This article looks at common mistakes made by businesses online, predominantly through social media sites, which can terminally damage their reputation and customer relationships.

Hard to Get, Easy to Lose

Your driving licence, the lover of your dreams, and your reputation are three things that the above heading could easily be linked to. Thankfully we are just looking at business reputation here, as the others could get a little messy.

Businesses invest thousands, if not millions, of pounds on an annual basis to build up their credibility and reputation as a major player in the industry. Then, in many cases, it falls down easier than a house of cards in a force nine wind.

What happened?

Greed

Perhaps “panic” would have been a better word to use here, although while panic was the cause greed was most certainly the effect. With the global financial crisis still going on, many businesses have looked to add value and revenue in the short term. All well and good, except for when targeting the short-term gain often involves the hard sell and annoying people, meaning that in the long-term a business is little short of in ruins. In fact, short-termism is perhaps the biggest danger to any business. This is especially true when the short-term view can lead an organisation into disreputable and questionable business practices.

There are many ways this can happen, whether you start using black hat SEO techniques or clutter your website with more advertising, for example, both are going to hurt in the long-term.

Carelessness

This one is particularly common, especially in the case of social media or other communications that can be leaked into the public domain. If you want to see a case in point, go to Google and type in “ocean marketing” one you have finished reading this. Although that guy was guilty of a whole range of things, it will help you to understand the point.

While social media advice articles always advocate the need to be human and avoid corporate speak in tweets, there are times when people get it wrong. In fact, some of it is linked to company employees mistakenly using the business account rather than their own. This has led to the embarrassing situation in the past of a globally respected charity posting tweets boasting of how much they had had to drink on a night out. While that situation was easily resolved, all too often similar things can happen where people are not as understanding and fail to see the funny side.

Personal feelings in company posts is another killer, especially when frustration and the dreaded red mist takes over.

Avoid it at all costs.

Bough SEO are an established search engine marketing company based in London, specialising in taking start-up companies from launch to profit.