Chris Silver Smith shared important information with us about Reputation Management at the 2015 Rocks Digital Marketing Conference.
Why Worry About Reputation? Because any business carries risk. No matter how wonderful, how innocuous and how beloved your product/service – even ONE problem, when it gets onto the internet, can get out of hand. And even if you take care of and resolve a problem, things tend to stick around on the internet (example: “United Breaks Guitars”).
All sorts of things can impact your online presence:
- Estranged relationships
- Disgruntled customers
- Customer service issues
- Unresolved issues of many types
Proactive Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Proactive ORM Enables a business to control more of its reputation online
- Proactive ORM insulates a business from damaging exposure when attacked online
Elements of Proactive ORM
- Wikipedia pages rank in Google very easily
- Facebook pages rank well, if optimized
- YouTube pages rank well, if optimized
- Twitter also ranks well – this can be in your favor if you have many followers and utilize it strategically.
Top Online Reputation Assets:
- Website (optimized)
- Facebook page
- Twitter Account
- Wikipedia Page
- Google+ Page
- Blogs (WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr)
- YouTube channel
- Links
Online Reputation Liabilities”
- Bad reviews
- Bad things that happened “nearby”
- News stories (example: Children’s Museum has thousands of visitors. ONE child trips down the stairs and gets hurt, the story makes it into the paper and that creates a negative entry in search)
Click-Through Rates are Affected by Ratings in Reviews.
- G+
- Yelp
A little bit about online reviews:
- Ignoring your reviews can result in a snowball effect.
- Offsetting Negative Reviews + Good Customer Service = WIN!
- BBB has (quietly) added Consumer Business Reviews (people trust the BBB, so it may be helpful to have your customers post reviews via BBB).
- Leverage services that elicit Customer Reviews.
How to handle negative things that get linked to your name/brand:
- Dilution may be the best approach – Proactive entries that are positive help to keep negative entries from floating to the top and keep them from STAYING at the top.
- Use Humor to Diffuse/Overwhelm Haters.
- Utilize tools like PlacesScout – online review monitoring to keep an eye on what’s going on .
- If you need help setting up your profiles, Knowem can help.
Have you got a handle on your Online Reputation?
To learn more about Chris Silver Smith you can read his full bio on Rocks Digital.
