HOW TO MONITOR, MANAGE, AND IMPROVE YOUR Local Business ONLINE REPUTATION??
Hopefully, you’ve never had that sickening feeling when you self-Google and the top result is someone slamming your company, your brand or yourself.
And now it’s even more challenging as conversations about your company are taking place at a variety of social media sites–such as Facebook or Twitter–that don’t necessarily rank well at Google but can still influence your potential customers.
There are plenty of Web sites, applications and companies that will help you monitor and manage your online reputation…for a fee. Let’s talk about what you can do for little to no cost.
Note: when I talk about “company keywords” below I mean your company name, your brands, your personnel and yourself.
How to Monitor Your Online Reputation
There are dozens — if not hundreds — of online reputation tools, many with overlapping features. Here are a few good places to start:
- Google.com — Since many potential customers will Google your business, it’s important to see what they see. If you have a Google account, make sure you’re logged out so you see results that haven’t been colored by your previous searches.
- Search.Twitter.com — This is a real time search of what people are discussing at Twitter. Just plug in your company keywords to see what people are saying about you. You can even subscribe to an RSS feed of the results.
- Google Alerts or Yahoo Alerts — Get blog posts, news stories and more emailed to you that contain company keywords.
- Discussion Forums — If there are some popular discussion forums where your audience can be found, it’s important to at least monitor conversations going on there by performing the occasional search.
- Yelp, TripAdvisor and similar sites — Many people post their experiences with restaurants, hotels, and even doctors and plumbers to sites like Yelp or TripAdvisor. Find out what sites are popular in your industry and see what people are saying about you.
How to Manage Your Online Reputation
I want to be absolutely clear that this next section isn’t about how to obfuscate your online reputation; if you’re doing a really bad job out there, nothing in the next section is going to save your bacon. You should skip down to the third bullet in How to Improve Your Online Reputation below.
One of the best things you can do to manage people’s first impression of you is by “owning” the first page in Google for your company keywords, pushing negative feedback to page two or beyond. Here’s how:
- Search engine optimize your site. You should rank well for your company name unless 1) you have the world’s most generic company name, or 2) your Web developer didn’t know the first thing about SEO. Make sure you rank well for all your company keywords.
- Start/Build up your company blog. A blog will help with search, reputation, establishing your expertise and more. It also allows people to get to know you better, which can build loyalty and diminish animosity. In addition, a blog can take up more of those “page one” search engine results.
- Get involved in a wide variety of social media sites. Twitter. Facebook. LinkedIn. Plaxo. These social media sites and others can all help bolster your site’s search engine visibility and take up additional page one results.
- Post videos to YouTube. Google loves YouTube videos and often places them as page one results.
How to Improve Your Online Reputation
- Engage your fan base. Do customers send you complimentary letters and emails? You may want to thank them, and ask if they’d be willing to post something publicly on your behalf. Direct them to review you on Google maps, Yelp, LinkedIn or other sites that may be specific to your industry. Never create personas to defend or promote you. Companies such as Sony and Walmart have discovered the wrath of people who feel they have been lied to or betrayed.
- Negative feedback: engage or ignore?This is a difficult question to answer. If someone is posting factually incorrect information about you, it might make sense to calmly and evenhandedly correct that information. However, if you’ve got a crank out there it might make more sense just to ignore them.
You may also want to look at that person’s sphere of influence as a deciding factor. If they have few Twitter followers or a blog that attracts few readers or comments, the simplest answer may be to just let sleeping dogs lie. Never get into a flame war.
- Be a better company. You know, maybe there’s something to those complaints on Angie’s Listabout your staff’s use of foul language in front of their kids or the dozens of blog posts about how your skin care product turned people’s skin purple. The silver lining about online negative feedback is at least you can respond to it.
If it’s warranted, apologize for a surly waiter or a dirty hotel room, offer compensation and do it right below the original complaint. People can be amazingly forgiving when they feel you’re listening.
In Conclusion
Use monitoring tools to see what people are saying about you, and use a combination of search engine optimization and social media to make sure customers’ first impression of your business is a good one.
While the Internet and social media may give customers unfettered ability to gripe and complain, it also gives you the ability to improve and respond to their feedback. These conversations are going on whether you’re listening or not. If you truly want to improve your company’s online reputation, it only makes sense to listen and participate.
Reputation management
Reputation management (sometimes referred to as rep management, online reputation management or ORM) is the practice of attempting to shape public perception of a person or organization by influencing online information about that entity.
The first step in reputation management is monitoring references to the person or business, primarily through social media monitoring and carefully crafted search queries. Social media analytics and similar processes on search results help to deliver a snapshot of current public opinion of the person or business in question and then a campaign can be designed to address any problematic issues that have been revealed.
Public relations (PR) campaigns may be conducted to increase the visibility of positive opinions or to decrease the visibility of negative opinions. One common practice is the creation of positive content pieces about a business to counter negative organic content. A reputation manager posts positive pieces in sufficient numbers to make the negative commentary display less prominently in search results or on social media sites. They might also join conversations, for example responding to tweets complaining about a company with comments that they had only good experiences to report.
Although there are artificial ways to at least attempt to affect your online reputation, there’s no way to effectively create a false impression with any lasting power. You can choose what information to intentionally share online but you cannot control the conversation about you or your brand. 53 percent of adults follow particular brands online and 60 percent of users of social networking sites write reviews of products and services. Given the number of people willing to discuss real customer experiences — and especially negative ones — the only truly effective way to create a positive online reputation is through appropriate behaviour.
For individuals, the first and most essential step of reputation management is limiting what you make available online to information — whether images, video, posts or comments — that you are comfortable sharing with the world for the foreseeable future. For businesses, the most effective approach to reputation management involves promoting your company honestly, implementing customer experience management (CEM) practices and actively engaging with customers online.
The Definitive Guide to Online Reputation Management
There are a lot of misconceptions about online reputation management. Some people think it’s just social media monitoring, while others believe it has something to do with public relations, and still others literally have no idea how it can impact business and sales.
In this guide, I’m going to explain the role of online reputation management in today’s business and media landscape. Companies of every size can benefit from having a clear outline of its main concepts.
They Are Talking About You
Just a few years ago, the internet was very different. Companies were not engaging customers but just selling to a passive audience; people could not express their voice in a powerful way, and the overall communication landscape was very “top down.”
The situation has radically changed. Today, websites are no longer static brochures. User-generated content is a must. And regular interactions on social networks are vital to any business success.
No matter the size of your business, they (prospects, customers, clients…anyone and, potentially, everyone) are talking about you. They are tweeting about your latest product, leaving a comment on your blog, posting a Facebook update about their customer experience, and much more.
If you think you can skip this, or if you think you can make it without taking into account people’s voices, opinions, and reviews, think again.
