It’s a great day in real estate. You’ve just won a sensational listing, your team has been receiving excellent customer service feedback, sales are up, and your rent roll is growing. 

Suddenly, a colleague mentions they’ve noticed some damaging comments about you and your agency on Twitter.  A disgruntled tenant is making wild accusations, and nightmare of nightmares, Google has indexed the Tweets and they’re already ranking above your company’s website in Google’s search results. 

Panic sets in as you realize the commercial damage that is unfolding. 

What on earth do you do? You can’t delete the tweets. Nobody can instantly make your agency’s website leap frog the comments in Google’s results, and, as you urgently contact people for advice and they read the Twitter comments, Google notices the increased engagement, making the comments harder to suppress.

In a cold lather, you realise it’s now more about what you and your team could have been doing six months ago, than what you can do today to counter the attack underway.

With consumers embracing the power of social media and product review websites, they’re not holding back when it comes to legal concerns about liability and defamation. A sense of online impunity pervades the avalanche of negative commentary.

Tripadvisor.com has taught consumers how to choose hotels and vacations. Now, they’re choosing agents the same way. 

A quick Google of your name and company reveals whether there’s a track record of poor performance. Negative reviews can kill your chances with new customers stone dead. 

Websites such as productreview.com.au offer consumers a platform to freely criticize your services, yet charge agents a fee to respond. Google Places pages provide still more opportunities for negative commentary, and Facebook community pages can expose disputes and bad reviews to thousands of local customers within minutes.

With online profile management experts charging as much as $10,000 a month, agents need better strategies to protect and maintain the profiles they work so hard to establish. Fortunately, there are simple strategies that cost but a little time, and you can employ them immediately to build a permanent, positive record on the Internet.

Start by immediately launching or properly completing your personal LinkedIn profile. Of all the social media players, LinkedIn is the number one referrer of traffic to your website and is closing in on 5 million members in Australia. It’s quickly indexed by Google, is well known, and is the perfect place to collect and present positive testimonials about your service and track record.

When consumers think about hiring an agent, 79 per cent are looking for confirmation of your expertise and 88 per cent want to know you’ve sold properties similar to theirs. By asking satisfied customers to write testimonials, you begin building a professional record of all the things that you do get right. LinkedIn gives you the option to approve testimonials or not, plus you can organise the order in which they’re presented so the most compelling ones are positioned near the top.

By posting profile videos, testimonials and other property related content to your page regularly; Google will quickly increase the ranking of your page. Typically, a properly optimised LinkedIn profile will achieve page one Google search results within days. Then, if you are subject to a profile attack, you’re prepared in advance and the adverse comments will be seen in overall context by the fair-minded. 

A lengthy track record of satisfied customers will always minimise the effect of a disgruntled customer.

While there are many additional things you can do to protect your online profile, LinkedIn is your brass plaque, the foundation of your personal brand. Once you’ve established a profile for every member of your team, a LinkedIn company showcase page logically follows. 

So that’s profile management for beginners. For the more ambitious; those who want to own the entire first page of Google results associated with their name, consider buying your domain name, put all of your content on a personal website, join Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google+, then optimise your presence by linking all the sites together.

Finally, set up groups within Facebook and keep your posts professional at all times. Use your privacy settings and groups to separate the posts you share with family and friends from professional contacts. Remember though, nothing is truly private on the Internet and the more personal the views you share, the greater the chance you’ll miss a potential customer.

With due diligence, patience, and a pattern of requesting testimonials from satisfied customers, you can wrest an important element of control over your profile from the lawlessness of the Internet.