If there’s one thing that’s certain about having a business today, eventually somebody’s going to write an online review about you. It could be a fantastic review from a well known publication that brings down the house and loads of new customers. Or it could be a negative review, which at least gives you an idea of where your business can make some improvements. Then there are those reviews (sometimes disgruntled employees) who just can’t be satisfied – or malicious reviewers who don’t like something about you. So they lay it on thick and heavy at customer review sites.
These sites have a lot of power in the search rankings because people are constantly adding new content to them and are trusted by the searchers. Luckily, the search engines may be getting better at filtering out false accusations that are overly descriptive. Anyrate, you will need to be ready for the fire hose of all three types by having a decent reputation management plan in place. You can start by appearing approachable. Open a twitter account and have at least a company specific email address so you can take advantage of communicating with reviews directly on behalf of your company. If you don’t have a feedback area directly on your site, create one. There are many low cost tools to help with this. If you give a displeased person a place to lodge their complaint directly with you, typically they’re less likely to take their gripes to a general online complaint page. Next, follow up on these complaints directly and try to appease the customer. A good rule is just be upfront and honest. Hey, we all make mistakes, right? If they have nothing to complain about, they won’t. You can even set up your own community for feedback online. Sites like Ning allow you to set up a means of communication between you and your customers for pennies and with minimal setup time.
Just be ready to regular participation. Furthermore, using all of the social media channels opens you up, for good or bad. Encourage customers to post videos on LinkedIn and other websites about your business. The more positive reviews and votes you have leading back to your site, the stronger your site can withstand a search ranking attack from complaint sites. Online Reputation Management(ORM) can be a full time job. If you don’t have someone on your team that understands this and can manage it, there are many fine SEO companies that can do this for you. You may not be able to stop bad comments about your company but with the right reputation management plan in place you can successfully push the bad comments off of page one of the results page for searches for your company and your brand terms.
