Training Marketer

Like we’ve said before, online reputation management is a must. Just one bad review can leave scarring wounds on your reputation, making it important to keep your online reputation clean.

With the rise of internet marketers, an industry of online reputation management service providers have followed. These services can help you bring attention to positive reviews and search results, and will work to bury the negative far down in search results.

When your online reputation has grown to be more than you can handle, these services may come in handy, but are they completely necessary?

Paying for a service that may not use ethical web practices can work against you and could actually hurt your reputation even more.

“Google, for its part, says there is nothing inherently wrong with reputation services, but ‘if you use spammy and manipulative techniques to get this positive content to rank highly, we may take action on it,’” according to a recent BusinessWeek article.

Small business owners should approach online reputation management with caution. Small “tinkering” with search results is ok, but not enough to salvage an entire reputation.

“You have to take partial ownership in fixing your online reputation. It’s not something that you can simply just provide a credit card number to a company and they can take care of it. While outside firms can help businesses influence results on Google, only the company itself can repair real damage to its reputation.”

Ask yourself - are you really muffling angry voices instead of fixing the real problem? Take a look at all of the negative reviews about your company or website. Are they legitimate complaints? Is there something you can do to fix the issue for future clients? Instead of trying to find the mute button, take a step back to look at the real problem and try to find a way to fix it.

Last week we told you how important it is to track your online reputation and today a friend sent me a link to this great list of resources from Marketing Pilgrim.

Titled “Free Online Reputation Management Beginner’s Guide,” the author goes through how your company’s reputation could be destroyed in just a few hours by a disgruntled blogger, or one angry customer on a message board.

“A company can dominate market share, throttle competition and hold the #1 brand in the world. It can also crash in months if it fails to listen to what its customers want.”

It’s your choice to ignore the voices on the Web or learn from them.

Begin with tracking everything related to your company including your company’s name, the names of key employees and all the names of your products and services. You should also track the same information about your competitors, advises the author from Marketing Pilgrim.

In order to do this on your own, you’d have to spend all day, everyday Googling these terms and sifting through pages upon pages of results. Fortunately, there are free online tools to do all of the work for you.

Marketing Pilgrims came up with an extensive list of online reputation monitoring tools and what types of pages you should be monitoring. Here are just a few:

• Create custom RSS feeds based on keyword searches with sites like: Google.com/blogsearch, Yahoo News, Blogpulse
• Use a RSS reader, like Google Reader, to save you some time reading through results
• Track message boards and forums with BoardReader.com, iVillage, Yahoo Message Boards

Read the full list along with “short cuts” for online reputation management.

“It’s a well-known customer service maxim that happy clients tell three people about their experience. Unhappy customers tell nine.”

Online review sites multiply those numbers by the thousands. Whether a customer has had a good or bad experience with your company, they are free to tell everyone on sites like Yelp, AOL’s Yellow Pages and Angie’s List.

Word-of-mouth can be both positive and negative, and one bad review can quickly turn customers away from your business. In business to business marketing, reputation is everything, make sure your online reputation is pristine.

Do a quick search of your company’s name on Google or Yahoo. If you find any negative reviews, don’t get too discouraged, there’s something you can do about it.

A recent article in Fortune Small Business chronicles how some savvy business owners have come up with successful defenses to bad online reviews. A good mix of “vanilla marketing” and customer service, with an online twist helped these businesses come out on top.

After some horrible reviews on TripAdvisor, a hotel owner in San Francisco decided to personally defend the hotel. For each negative review, he would publish the hotel’s side of the story, using the site’s response tool. If a complaint was legitimate, he set out to make it right for future guests.

Preston Wynne Spas in Silicon Valley uses negative online complaints as a way to create a deeper relationship with the client. The company sees it as a way to potentially turn negative complaints into a strong word-of-mouth marketing force.

The spa owner personally messaged each unhappy reviewer and offered a complimentary return visit. Many reviewers returned to the site and posted positive reviews in place of their old negative posts.

“I’m not trying to bribe them,” Borgman [spa owner] says. “I’m just trying to give them what they deserve. And I never asked them to repost - that would be completely inappropriate.”

The spa owner had used a free online alert system, like Google Alerts, to help bring reviews (good and bad) to her attention. Whenever her company name appeared on the Web, she would get an email alert.

Another strategy in the fight against negative content involves a little Google “magic” - push the negativity so far down in search results that it is virtually invisible to surfers.

The authors over at Web Success Team recommend combating negative content with an influx content both branded and positive. They advise starting a blog to drive traffic to your site, which will help to increase sales. Blog articles and keywords should be relevant to your products and/or services and should provide browsers with valuable information.

Also try joining social networks like FaceBook, MySpace and LinkedIn. Link these pages to your blog and homepage. Google will rank sub-domains (other pages that link to your site) close to the top of a search for your business name.

“The more sites you have with your brand, the better your chances of increasing sales and consumer relations.”