by Francois Muscat | May 6, 2013 | Online Reputation Management
Online reputation management isn’t only about managing negative comments on review websites and social media. A huge part of ORM is ensuring that your customers are able to trust you. One of the ways to achieve this is by being completely transparent.
Consumers trust their peers
According to the twice yearly Neilsen Global Online Consumer Survey of over 25,000 consumers from 50 countries, people trust their peers more than they trust information from brands and companies:
“Recommendations by personal acquaintances and opinions posted by consumers online are the most trusted forms of advertising globally. The Nielsen survey shows that 90% of online consumers worldwide trust recommendations from people they know, while 70% trust consumer opinions posted online.”
You need to embrace people reviewing your product, services and customer service online. Whether it’s in blogs, on Twitter or online reviewing sites – you need to make sure you’re aware of what’s being said (so that you can improve where needed). Reviewing is the new advertising and there’s a huge need for trustworthy information. Your best bet is to be honest and to engage with the people who are already reviewing your brand.
Here are a few tips to be transparent and build trust:
- Be customer-centric. Show empathy and make sure you’re focusing on the entire customer experience (not just selling your products)
- Don’t be a control freak. Many people are starting to see the value of building an online community in order to help with their online reputation management. Don’t try to exert strict control of what gets posted – facilitate engagement and encourage customer collaboration
- Encourage sharing. One of the great things about Web 2.0 is that people have an urge to share information. Make this easy by including share buttons on your reviews, blogs, pictures and anything else you post online
Need help with your online reputation management? Contact WSI OMS today!
by Francois Muscat | Mar 26, 2013 | Online Reputation Management
What does online reputation monitoring really entail? Some people have built entire careers from this field of digital marketing and quite a few companies have created advanced software that will help you monitor your presence online.
Online reputation monitoring generally refers to keeping tabs on what’s being said about you online. While having a dedicated staff member (or expensive software, for that matter) sounds grand – it’s not really necessary for each and every type of company.
Different online reputation monitoring solutions for different companies
If you own a bank, national food chain or a large company that requires day-to-day customer interaction with thousands of people, you might need a full-time solution. Your online reputation monitoring strategy should include everything from social media monitoring to providing feedback to online complaints and queries on a daily or hourly basis.
If, however, you’re running a small to medium sized business, there are a few things you can do to monitor your online presence, such as the following:
- Google alerts: Nobody wants to hop onto search engines and type in variations of their company or product names each day. Setting up a Google Alert is a great solution for this because you will get an e-mail whenever your specified keyword gets posted online. This is a fantastic way of staying on top of any blog posts, complaints or reviews that get posted about your company online.
- Twitlerts: A “Twitlert” is the same as a Google Alert, but for Twitter. Whenever your specified keyword or name gets typed into Twitter, you will be notified. You can then see what was posted about you and decide how you are going to respond.
The importance of quality referrals for online reputation management
Online reputation management is a lot more than simply monitoring what gets said about you online. It also has to do with monitoring how your website is performing on search engines such as Google.
Search engine algorithms keep changing and Google no longer rewards referral links from “low quality links” (such as link farms). In order to retain top positions in Google, you need to make sure that authority websites are referring to your site. The only way to make this happen is to post quality content.
Need help with your online reputation monitoring? WSI OMS can help. Contact us for more information today.
by Francois Muscat | Jul 24, 2012 | Online Reputation Management
One of the worst things you can do on the web is ignoring your clients on the social web. Even if your clients post negative comments about your business such as poor customer service or complaints about your services or products, you should never ignore what is being said about you online.
Any business whether they are operating offline or online that doesn’t take customer complaints seriously is telling its clients that they are really not that important. It won’t be long and that business will be left with no customers at all. In today’s digital lifestyle, your customers are just as likely to complain online through their favorite social media channel as they are going to complain directly to your business. That might not be fair, but it is real and you should take note of this. Because it is real, you should make a point of monitoring your products, services, and brands on all the social media channels.
Monitoring your reputation online
Monitoring doesn’t mean that you should interact and engage on every single social media channel on the social web, although creating a presence on the ones that your target market spends their time on is not a bad idea. At the very least, you should monitor the social media channels to see what is currently being said about you.
Most of the time it is really easier than you think. There are a couple of ways you start monitoring your online reputation by using free services such as socialmention.com, Google Alerts, Twitter Search, and keeping an eye on other channels such as Google Blog Search and Technorati. Monitoring this way doesn’t cost anything, but it does take time and effort.
By monitoring your reputation online, you can save quite a lot by being notified of an issue before it loses control. Respond to your clients concerts on the public web in a timely manner by addressing their concerns.
by Francois Muscat | Feb 10, 2012 | Online Reputation Management
If your company is good and honest, misconduct and accusations online can very quickly damage your digital reputation and this can influence how people view your business. If there are negative comments about your company online, there are steps you can take to minimize the overall damage and help you prevent and respond accordingly when it happens. Various internet marketing and social media marketing strategies can be applied to minimize the effect of negative comments.
Never try to delete negative feedback about your business online as this can quickly turn into a snowball. The goal with a good online reputation management strategy is to push the negative statements down in the organic search engine listing and replace those unwanted listings with positive ones.
Here are a couple of tips to help you with this process.
Digital Reputation Management
Research the negative comment: Always look at the root cause of the negative comment and what can be done to bring the conversation to a stop. Your repairing process can only start when the comments has stopped.
Keywords: Which keywords do you want to use in your campaign? Try to keep your focus on one or two keywords. These keywords can include your name, business name, brand or even an event.
Identify: List all the articles, blog posts, forum topics that already exist that you want to displace on the search engines.
Link building: Launch a link building strategy for the identified articles, blog posts and forum topics that you want to be found for. Use the keywords you have selected in this campaign.
Blogging: Publish a couple of blog posts where you can control the content. Use a variety of blog aggregators related to your market niche to aggregate the content of the posts.
Flickr and YouTube: Publish and promote photos and videos. Add the keywords you have selected in the title and tags of the multimedia items.
Monitoring: Setup a couple of monitoring processes so that you will be made aware if your name is mentioned online. If these are negative, address them quickly.
Digital reputation management is not a once of process and constant monitoring is required to help you with your digital reputation.
by Francois Muscat | Dec 19, 2011 | Online Reputation Management
Blogging and social media is busy changing our world and how we do business online. Your digital reputation is your credibility in cyberspace and how people see you. It is crucial that businesses monitor what is being said about them online as conversations happen even without your participation.
Your digital reputation can be made or lost in a few minutes – with only 140 characters (Twitter). Just as powerful, positive stories of good customer service can quickly build a positive digital reputation. Marketing departments must add social media to their marketing mix and use blogging to promote and build their organisation’s reputation and brands. The blogosphere and social media adds a new dimension to business marketing. All these new online tools can greatly increase the speed in damaging or building a brand.
Internet marketing together with various social media strategies should always include monitoring (listening processes) for what is being said about you, your brand, and your competitors online. If you are a public facing company and your image is important to you, then using social media is one of the costs of doing business in today’s digital world.
How to start monitoring your digital reputation? Here are a couple of tips that can help you with this process.
How to protect your reputation online
Strategy: Setup various strategies and processes to monitor what is being said about you online. Google Alerts is a free service from Google that you can use to alert you via email or RSS as soon as someone mentions your name, brand, or even products online. There’s also paid services such as Radian6 that you can use for more in-depth analysis of your company.
Internet Marketing: Create an optimized internet marketing strategy that promotes your brand in a positive way. Search engine companies can help you push down negative comments on the search engine result pages but this is not always favourable because if you get found out that you have used “false” reviews of positive content, it could have a double impact on your reputation and business. This type of strategy is not a guarantee and it can take months before you see any results. In the long term you should have a strategy to publish positive stories on your company and develop your online brand in an ethical way.
Research: When a negative comment is made about you online, research and study the origination of the comment. Who posted the comment? Was it your fault? Is the person who posted the comment open for discussion? Usually, if you have done your research about the negative comment, there is a chance that you can turn the foe into an advocate of your brand.
by Francois Muscat | May 6, 2011 | Online Reputation Management
You will find quite a few complaint websites with high rankings such as the South African local one hellopeter.com on the world wide web. Complaints placed on these trusted sites usually ranks very high on the organic Google search results for your brand, company name and even the names of your key executives.
These days, upset clients have easy access to review anyone and they can even set up a blog for free to express their feelings to the world. This is a big problem because these complaints stays on the internet forever. Legal action can get these removed, but it isn’t easy.
What can you do to repair your digital reputation when this has happened to you?
Monitor
Every company should set up tracking and reporting systems that will notify them any time their name is used on the web. This could include their name mentioned in searches, blog or forum posts, etc. Google Alerts is a free tool that will send you an email any time Google detects something new being said about you or any phrase you specify.
Respond
Start by taking a little time to monitor and view the reaction. Criticism of your services or products should never bring a strong response or argument. Always be concerned and helpful to resolve the issue. Try and turn the situation around.
Repair
You may not be able to erase what has been said about your brand and company, but you can take steps to minimize the damage. The goal is to push the damaging statements down in the organic search results and replace those with positive information and comments.
The key to repairing your digital reputation is to be focused on a specific phrase such as your company name. Launch a series of articles, press releases, videos on YouTube, blogs and even possibly an article on Wikipedia. Use the exact phrase you want in the title and the body of the text. With time, the search engines will generally give these good rankings.
