How to Clean Up a Bad (Digital) Reputation

Jason Ciment, is CEO of GetVisible, a consultancy and digital agency that builds websites, drives traffic to websites through search engines and social media channels, and provides digital reputation management services.

Most of the agency's 10 employees started their careers as professionals working in businesses other than marketing. Jason, himself, started as a CPA/real estate specialist in a big accounting firm. He went back to school to study law, worked a summer with a large clothing factory in Sri Lanka, and spent time in the NYC rag trade before he finished his law degree. What then?

Time to start a business.

Jason launched Magmall, an ecommerce business selling magazine subscriptions, in 1997, and dug into pre-Google search engine optimization. (Early Google became one of his clients.) Over the years, GetVisible added a new skillset every couple of years: service business website development, pay-per-click ads, social media services, reputation management, LinkedIn-associated services, and email marketing. Each time the company decided to offer a new service, it hired someone who already had the needed expertise and introduced them to the organization's philosophy and its Assessment Toolbox Methodology, a means of discovering a client's customers and where on the digital landscape they are to be found.

Jason admits that the company is relatively small. Leveraging limited assets is important. A big question and challenge is always: How can they stretch a dollar and produce a higher ROI with a lower cost?

A few innovations . . .

• GetVisible has never had a sales force. Jason feels that salespeople focus on sales; he wants to focus on client outcomes.
• GetVisible uses a what Jason refers to a "transparent contract," a flat fee, six-month contract that, rather than tallying up a total of separate service, targets producing a client's desired results and itemizes how the client's money has been allocated.
• The agency implemented a simplified wireframe process to increase WordPress site development efficiency, promote intra-page symmetry, and get early client involvement and buy-in.

Jason believes a website needs to answer 3 questions: : What is it that you do? Who do you do it for? Why are you better than anyone else?

Get Visible builds healthy online branded Google and Bing search reputations for its clients. But, what can be done when a company gets damaging listings, bad news, or bad reviews?

There's the clean way and the not-so-clean way of removing someone's "bad news" from the internet. The "not clean" way is to actually try erase the bad thing that is damaging a client's website, not an easy thing to do. The clean way? GetVisible creates a flood of "good news" content for its clients. This more current information pushes the bad news down the page. Good news won't make "the bad stuff" disappear completely, but the bad stuff will become obsolete and irrelevant.

Jason can be contacted on his company's website at GetVisible.com, or through his LinkedIn profile, where those interested can sign up for his "secret newsletter." His first book, I Need More Clients: Digital Marketing Strategies That Grow Your Business (Amazon, 2016), has straight five star reviews.