Your online reputation can affect everything from your personal to your business life. No matter what business you're in, dog groomer or hotel manager, if your personal reputation is reflected negatively, it's going to have an impact on your business.
Your personal reputation is your hotel
If you run a small hotel, maybe a bed and breakfast, then any negative impact on your personal online reputation can have an effect on your business as well. When someone searches for somewhere to stay — say they Google "bed and breakfast Melbourne" — they're not only going to pull up information about the establishment itself, but about you personally. If there are negative posts about you that come up on Google, it is going to impact your business as well.
The case of Lucy Reynolds
Nothing tells a story better than that of real life, and Lucy Reynolds is just the type of story that shows you why you have to keep your online reputation positive.
Lucy Reynolds was a successful Australian expat with a thriving tourist business in Florence, Italy. The Sydney-born lawyer had built up her business showing tourists around all the hot spots of Florence, the Uffizi, the Duomo, the Baptistery of John the Baptist, the Ponte Vecchio — all the places tourists travel to Florence to see.
Lucy was, of course, listed on TripAdvisor, the lifeblood of the tourism business. Her reviews were plentiful, and even more important, they were positive. Then it all turned very bad for Lucy.
The ugly side of personal reputation
One morning, out of the blue, she logged on to TripAdvisor to find that all her positive reviews had been pushed down, only to be replaced with not just negative soundings, but hostile ones. Overnight, her business was in jeopardy. She started getting threats from people who claimed they were customers.
"They said if they did not receive discounts or upgrades, they would damage us on TripAdvisor," says Reynolds. "It was blackmail."
An investigation into the matter found that the new Destination Expert, or DE, had through incompetence let in exactly the types of people they were meant to keep out. On a site with 50 million traveler reviews and millions of viewers like TripAdvisor, once the wrong sort gets in, it eats away at businesses.
How you can keep this from happening to you
While the case of Lucy Reynolds turned into a nightmare of legal battles, don't let the same thing happen to you. Take control of your personal and business reputation by letting professionals in internet reputation management make sure you are not blindsided like Lucy and so many others are every day.
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About the author
Phil Loyd has been writing professionally for over thirty years. He specializes in financial articles as well as general marketing content.
