Thanks to the increasing rapidity and availability of communication online, brands and customers are coming closer together. 2011 has seen the largest rise in social media users and social media use since social media was invented, and today customers don’t simply expect to buy a product from a brand, they expect be able to follow their favorite brands online and to be able to easily access them and communicate with them.

That means that companies can no longer afford to keep their customers at arm’s length. Gone are the days when managers and executives could ignore customer complaints and comments. Today, if your company keeps its customers at arm’s length and ignores them, you can expect not only to receive bad reviews online, but a barrage of bad comments on social media sites where people share and give recommendations. And those reviews and comments are now showing up in search results that can hurt your company’s image and bottom line.

That’s why one of the best ways to build customer loyalty and bring in new customers is to be nice. This is what I mean:

1. Respond

Before the social media revolution (back when information was slower and only a handful of people used the internet) companies didn’t have to respond to criticism on an individual basis. But today, not responding to bad information about your company online can be fatal. Bad reviews and ugly blog rants can prevent new customers from coming to your website. So you need to do the nice thing and respond.

Reach out to those that criticize you online and ask if you can help. Be sincere in your apology for the bad service or product they received and offer to make it up to them. If your online critics feel that you care about them, you’ll have a shot at turning negative reviews positive and taking down negative content.

This goes for social media as well. Monitor social media for mentions of your company and brand names, and reach out to those that ask questions and criticize you. Not only will you help turn those critics into loyal fans, but you’ll be changing the way they talk about their experience with your company to their friends and family, improving your reputation all around.

2. Give stuff away

This is not to say you need to give your products away for free. Rather, give away useful, cool stuff on your website. For example, make your product manuals available online for free. Give away pictures of your products for free. Give away widgets and blog badges. These things cost very little to make, but giving them away will encourage your customers to see you as an engaged and generous resource. As such, they’ll talk about you highly on social networks and they’ll link to you from their websites, improving your search rankings and your level of reputation management protection.

3. Provide useful content

Most companies that are web savvy nowadays know that a company blog is one way to boost your search engine rankings. But another way to show how nice your company is, is to create compelling and interesting content all over your website. Make your blog interesting and useful—something web users will want to link to. And make your website information rich and interactive. When you create a pleasant website experience for your customers, you’re telling them subtly that you care about them and want them to come back. What is your current website telling your customers?

4. Don’t be evil

The founding principle of Google is “do no evil.” That’s a great way to think about your company’s reputation online. Don’t implement practices at your company that you wouldn’t want implemented at a company you bought from or want to use. Your customers are not your enemies; they are your friends. And when you starting treating them like friends, they will be loyal to you and your brands. They’ll continue to buy from you and link to you—which means you’ll only increase your positive reputation online.

Being Nice

It’s cliché to say that corporations are people, but in terms of reputation management, the more you treat your customers like people—instead of numbers—the more they will respect you online and the better reputation you’ll begin building.

As a sales professional, it’s your job to get your customers to buy your company’s products and services. And your job is easier if customers come to you with a positive view of your company and your products. You are the face and the voice of the company and your customers will buy from you based on how well you treat them and how much they trust you.

But when customers come to you with a negative view of your company and its products—or have preconceived notions about how you’ll try and scam them into buying your products—you’ll have a much harder time doing your job. That’s one of the reasons reputation management should be a vital concern for all sales professionals.

Today, it’s easy for anyone with internet access to look up your company, find reviews, and read both positive and negative information about your company. And as a sales person, you should be concerned about the way your company is portrayed online. In fact, here are 4 ways a negative online reputation can affect your sales.

1) It scares away customers

First and foremost, if you have a negative online reputation (due to bad reviews, so-called “scam” reports, or negative online rants), the number of people who want to buy from you will decrease rapidly. Simply put: you’ll have less people coming to your store, visiting your website, or calling you on the phone.

2) It creates bad word-of-mouth

Negative information about your company online doesn’t just affect those who are searching for you. It affects the family and friends of people who have searched your company name online. If potential customers have already formed an opinion about your company based on search results, they are likely to pass that negative opinion on to others. Your online reputation isn’t just about protecting yourself from online attacks, it’s about strengthening your reputation online and off.

3) Customers are less willing to buy

Sales is a hard job to begin with, but when all your customers are coming to you with doubts about you and your company, it’s even harder. Even if they are still willing to buy from you after reading negative reviews, they will be more skeptical of your sales tactics and will want more assurances that they can trust you and your company’s products. All in all, with a negative view of your company, customers are much harder to sell to.

4) Customers are more likely to be dissatisfied with their purchase

Once a red flag has been raised in the customer’s mind, they will be more critical of the products they buy from you and are more likely to be dissatisfied with their purchase. Although you may think that returns are not your problem, each return results in a loss of profit and another dissatisfied customer who will share their opinion with their friends and family.

Reputation management is about more than simply optimizing a Google search for your name so you can get positive results It’s about building a positive image for your company—a trustworthy and positive image that instills confidence in your potential customers about the kind of service they will receive and the quality of the products you sell. Reputation management isn’t just the concern of the company executives; it affects everyone at your company. If you’ve been having a harder time selling, or you’ve had fewer customers than usual, do a search for your company online. You may be in need of some positive reputation management.

Although the sales team may close each sale, they owe a large part of each sale to the creativity and hard work of the marketing team. And today, marketing is both easier and harder than ever. Thanks to the rise of the internet and the high number of people online, marketers have tools and avenues open to them for contacting and interacting with customers that they never have before. Using strategies like search marketing with SEO firm in Melbourne and tools like social media, marketing professionals can decrease their budgets and increase their customer base at the same time. Marketing a unique business, why? Marketing is everything an organization does to build a relationship between the company and consumer. Marketing attracts prospects, prospects become buyers, and buyers provide profit. But marketing is more than just putting your business name out into the world.

However, there is also a downside. It is now easier than ever for individual customers to access negative information about your company online. And it is also easier for any dissatisfied customer to write an untruthful or damaging review of your company’s products or services and persuade other customers to shy away without even getting to know your business.

This ease of access to negative information about your company is the main reason your marketing department should be concerned about your company’s online reputation. But more than that, here are three reasons the marketing department should get involved in reputation management.

1. Customers don’t have to dig deep

As mentioned before, thanks to the ease of access to information in today’s society, customers don’t have to look very far to find out about your company’s reputation or be misled by an angry review on a former customer’s blog. In many cases, if a potential customer searches for your company name online and they see one or two negative results, they may never even visit your website—where you’ve put all marketing messages, ready to convert them. But by paying attention to your online reputation and employing a solid reputation management strategy, you can get as many people to your website as possible.

2. Customers read reviews

Did you know that when a potential customer searches for your company name online and they see negative reviews in the results, they are more likely to click and read the negative reviews first, before visiting your official website? Customers read reviews—especially bad ones. And they tend to believe them. If you have negative reviews showing up on the first page of a Google search for your company name, may help your business, being one reason why you should consider promoting your roofing business on google. So now is the time to look into effective reputation management strategies and push those negative reviews down.

3. Customers purchase on trust

If a customer doesn’t trust your company, they won’t buy from you—even if you have the lowest price. That’s why it is vitally important for you to remove any obstacle out of your customers’ way. When your customers are searching or you online and seeing negative content, the seed is planted in their mind that your company may not be trustworthy. But the truth is, you are. You just need to co a little clean up so your customers don’t get the wrong impression before they even learn more about you. We're the best lead generation company servicing the lehigh valley.

As a marketer, you are not just making sure your customers know your name, you are also building a brand as well as emotions and values associated with that brand. You don’t want a few negative reviews to destroy the image you’ve worked so hard to create. Take a look at your online reputation today and, if you need to, start thinking about reputation management strategies you can employ to safeguard your company’s reputation from all kinds of online attacks.

If you a run a company of any size that deals directly with members of the public, chances are you will eventually have a customer who—for some reason or another—will not like your service or products and decide to defame you online. In fact, you should count on it. And no matter if they decide to give you a bad review or write a lengthy rant on their personal blog, those negative comments can end up hurting your online reputation by showing up on a search results page for your business.

Although there is some content that you will never be able to remove from the internet because the site owners have made it impossibly hard to find any contact information for them. There are some instances where you have a chance at protecting your online reputation simply by contacting the customer, opening a dialogue, and asking for the comments to be removed (or changed).

If this has happened to you, and it is hurting your online reputation, here are a few tips to dealing with a person who has published negative comments about you online.

1. Be polite and apologize

It doesn’t matter if you were in the right and they were in the wrong. What matters is that they perceive that they have been mistreated or disrespected in some way. So, before you do anything else, apologize and be polite about the situation. Treating the customer with respect will go a long way to helping change their mind about your company. And when you are polite, you open a door toward communication, which will help you change their mind about your company and recant their comments.

2. Don’t argue

Although it may be tempting, don’t argue with the customer. They already feel powerless, or they wouldn’t have written negative comments about you in the first place instead of contacting you directly to resolve their issue. So don’t make them feel like you are trying to win an argument. That attitude will only add fuel to the fire, and you’ll never be able to remove the negative content.

3. Offer to fix the problem

Once you’ve been polite and created a dialogue with the customer—slowly rebuilding their trust in you and your company—offer to fix the problem. Depending on your business, you can offer to exchange their defective product, give them their money back, offer them extra goodies like free products or services, or offer to fix the problem in a way that only your company can.

4. Add value

If you really want to win over your dissatisfied customer and encourage them to remove their negative comments, go above and beyond fixing their problem. If they don’t like the product you sold them, offer to replace the one they have with a better model and give them another on top of it. The more you can do to go out of your way to make this customer feel like you are genuinely sorry and willing to do whatever it takes to make them happy, the more inclined they will be to help you.

5. Ask their advice

As mentioned before, many people post rants online because they feel powerless in some respect and think that they best way to vent their anger is online. Many times these people simply want you to listen to them and understand what they are going through. In all cases, seek the customer’s advice, so you can be sure to avoid these problems in the future. When you do that, you give your customers the chance to be part of making your company better. And this may be the most powerful tool you have in turning an enemy into an ally.

Reputation Management Strategies

Most bloggers will post contact information or a contact form on their website so you can get in touch with them easily. And many review sites will let reviewers send messages to each other. But in many cases you will not be able to contact the person who wrote the comments directly, and may have no way to contact them at all. Or they may not want to respond to your request to fix the problem for their own reasons.

In extreme cases when someone has published slanderous information about you or your company online, you can take legal recourse and eventually remove the page from the Google index. But this is very hard to do, and Google won’t remove any web pages considered slanderous unless they are directed to do so under court order.

This is why reputation management is so important. Although contacting site owners and reviewers directly should be part of your online reputation management strategy, you should also implement other reputation management tactics to push negative content down and bring positive and neutral information about your company up in the search engine results pages. But whenever possible, contacting dissatisfied customers directly should be a first step in resolving reputation management issues.

It happens all the time. When you search for a company to find out more about them, often times you’ll see a “scam” report or a “rip-off” alert with a link to a website that purports to give consumers and former employees a way to rant about their bad experience with a company. Often, these scam sites rank well in the search results, and if you are the company in question, your company reputation can be damaged by the rants and outright lies that a site like this spreads. So how do these sites work, and how can you deal with the problems they create? Let’s take a look.

Scams and Lies

First off all, it’s important to understand that although these sites offer a way for disgruntled employees and unsatisfied customers to talk about their experience with a particular company, the site itself benefits from the negative reviews that are published. Therefore they have no reason to verify or censor any of the user-submitted content on their site. In fact, the policy of many of these sites is to NEVER remove a bad review—even at the request of the person who wrote it.

And it has been alleged in numerous court cases that these sites will often fabricate bad reviews or edit user reviews to appear more damaging to the company they profess to review. However these are only allegations, and nothing has ever been proved in court. The reason that sites like these do not want to remove false information and benefit from inflammatory reviews is that their sites are paid for with advertising. Therefore, the more site traffic they get, the more money they make. And the more inflammatory a bad review, the more traffic it will get—especially if it is for a popular or well-known company.

Arbitration Options

Although many of these sites will refuse to remove any content from their site—even if it contains outright lies about a company—some offer an arbitration service. These arbitration services cost $2000 or more and claim to let independent reviews look at the “scam report” and verify whether or not erroneous claims have been made. If false statements are found, they will redact portions of the review that are found to be inaccurate. But the hefty fee does not guarantee removal of any false information. And even a few sentences are removed from an offending review, the bulk of the review will stay online.

Lawsuits

It’s hard to sue scam and rip-off alert websites. This is because all the content on the sites is supposedly user-generated and not created by the site owners or their employees. And one cannot sue a website for statements made by a third party on that site. (For example, no one can sue you for an inflammatory comment on your blog made by one of your readers—which is a good thing.) Many companies and individuals have filed lawsuits against these websites, but few have succeeded in winning a court settlement. And when you consider that a lawsuit against a website like this may cost you a hundred thousand dollars or more to resolve, it hardly seems worth it for a case you have little chance of winning.

Reputation Management

But this is where good reputation management comes in. No matter how unethical these scam and rip-off alert sites can be, you have just as good a chance of beating them at their own game. Scam sites optimize their reviews for the web so that they will show up when a user searches for a company name, but by using a solid reputation management strategy, you can make sure those reviews never show up in a Google search.

Reputation management is much cheaper than fighting the scam website in court and may actually yield better results. Even if you are able to get defamatory items removed from a review, the review will still stay on the web with all its negative accusations against your company. Reputation management can bury that review so deep that most casual searchers will never see any of it.

Scam and Rip-off sites are a pain and a nuisance, and rarely give any useful information to consumers. But with an effective, positive reputation management strategy, you can win every time.

 

Stop the presses! Reputation management isn’t just about promoting positive information about your company. In fact, if your reputation management strategy has consisted of solely filling the first page of a Google search with gushing reviews and company-sponsored blog posts about how wonderful your company is, you’re missing the point of reputation management altogether.

Natural Search Results

The point of reputation management isn’t just to make your company look good when someone searches for it online. It’s about creating a search engine results page that looks as natural as possible without focusing on misinformation or negative reviews. In fact, if a Google search for your company name looks too positive, people will think it’s been manipulated. And they’ll look elsewhere for more information on your company. That’s why you need to include both positive and neutral, third-party information and web content in your reputation management strategy. And one of the best ways to get that third party, neutral information is through the news media.

Harnessing the power of news outlets online can give you a more natural-looking search page, one that will nonetheless give searchers a varied set of search results. For example, here are three ways you can harness the power of the news to create a more natural looking results page.

1) Press Releases

One way to add to the variety of your results page is to publish a few press releases. Press releases can be expensive to publish through wire agencies, but they very easily show up on the web. You can create press releases for your successes, but you can also create press releases that are more informational.

Usually, the point of a press release is to get the attention of media outlets and compel them to do a story on your company. But that does not have to be your goal. You can just as easily get a press release out on the web that discusses the hiring of a new member of your executive team or other neutral information. Then you can promote the press release on a site other than your own to help it appear in the search results.

When your press release appears in the search results, searchers will see that it is information that is not posted on your own site, and it will look more natural, which, in turn, will give your company a positive results page that boosts confidence in the searchers mind.

2) News Stories

You don’t have to be the #1 company in your city—or create the next iPad—to get some news coverage. All you have to do is get your company name mentioned in a news story somewhere and it can be used to populate a results page for your company. For example, stay in contact with your local media outlets and let them know when you do something that might be interesting to your local community.

For example, create an opportunity to give service to your community, and invite a local reporter to come along and observe. Things like helping rebuild a local park, starting a food drive in your community, or donating something useful to the city, are all actions that might interest your local media and could get your name in print (both on paper and on the web).

In addition, offer up yourself and your company as experts who can be consulted on news stories. When a news story comes along that is in some way related to your industry, you can give your expert opinion and your company’s name can get mentioned in the story.

3) Business Listings

Like I said, you don’t have to be newsworthy to be featured on the news—or at least a news website. Many local newspapers and television networks have websites with sections devoted to finding local businesses. Often times a listing may be free, but you may also have to pay a yearly or monthly fee. Include your business name and contact information as well as a short blurb about your company. Google likes displaying results from news websites, and if you optimize it the right way, you can get that business listing in the search results, giving a more natural feel to your results.

It’s News to Them

When people search for your company name online and they see a variety of results from a variety of trusted sources, like news sites, they’ll build confidence in your company. But having a results page that is too filled with positive information may turn a potential customer off, because they’ll think they’re not getting the full picture. Harnessing the power of the news can help improve your online reputation and give you credibility at the same time.