign with intelligent and rhetorically effective arguments against the points of your detractors.
Just as we would do for a for-profit enterprise, we actively offer realistic solutions from your administration that would address a commenter’s concerns.
Once we have our finger on the sites and domains where your reputation is being most affected and have engaged with your detractors in a robust and meaningful way, we expand our demographic narrative monitoring efforts.
Moving like a dragnet across the web to find and address any potential threat to your reputation, we search out and mitigate potential harm.
As mentioned above, part of the effect of all this work is to push negative messaging downstream, away from the top of pages, using NSEO to draw clicks away from your detractors.
All of this happens at the same time, and there are studies to prove it.
The Challenges of Political Reputation Management
While there are important parallels between political and commercial reputation management, there are some hurdles that politicians alone must face.
For a start, people are aware that politicians can affect their lives whether they support them or not- unlike commercial enterprises. Therefore, people are motivated to be involved either in support or opposition to you.
Second, you cannot choose who attempts to work against your campaigns. You have to deal with your challengers, whoever they may be. Your opponents are motivated on multiple levels to oppose you and stop you from taking or holding office.
They may have a direct or indirect financial interest, or hold a worldview that’s completely opposite of your character. They may have heard negative information about you that has motivated them to attack your reputation.
Most importantly, your political opponents will be sophisticated and have access to all the same experts and resources that you have access to. The only way to respond to these threats is to use equally or more sophisticated methods of defense and counterattack.
In today’s deeply tech-integrated world, online reputation management is an important part of the solution.
Whether they support you or not, the public, your opponents, and journalists are always going to be after your personal information and your data. Our team can help when they succeed in obtaining it, and sometimes we can even help prevent that from happening.
When a powerful or prominent news outlet turns against you, you need a political reputation management team that knows how to deal with the fallout. Sometimes news organizations can be leveraged by your opponents to focus negative press on you like a laser.
When this happens, NetReputation will work overtime to shield your public image.
Use Social Media
Social media is a great way to give the public the personal attention they crave and to use it to your benefit. We do the heavy lifting of managing your presence on social media.
Have a Strong Web Presence
With a well-crafted and SEO-strong website, you can absorb much of the traffic that might otherwise end up finding negative messaging about you and your career.
Use SEO & NSEO Best Practices
With the right keywords and phrases used in the right places, you can draw away negative attention from its target, and attract positive attention where your campaign needs it most.
To learn more about what professional-grade reputation management can do for your political goals and career, get in touch with NetReputation.com today. We have been endorsed by Bloomberg, Newsweek, and Yahoo Finance.
Our team of technicians and social engineering experts is standing by to answer your most pressing questions.
Want to learn more? Call us at 844-461-3632
by Net Reputation