Perception
is reality, and in today’s digital landscape, a negative reputation can be the
kiss of death for any business or brand. That’s why online reputation
management is such an increasingly important, field. As online search inquiries
and review sites come more and more to dictate a business’ bottom line it
becomes imperative for companies to play a more active role in guarding their
online reputation.
The question
is, how can companies guard their online reputation as effectively and
efficiently as possible? Manually Googling your business name day after day may
be somewhat effective, but who has time for it? There are better strategies
that companies can implement, such as the five listed below.
1. Automate
your monitoring.
The first
step is to ensure that your reputation monitoring is fully automated. The
obvious solution here is to set up Google or Bing alerts for your brand name,
as well as any branded products that you have, the names of your chief executives,
and more. You’ll receive updates in your email inbox whenever these terms are
invoked on the Web, enabling you to keep an accurate and up-to-date assessment
of your company’s online portrayal.
Google and
Bing Alerts are effective, but not necessarily perfect or comprehensive—which
leads to our next point.
2. Use an
array of reputation-monitoring tools.
There are
plenty of other online tools, most of them free, that you can use to monitor
your company’s online reputation. A few that are especially noteworthy include:
• A tool
called WhosTalkin offers a thorough evaluation of your online mentions,
including social media mentions, making it, in some ways, even more
comprehensive than Google Alerts. It also takes into account images and videos
that are marked with your branded keywords.
• Social
Mention is helpful for monitoring what users are saying about your brand on
social networks.
• Technorati
enables you to peruse your keyword mentions on blogs.
3. Offer
your customers chances to vent.
No matter
how vigorously you monitor your online reputation, there may come a day on
which your company is hit with a negative review. That can prove disastrous to
your online reputation and your bottom line.
One way to
avoid this is to provide your customers with more constructive ways to vent.
Tech support forums and easily-accessible contact forms through which your
customers can submit their inquiries or their concerns may help funnel some of
their frustrations or their dissatisfaction away from sites like Yelp.
4. Encourage
positive reviews.
Another
approach is to be proactive in asking clients to leave reviews on your online
review profiles, such as Yelp, Urban Spoon, or whatever else. You can’t really
stop negative reviews from cropping up, but you can suppress them and minimize
their impact by surrounding yourself with positive reviews. Reach out to your
best, most loyal customers and ask them to give their two cents.
5. Respond
to negatives.
What happens
when your online reputation monitoring endeavors reveal a negative comment or
review? The first thing to do is to take a deep breath and compose yourself.
Never respond in anger or in haste.
From there,
offer a humble and sincere response to anyone who has a legitimate beef with
your business, offering to make things right for that customer. If the negative
review is the work of a cyber-bully and is simply defamatory, however, you may
be better off simply ignoring it. Any response you offer is only going to fan
the flames and make things worse.
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