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Your community, your company and your name could be at risk for the accidental critic that gets ahead of you in searches for information.

People are using the social media sites for TMI, (too much information), we know that already. Recently, I did a Twitter search for a small town in central Missouri. I wanted to see who was using Twitter and naming the community (claiming it) in their updates.

I found some scary surprises. “Smalltown” Missouri was only mentioned twice. One was a profanity laced update from a dissatisfied customer at a Walmart Pharmacy. The comment was picked up in a RSS feed and repeated twice by a competitive pharmacy resource. Her profane criticism was the only representation of that community that would show up in a Twitter search. “Small potatoes.” you’re thinking. Well, the pharmacy resource that repeated this ‘tweet’ is deliberately pulling negative information from the internet into their Twitter account. They don’t care what the comment is, they just want to put up ‘scandalous and sensational’ information to get readers to click on their link and find them. They are doing dirt because bad news sells. You can possibly predict the percentage who will see the original criticism and react. You cannot risk the possibilities for damage from the ‘scandal mongers’; you have to build your own reputation and set the pace.

Your best insurance against negative results in searches for you, your business and your community is ACTIVITY. When you blog or update on Facebook or Twitter about your business you are giving the search engines ‘fodder’ for their response to searches. Claiming your business on sites such as YELP.com and your local media sites which offer business listings is like having a billboard up that you can check, but do not have to keep rebuilding. Your customers can leave reviews for you on the local sites as well as at the local search sites we talked about last week – Google Business, Bing Local and Yahoo Local. Suddenly, you have evangelists marketing your business for you.

Your involvement in the online community steadies the online reputation of your decorative concrete engraving business.

• Consistent participation gives you the leadership and ownership for your business, name, and town.

• Because you are active, you will be able to learn almost instantly if someone is taking a problem online. Then, you can respond with the excellent customer service you learned about at Engrave-A-Crete University.

• Your activity will build search results that compete with the criticism and eventually come ahead of it.

• Your activity will speak about YOU; as the rest of the online community gets to know you, like you and trust you, they will be less likely to be swayed by negative criticism.

Hey, that’s YOUR territory; take some time this week and stake your claim.