Online marketing experts have spent a lot of time providing advice on managing online ratings and reviews for local businesses — but reputation can have much broader impact than your reviews in Yelp and Google. There’s hardly a business out there that doesn’t have an occasional issue arise with a customer. Ideally, you can resolve things before it reaches a point where a customer believes they can only get satisfaction through a public forum or feels they ought to warn people about your business. The internet has made it so the barriers between one customer and another are far reduced — word-of-mouth can now travel almost literally at the speed of light! But, if you’ve prepared and planned for how to handle online criticism of your company, the impact of one or two complaints can be much reduced, and you may be better able to respond effectively and rapidly to minimize monetary impact. You Can’t Opt Out Of Reputation Management For many small … [Read more...] about 10 Pro Online Reputation Management Tips For Local Businesses
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Social Media Reputation Management Dos and Don’ts
Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter can and should play an important role in your reputation management strategy. But if you’re using a tried-and-true marketing voice to amplify your message, you could be missing out on the “social” part of social media. If you shift your tone and let your humanity come through (in other words, if you “get real”), you could see some huge benefits. But, you’ll need to take care to handle that shift in the right way. Why Get Real? Most of us spent years in business writing classes, learning all about how to share a brand’s marketing message in a tone that was kind, but a touch on the aloof side. There is a time and place to get real, my professors always said, and when you were writing for a business, all manner of lowly chatter should disappear. Many people think shifting from professional-speak to human talk makes sense, especially in social media channels. For example, in a study in the Journal of … [Read more...] about Social Media Reputation Management Dos and Don’ts
Holiday Reputation Management Action Plan
A solid reputation management action plan that anticipates and corrects common problems is a present almost any manager would like to see underneath the Christmas tree. And if you start right now, you could pull together a comprehensive plan to get you through the holidays without a gaffe. Avoiding issues this time of the year is vital, as the Pew Research Center found November-December 2013 sales made up close to 19 percent of all sales that took place during the fall of 2013. That means sales during the holiday season could make or break your business. All of those sales are attached to customers, and every one of those customers has the potential to say nice things or horrible things about the work you’re doing and the products you sell. Clearly, when it comes to consumer exposure and the potential for consumer ire, there’s no more dangerous time than the holiday time. And that means you should start planning now, so you can put those plans to work before the consumers … [Read more...] about Holiday Reputation Management Action Plan
Facebook as Reputation Management Tool
Some 30 million businesses had active Facebook pages in 2014 says TechCrunch, and judging by what flies across my newsfeed, most companies are using this blue behemoth to discuss new products, promotional pricing, and philanthropic events. In short, they’re using Facebook a little like a newspaper and a little like a billboard. It can do more. By tapping into a few secret features on Facebook, or using features you’ve already heard about in a whole new way, you could help to boost the reputations of the companies you work with. And, since this work isn’t overly intrusive, you won’t feel icky at the end of the workday, either. Here’s my 3-step action plan. Step One: Sync Up with the Facebook Check In Back in 2010, Facebook programmers went head to head with behemoths like Foursquare, hoping to push people to check in to each and every single place they went. The service was GPS enabled, which made those check-ins really easy, too. As long as companies were … [Read more...] about Facebook as Reputation Management Tool
Your Guide to Reputation Management Blogging
Remember the good old days of the internet? You know, the times when you could just stuff a ton of keywords into a blog post and sit back smirking, knowing that you’d kill the SERP almost immediately? Those days are long gone, and we can thank creatures like pandas and hummingbirds for that. But that doesn’t mean blogging, as a whole, is dead. In fact, it’s a vital part of a reputation management strategy. Each post you write has the potential to bump something nasty that’s written about you or your company. But you will need to amend your strategies if you’ve been leaning on the techniques that worked during the Ye Olde Internet days. So here’s my plan. Let’s consider a fictional company that’s been writing blog posts in order to combat an attack about customer service. How should this company blog? We’ll take it step by step. Step 1: Pick the Right Topic Reputation management blogs tend to be keyword driven. You look for the … [Read more...] about Your Guide to Reputation Management Blogging