Online Reputation Management - What every business should know!

I just had this client-from-hell bad mouth me online. Do people read these reviews? Is there anything I can do?

That’s an e-mail I just received from a client. As we’re sponsoring a free webinar titled “ Online Reputation” on Wednesday, February 2nd, I thought it very timely. If you read my last Blog you’d know that people really do read those reviews. People are constantly talking about you whether you realize it of not. So, what should this client do?

First of all, he is doing one very important element of Reputation management – namely monitoring to see what people are saying about his company. However doing manual check on Google Places is not enough. There are a number of tools you can use depending on your level of technical and marketing expertise, however the very least everyone should use is Google and Yahoo alerts. They’re straight forward, easy to set up and they e-mail you every time someone mentions the keywords you’re tracking.

Step Two: Listen and analyze. It’s important to people that you’re listening. If there was something legitimate in their complaint, acknowledge it and talk about what you’re going to do to fix it. Recently we were visiting family in Seattle and they insisted on taking us out to a restaurant they loved and had found due to an excellent review on Yelp. (The Purple Café and Wine Bar in Kirkland) Unfortunately for a number of reasons, the dinner was disappointing. So, my sister did what a lot of people now do, she wrote a review in Yelp about her disappointment. Within 12 hours, she had received a telephone call from the manager inquiring further into the incident and within the week she had received a $35.00 gift certificate with his apologies. She is now, and continues to be, a huge, vocal fan of the restaurant. Look at situations like this as an opportunity to improve customer communication and customer service and often the person is so impressed they will write another review telling everyone about it.

Step Three: Influence. If you must respond directly, never, never bad mouth the person back! Do respond dispassionately with the facts. If the problem was legitimate, admit it and talk about what you did to rectify it. Everybody has a bad day and most people respect that, they just want to know they are dealing with a reasonable person. If you know you are not capable of doing that, ask your marketing department or online marketing firm to write it for you. We do this for many of our customers. It’s a great way to avert a crisis.

If you’d like to learn more about Online Reputation Management and Crisis Management then register for our webinar on Wednesday Feb 2, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 12:00 AM (MTN) / 10:00 AM – 11:00 (Pacific)

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