How to Manage Your Online Reputation?

managing-online-reputation

Get a Bad Review? Reputation Management Services to the Rescue!

It can ruin your whole day: a bad review on one of the websites people visit to see business reviews. Whether it’s Yelp, Urban Spoon, Angie’s List, Google Places, CitySearch or Yellow Pages, the power of the consumer to speak out either positively or negatively about any business is incredible. You spend half your day fretting and dreaming up clever snide responses to the one customer who was in a bad mood the day she ate at your restaurant or shopped at your store. We’re here to caution you not to waste precious time worrying—our reputation management services can help you handle situations like this and come out smelling like a rose.

How Our Reputation Management Services Can Help Your Business:

You can’t make everybody happy, but you can put your best foot forward, and we can help. Here are some concrete steps our reputation management services can help you with:

1. Stake Your Claim

If you haven’t done this already, our reputation management services can help you claim your business listing on Yelp, Google Places, etc. as your own. There may already be a listing out there for your business and you may already be getting reviews, positive or negative, but you might not realize it. Once we file the appropriate forms to claim your listing, you can start having more control about what goes up on that listing and responding to any troublesome reviews that come in.

2. Stay Calm

If there’s one thing our reputation management services can do to help you, it is helping you stay calm and focused when a bad review arrives. You work hard all day doing what you do best, but everybody makes mistakes or simply runs into people who want things done differently. Did you know that more people are apt to write a negative review about something that bothered them than a positive review about a product they like or a great service they’ve enjoyed? This means that that one negative review you are worried about isn’t always a true reflection of how you’re doing—20 other people may be in love with your business, but just haven’t chimed in. Still, that one bad review can make potential new customers think twice about navigating toward your door. So…

3. Be Diplomatic

Our reputation management services can also help you with the actual responses (once you are calm). In today’s marketing world, it’s all about the relationship. If the bad review is from a genuine customer who has a genuine complaint (we’ll talk more about non-genuine reviews shortly), this is actually your chance to shine. Politely, honestly and professionally trying to resolve your customers concern without making excuses can actually turn a negative experience into a lifelong customer relationship. More often than not, a customer who had a negative experience that was positively and personally resolved by the company is more likely to become a loyal fan and customer than customers who have never had a bad experience with you!

4. Be Consistent

Keeping the previous step in mind, it is important to be prompt when dealing with negative reviews. Again, our reputation management services can help by alerting you to problems as they come in so that a negative customer review doesn’t sit out there and fester for weeks on end. We can help you develop a positive, consistent policy for dealing with negative reviews so they turn into positive ones.

5. Say Thank You

Encourage more organic positive reviews and customer loyalty by responding to a positive review with a heartfelt thank you! Unfortunately, the web can be a very uncivil place, so putting your best, most grateful self out there for everyone to see can really endear you in your customers’ hearts and minds!

6. Responding to Fake Reviews and Weird Review Filters

Of course, all of the above assumes that there are no trolls out there flaming shops they’ve never visited or complaining about food they’ve never eaten. That does happen. And sometimes, the filters on the review websites can be problematic (Yelp in particular has some strange algorithms that may hide positive reviews in favor of posting negative ones, particularly for first-time reviewers). Our reputation management services can help you sort out the trolls from the real customers (even if Yelp can’t) and deal with everything in between.

The bottom line is that we want to help you keep doing what you do best in your business—provide your customers the products and services you excel at while our reputation management services helps you handle the inevitable reviews that pop up in this imperfect web world. For more information, call us today at (800) 929-8611!

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