4 Steps For Managing Your Brand’s Reputation Online

In an age when anyone’s opinion can be posted quickly and easily online, reputation management has become increasingly important for any business.  Any restaurant supplies an excellent example of why.  Businesses in food service were among the first affected by the explosion of online opinion sites, and it is only a matter of time before your business is affected as well.

So do you have any idea what people are saying online about your business?  Getting your brand involved in social media is the first step in learning what people are saying about your business and then participating in the conversation.  The opinion machine driven by social media isn’t all bad.  It is, however, a decidedly double-edged sword.  On the one hand, positive reviews and feedback coming from your happy customers can bring new customers in droves.  On the other, one jerk who may or may not have actually had a bad experience can pick up the megaphone and start screaming nasty things about your business, no matter what industry you are in.

A good example of this is a restaurant equipment company who sells new items like stoves and ice machines to restaurants.  It’s not a glamorous business but the company has a good reputation and generally happy customers.  All it takes is one customer to be unhappy about one product, even in a niche industry like restaurant supply, for the bad publicity and the negative comments to start outweighing the positive press for a company.

When 84% of Americans say their purchasing decisions online are affected by peer reviews, you know you are dealing with a phenomenon you can’t ignore.  What to do?  Here’s 4 simplet steps to online reputation management:

Step 1: Listen to what people are saying.  You can’t manage something if you don’t know what you’re dealing with.  So tune in to the internet and start listening.  Some places to start: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and any review site specific to your industry..  An even better option is to use Google Alerts, which will scour the entire internet for new content with your name in it and send you a report on what it finds.

Step 2: Respond to your critics and thank your fans.  The new internet (a.k.a. Web 2.0) is all about conversation.  You’ve listened.  Now it’s time to answer.  No matter how you respond, do it with a healthy dose of common sense: e.g. don’t insult people, don’t act defensively, don’t act like a jerk, don’t pat yourself on the back, etc.  Basically, all the things that annoy you about people at a dinner party are the same things that are going to annoy your customers online.  So avoid them.

The most important thing here is the creation of a dialogue.  When you interact with customers, you cement loyal fans in place and you blunt the negative effects of the critics.  You also appear open and engaged, which will earn you serious points with all your existing and potential online customers.

Step 3: Take the initiative.  Don’t let the naysayers define your reputation online.  If you’re not offering an alternate narrative, then people will start to think everything they read about you is true.  Here’s where Twitter and Facebook come in.  If you’re not on actively involved in these two sites for your business, stop reading this and go create an account right now.

The reasons for this are simple.  These services are free.  These services are popular.  These services are also considered culturally important.  Take the time to learn how to use them and then start talking about how great your business is.  You’ll be amazed how many people want to listen.  All this costs you is your time, and the potential for new customer development is virtually unlimited.

Step 4: Gather intelligence.  This goes hand in hand with Step 1, but you can’t really gather effectively until you’ve started the conversation that follows from Steps 2 and 3.  Once you’ve established your own presence online, you can start to really learn exactly who your customer is and what they want.  This is the revered Holy Grail of marketing: knowing customers better than they know themselves.  You can achieve this through effective online reputation management.

When you converse with your customers in the realm of social media, you are going to start noticing trends and patterns.  If you are careful about tracking and analyzing this data, you’ll be able to learn the habits of your customer, which means you’ll be able to serve them better, which in turn means they’ll write nice reviews about you online….

You get the point.