Businesses Urged To Consider Their Online Reputation
Businesses Urged To Consider Their Online Reputation
A Harris poll this month revealed that 78% of people search for information about a person or business before choosing whether or not to contact them. Also 74% of people said they would refuse to do business with someone or a business if they found any negative web pages mentioning them.
This has massive repercusions for people who own businesses on the Internet. A drunken photo uploaded to Facebook or that private tweet sent to a friend could come back to haunt them!
A US restaurant chain called Chipotle recently hit the headlines with an online reputation incident that rocked the world. Their facebook account was allegedly hacked making it look like an employee posted a message saying they ran over a cat on they way home from work. This sparked outrage and it could have easily led to a sudden loss of sales - a nightmare for any business.
James Winsoar, president of Nottingham based search engine optimisation firm JW Enterprises told reporters, "If you searched for your business name online what results would you see? Businesses could find bad reviews about their business written by unhappy customers or ex-employees onto internet review sites like Google Places, Yelp and Tipped".
"However there is good news. There is the legal route which can be taken if there are untrue comments but it can be dear to employ a law firm. The better method is to make blogs, social bookmarking profiles, and wiki's where people can get their questions answered. Upload articles, videos and press releases that describe you or your company in a positive light".
Most problems can be worked out simply by talking about them and finding out how to reach a resolution that is acceptable to both parties. The main complaint from genuinely unhappy customers is that they are not being listened to. Thankfully this can be resolved in exactly the same way that the negative comments can be pushed further down the search results and onto page two or three where people will be less likely to read them.
It is well worth the short time investment needed to manage the accounts, perhaps an hour a day spent wisely posting useful information and answering customer enquiries. Many tasks can even be automated making it easy to spot potential prospects to interact with based on key phrases they mention - your company name is one example. Twitter is a great way to conduct customer service in an open and honest manner.
There are some techniques you should steer clear of - for example reposting multiple testimonials onto review sites. Anti-spam measures are in place on all the top review sites. Review sites expect genuine customers to post reviews from different computers and from different IP addresses. Having people post good reviews about you is a sure-fire route to achieving higher rankings and a more favourable online reputation.