How to Recover from a Personal Reputation Crisis

Last Updated on May 13, 2024

Understanding how to recover from a personal reputation crisis is essential to maintain a positive online image. You never know when an unexpected crisis or negative event will occur in your life. 

The study of PR crisis management originated in the 1980’s following the increase in public relations coverage of industrial and environmental disasters. Since then, this industry has evolved greatly with the contribution of social media, smartphones, and news coverage. 

Today, it takes less than one second for a mistake made to grow across social media sites. To minimize the damage, individual people need to practice crisis reputation management.

How to Manage a Personal Reputation Crisis 

Much like a corporate reputation crisis, individuals and personal brands can also face the negative effects of a reputation crisis. Having a plan to manage a personal reputation crisis is just as important for your own individual reputation. 

How do you know if you’re having a personal reputation crisis? It usually begins with one instance that snowballs and overtakes your online search results and social media presence. 

Some examples include: 

• Harassment Allegations 
• Malpractice Allegations 
• Fraudulent Claims 
• Negative News and/or Fake News 

Our personal reputations are catastrophic when a crisis strikes in connection to personal reputation and can affect individuals for years to come, even after the initial crisis situation has passed. 

Social Media Crisis Prevention

Unfortunately, social media accounts can often be a source that can damage your personal reputation. While social media is a great way to connect with others online, one bad post has the chance to reach thousands of people. Our best piece of advice is to stop and think about what you plan to post before actually sharing with your network. This can help you avoid making a bad mistake online.

Learn more about the do’s and don’ts of social media to avoid a crisis.

Personal Crisis Reputation Management

Hiring an online reputation management company is a great way to address a crisis or protect the business from a future crisis. During a crisis, all eyes are on the organization and every wrong step will be magnified. This means that a time of crisis is the worst time to complete reputation management on your own.

You are better off hiring a company that has experience with crisis reputation management to minimize damage. A reputation management company will use its experience and expertise with personal crisis reputation management to hit the ground running, using tools like social media, crisis communication press releases, and search engine optimized websites and blogs to re-shape your personal image online while burying negative stories and content online.

Benefits of Personal Reputation Crisis Services: 

Our social media managers will distribute an official statement across social media channels and respond to wall comments or Tweets by individuals to alleviate concerns. Our engineering team not only works to neutralize threats, but also helps to rebuild your personal reputation online.

Removal Services 

The first course of action when facing any sort of online reputation crisis is to remove the negative content if possible. Removing negative content directly from the source will immediately begin to aid the reputation crisis by eliminating the potential crisis-causing material and slowing any process of circulation on the web.

The quicker you remove the negative content the better, and working with a team of trained professionals like Reputation911 will ensure all material is removed from the source as quickly as possible, and avoid the potential crises entirely.

Suppression Services 

Sometimes there’s no way to remove content like negative news, negative reviews, or other results that come up when people search for you online. In this case, remediation of the personal reputation crisis is much better performed with suppression services. 

Suppression of negative online search results is performed by utilizing online platforms to address the issue firsthand, implementing your own online sources to outweigh any negative content, and “push down” and suppressing the negative links away from your Google results. The idea is to create more content that becomes much more powerful than any negative content.  

Ideas on how individuals can suppress content online:

• Launch a blog on Medium
• Buy a domain to make a personal website
• Create a Wikipedia page
• Join a social media platform and create a new account

What Makes Reputation911 Reputation Different?

Here at Reputation911, our trained professionals provide personal reputation management services, utilizing resources to prevent, manage and repair any personal reputation crisis. We work both internally and externally to manage your personal reputation, creating a custom plan to fully remediate a reputation crisis and protect your name online.

Our customer service ensures confidence to any potential customer during the stress of a reputation crisis. It pays to work with a team you can trust and get your questions answered in real-time. 

To take control of the conversation, rebuild or improve your online reputation, and be better protected from future crises, reach out to us today for a free consultation by calling 1-866-MY-REP-911.

About The Author

William DiAntonio

William DiAntonio is the Founder & CEO of Reputation911, a reputation management firm he founded in 2010 that has earned the trust of its clients for over a decade by helping individuals, businesses and brands control their online search results.