Just like real world – Building good reputation takes time and effort online too. The Internet is a permanent record of our past, and by design it never forgets anything posted online.
The negative aspect of our online world: as images, commentary, blog posts, comments, status updates and photos are constantly posted on the Web. Potential customers are increasingly using the web to research products and services. Bad reviews or complaints that turn up in a search can mean lost business.
Potential customers will run if they see negative reviews, regardless if they are truthful or not. Perception is reality, & having a good online reputation is critical to your success. If you don’t control your brand online, someone else will.
What negatively impacts your Online Business Reputation?
- Angry customers trash-talking your business can sabotage your good name overnight.
- Customer reviews are considered to be very credible, and people use both positive and negative reviews each day to influence their buying decisions.
- What if a competitor slams your reputation online by writing negative reviews?
- what if a customer wrote something in the heat of the moment that was not true?
- What if you have hundreds or thousands of happy customers, and one unhappy one – and the unhappy one is the only one who leaves negative reviews online?
How to defend your Online Business Reputation?
The following tried-and-tested tactics can help you get public opinion of your business back on track. Here’s how to stay one step ahead of a reputation crisis.
1. Protect your Brand Name:
Register your “username” as the first step to building your online reputation. Purchase all relevant TLDs(Top Level Domains names like .com, .net, .co). If you haven’t done it yet, register your username with these top 5 social networks:
More than 70% of the total social network traffic comes from these 5 websites. Brand consistency is the secret to brand success & Brand impersonation seriously hampers this. By registering on them; you are making sure that no one else can claim your name.
2. Make smart use of Privacy Controls & filters
Most brands don’t realize how their social profiles are getting indexed in search results or how they appear to users outside of their network. Most Social Networks have fine grained privacy controls; use the settings of each network you belong to.
Let us see how it’s done on the major social networks
Facebook By selecting “create a public search listing for me”; you can control whether your Facebook page appears in the search engines. Go to:
Settings > Privacy > Search > [select search visibility]
You can now also control the types of information displayed on your Facebook profile if it is indexed in the search engines.
Twitter
Twitter accounts are designed to be a open microblogging social network. Make the best use your real name as your handle and/or in your profile. Be very cautious about what you tweet unless you’re selective about your friends and make your profile private:
Settings > Account > [select “Protect my updates”]
LinkedIn
With LinkedIn you may choose which fields get indexed in search engines or you can turn your public profile off entirely. Find these settings from:
Account & Settings > Public Profile Settings > [select view preference]
MySpace
To manage MySpace profile to remain private go to:
My Account > Privacy > [select “profile viewable by”]
3. Setup Listening Posts
Set up “listening posts” to monitor online conversations about your brand, product, service or your own name. No mention is too big or too small. It doesn’t matter if you get a dozen or 1,000 mentions about your brand per week. Online Reputation monitoring is all about, keeping your ears open and your finger on the pulse to discover invaluable insights and opportunities.
There are three main types of discussions that you might choose to monitor for:
- Discussions about your brand
- Discussions about your industry
- Discussions about your competition
Which online monitoring tools to use?
Professional brand monitoring tools are integrated, single window, precise, and are better equipped to handle online reputation monitoring activities. Here are some FREE and user-friendly tools we’ve found for you to get started.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is powerful free online tool to track Web results, news, blogs, video and groups. Subscribe via email or through a feed for best results.
Twitter Search
Twitter Search makes it simple to search Twitter for any mentions of a particular keyword phrase. You can also search by location, dates, sentiment, links, a particular person and more. Subscribe to the feed for your search results.
Feed Reader
Set up a feed reader to help you view the custom feeds you’ll be tracking for your keyword phrases. Your reader can be as simple as a gadget on your iGoogle home page or a full feed service like Google Reader.
Yahoo Alerts
Set up Yahoo Alerts for free to track news by keyword, stocks, local news, feeds and more. Receive notifications via email, Yahoo Messenger or mobile.
Technorati
Subscribe to the search results feed and get notified of new mentions. Search Technorati to find mentions of your blog or specific keywords across other blogs.
Social Mention
Social Mention helps to track immediate conversations around a specific keyword. You can either subscribe to the feed, get email alerts or download the Excel file.
Naymz
Naymz is a “reputation network” that lets you create a profile and then invite people to vouch for you, earning you points and improving your “Repscore”. Once you sign up, use the Naymz Reputation monitor to find out mentions.
BoardReader
Track conversations across forums & message boards with BoardReader. You can refine results by date, from a particular domain and by relevance.
Q&A Tracking
Find who is asking questions about you, your company or a particular keyword. Most popular Q&A site is Yahoo Answers. Subscribe to the RSS feed at the bottom of the page to allow you to keep track of future mentions.
4. Get your hands dirty
It’s time to get social if you already haven’t done so. Just like real world – start finding your colleagues, friends, clients and business partners & like minded people. Get involved in their conversations, questions & answers, keep them informed of your life or business, etc.
Where to start?
- Personal sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace
- Professional sites like LinkedIn, Quora, Xing & Plaxo
- Corporate sites like BusinessWeek, FastCompany, & Crunchbase
- Review sites like Yelp, Google local, and Amazon
- Media sites like Yahoo Flickr, YouTube or Vimeo
- School-related sites like Classmates and Reunion
- Resume sites like Rezume, Emurse, and Resume Social
- Bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg or Mixx
- Popular relevant industry blogs
- Industry-specific social networks, forums & groups
- Local social networks, forums & groups
- Special interest or lifestyle social networks, forums &groups
5. Prevention is better than cure
Prevent early on than worry later. By using different social media management tools, & by responding to customer service inquiries, owning your negatives, building credibility and responding to criticism. Most reputation problems start because your customer wasn’t able to effectively communicate with your business or you in the first place!
Yes, use tools to get the job done
- Use Ping.fm to distribute tweets to multiple social profiles at once.
- Use tools like HootSuite and EasyTweets to manage multiple Twitter accounts.
- Use Disqus to track your comment threads.
- And, keep an eye out for SocialStream to aggregate multiple social accounts
- Use Atom Keep to update multiple profiles at once.
Invest in Customer Service. If you are on a tight budget; use tools like Suggestion Box or Get Satisfaction to help you do this FREE of Cost.
6. Own all negative channels
Would you ever though of purchasing the domain – your_company_name-sucks.com? Do it. By purchase negative domains yourself others can’t make a simple hate site and rank high on domain relevance(exact match keyword domain). Also create a FAQ section with all popular keyword phrases like “alternative to [your-product]”. By doing so; you get a chance to win your customer back by offering them a different version of your product or services or send them to a friendly partner’s site.
7. Build Credibility & Authority
Position yourself as an authority in your space. When you become an authority, the community is more likely to link to you, send business opportunities, refer you to the media, etc. Here are several ways to grow your authority:
- Most Important! Create a company blog or use wordpress & write regularly
- Start a LinkedIN group, MeetUp or TweetUp
- Participate in Q&A sites like StackExchange, Yahoo Answers or ChaCha.com
- Optimize your corporate profile; make it easy to reach the founders / management
- List your business in relevant local business listings
- Make small web videos about your product or company philosophy
- Write guest posts on popular industry blogs
- List your blog in relevant blog directories
- Conduct interviews with industry leaders on your blog
- Speak at industry events and/or conferences
- Get quoted in local, regional and national news
- if you are Donating to charity – showcase it on your blog
- Sponsor an event or conference & publish photos
- Receive nominations and awards
- Promote news-worthy information through press releases
Also register with quality rating services like the Better Business Bureau and security logos like Verisign, Thawte and McAfee Secure. And, give your users a guarantee (that you can keep), so they feel more secure in dealing with you online.
8. Respond to criticism
Once you know what negative comments are being made, how should you respond? If someone is genuinely upset or angry, contact them and try to resolve the issue. Instead of being defensive, its best to just apologize and win them back by issuing a refund or free products/services. In most of the cases; people just want to heard by the right person. So its most effective if this comes from a person of authority like CEO or Senior Managers.
A word of caution: Choose your battle ground carefully. DO NOT try to comment & post on community boards and complaint sites. Things can get lot worse there. Twitter & Facebook are the best social customer service platforms.
What’s the bottom line?
- Improve visibility of positive mentions of your brand or company.
- Deal with criticism head-on to eliminate it if possible, or conceal it.
- Remain vigilant & pro-active.
Online Reputation firms can help businesses influence results on Google, but only the company itself can repair real damage to its reputation. The best piece of advice? Start thinking about damage control before it hits you. Don’t let all your hard work go down for the lack of Online business reputation management strategy. Act now!
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