So you’ve just given a killer PowerPoint pitch to a terrific new prospect, and are just about to ask how many seats of your application they’ll sign up for today. But suddenly a slightly-built guy at the far end of the table (and at the right hand of the top decision-maker) pipes up with: “That’s all well and good, but on Ripoff Report your customer Ace Mechanix said that your kit presented “installation difficulties”, and – even after those were overcome – didn’t really live up to its claims in several areas.” While racking your brain for some way to overcome this “objection” (and watching your 6-digit order and 5-digit commission fly out the window), you remember thinking “This is bizarre… we had no reason to think that Ace was anything but a happy customer.”
Welcome to what some would call the dark side of Web 2.0… the part where users or customers get to critique their vendors and have their comments essentially live forever.
The vendor in the vignette was actually victimized twice: once by the user who trashed their wares on a public site without giving the vendor any prior hint of dissatisfaction or opportunity to correct (which, sadly, is not unusual customer behavior); and once by their own folly, for being oblivious to what’s being said about them in cyberspace.
If your company has been in business long enough to ship product or service a client, chances are that it’s already been… the topic of some amount of user-generated content “out there” …which in effect is defining your corporate reputation as much as – maybe more than – the press releases your marketing folks churn out. Tracking and dealing with this content has spawned yet another Web-oriented niche discipline…
Reputation management (it’s far from rocket science)
Here is pretty much all you need to know and do…
Monitor. If you have no idea what’s being said about your company, you’re playing golf without a ball. Fortunately, you don’t have to spend every waking hour monitoring every possible site; there are a number of free online tools that will do this for you, while you run your business. These include Google Alerts, Google News, Yahoo Alerts, Technorati.com, BlogPulse.com, BoardTracker.com and Keotag.com (all mentioned by Tom Kurz in an interesting interview reported by Karen Klein in BusinessWeek.com).
Placate. Reach out to those responsible for the most negative comments and try to understand and resolve the problem(s) that fueled them; you may be surprised by how effectively this approach can turn critics into fans. This is really just Good Business 101 …only now the users have a bit louder voice. And don’t shy away from responding “in public”, if you can do so fairly quickly and without defensiveness; you’ll impress both your critic and the silent onlookers with your responsiveness and sincerity.
Push the negative reviews further down on SERP pages by time-tested SEO means, with emphasis on things like PR, blog and social media that can bump your ranking fairly quickly. (It should go without saying that this tactic shouldn’t be used as a substitute for placating customers or solving any real problems with your business.) Note too that the effort you put into the social media may pay a more important dividend than SEO; it may make active fans of your “silent majority” of happy users, and their newfound voices just may neutralize or drown out the naysayers.
For more do’s and don’ts of reputation management, you may want to check out Jeremy Martin’s recent post in Search Engine Journal.
Need help?
There are a number of firms that offer specialized services in reputation management; some of them are discussed in Rachael King’s “Saving Face Online” (businessweek.com), and in a recent Brafton Industry News Article. But unless you have an especially thorny problem, you should be able to protect your company yourself with a bit of diligent tracking, social-media-supplemented SEO, and recalling Good Business 101. And your Web marketing consultants can certainly help with the first two of those.
