Online Reputation Management

Online Reputation Management

1.Create A Presence On Any And All Relevant Web Properties
Your company should already have Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ accounts, at minimum. If you’re in a highly competitive market and vertical, you may need to be active on some additional social media sites, as well — there are dozens available, some of which may be specific to your industry.

2. Don’t Neglect Your Social Media Accounts
It’s important to build out your social media accounts. Merely having a Twitter, Facebook and Google+ account/page for your business is insufficient — you need to develop your audience on them, too. With ongoing development, you can build your social media accounts in order to interact with customers and to increase your influence and engagement scores.


3.Listen
When responding to online complaints or bad reviews, seriously consider that there may be some weaknesses in your process that need to be addressed — particularly if you get frequent negative feedback about a specific thing. Remember the adage that “the customer is always right”? Don’t be inflexible; come up with a creative way to give customers what they’re wanting without creating friction.

4.Apologize
If you or your company messes up, fails or otherwise does something wrong, own up to it — and make a genuine apology to those who have been affected.

5.Don’t Get Into Online Arguments :
It’s very easy to get sucked into this — but even if you’re technically right, you might lose out overall by just coming across as petty, harsh or unprofessional. Worse yet, you might actually be wrong… and once you get emotionally riled up, you could end up saying and doing things that damage your reputation. (For a dramatic example, read about the epic Facebook meltdown of a husband-wife restaurateur team.)

The best approach is to diffuse situations and take communications offline to try to reconcile. Be nicer in your online interactions than you even think you need to be. Your professional responses may win more customers than being “right” in an online disagreement.


6.Make The Investment
Reputation development requires an investment, both in time and money. Most small, local businesses are either ignoring proactive reputation management or they are doing it themselves, on a shoestring, and on an as-needed and as-they-have-time-to-do-it basis.