Why Should You Be Concerned?
There isn’t a day that goes by that we don’t read, hear about, see or receive Tweets about somebody famous having a meltdown and blowing up his or her reputation. Tiger Woods, Lindsay Lohan, Charlie Sheen—and the free world of pop culture fanatics watches the train wrecks in progress and distributes their takes on events in real time. No wonder these self-destructive superstars have staffs devoted to reputation management. When they do their jobs, we don’t hear about it. Just ten years after his retirement (more or less), imagine the difficulty that a choirboy like Cal Ripken might have today. Somebody would probably link him to Manson!
Business reputation management takes that challenge to another level. Business reputations can take years to build, but they can be destroyed online in minutes thanks to social media interaction and websites created by people that have too much time on their hands. It’s not just worrying about the CEO going off on a bender, although that would certainly make news. Every employee that works for your company represents it, and inane acts like posting drunken pictures online and tweeting them or even just saying the careless comment on Facebook will ultimately reflect poorly on your business.
That’s not the worst of it. Bad apple employees who don’t uphold your company social standards are one thing, but they can be explained away as individual issues to be dealt with. Far more damaging to your business reputation is the reaction of customers who felt cheated, mistreated, or totally defeated during a commercial exchange with your company. Today, everyone can be a rock star, an author, and a critic! There are Facebook pages dedicated to hating just about everything from Microsoft to IBM to BestBuy, which by the way has its own URL (see http://www.ihatebestbuy.com/testimonials.html) with a testimonials page. Not only that, but sites with once pristine images like Hewlett Packard are also in the hate blogosphere. Let’s face it, if you’re in business long enough you will tick off somebody. Unfortunately in the 21st century, that somebody can wreak havoc with your business reputation much easier than ever before, and he doesn’t even have to be accurate. What is the world coming to? Self-publishing content sites, in an attempt to get the truth out there as the world sees it, provide disgruntled customers the opportunity to edit your Wikipedia page or post problems on RipOffReport.com. Some of this stuff is downright funny, but consumers love to read the negative reviews and will make decisions based upon the ramblings of total strangers when it comes to doing business with you. Even worse, total strangers can pile on the bandwagon.
You will never stop unreasonable people from posting bad venom about your business. Ever. Certainly the world today provides business with emotional leverage to look after their business reputations more than ever before, bolstering quality and customer service. Trouble is, in recessionary times with competition coming from 3rd world countries receiving billions in US government aid, the first things that go to cut costs in order to stay competitive are…wait for it…quality and customer service. What to do, what to do?
BRM Action1: Monitor the Chatter
As a business aiming to control online reputation, you first need to find out what people are saying. There are many tools you can use to gage comments from different sources, even current conversations. Smart Company Growth will provide your small business with the online stethoscope to continually learn all the non-flattering things being said about your company in cyberspace. We’ll consider the source and prioritize the online chatter by source, level of accusation, and frequency.
BRM Action 2: Seed the Buzz
If you’ve browsed this site you know Smart Company Growth can help you with Article Marketing and Ghost Blogging to help you get your message out proactively, as well as amp up your website SEO. In the social media-driven business world we live in, world class companies are doing everything they can to seed the discourse about them, often with regard to new product launches, in the hopes of reaching the tipping point of uncontrolled, positive buzz becoming exponential. Facebook fan pages and thumbs ups, Twitter Lists and LinkedIn groups dedicated to their brands help with the social discussion. Everyone’s a millionaire, we all go home and sip port wine and play croquet.
One way we help you combat negative chatter is to provide you with blog posts and positive online commentary about your company. These can be positive anecdotes about customer service, new product reviews, or other items of interest regarding your inventions, brand, people, and more. This is a contact sport folks, and you need something positive about your business out there to stay in the game, much less knock your detractors off of page 1 of Google. Smart Company Growth, depending on your level of Business Reputation Management desired, will help with the seeding.
BRM Action 3: Combat with Online Anti-Venin
If you’ve looked online in the last 5 years, you see that web pages are not the web pages of yesteryear. These little colored icons to Re-Tweet this, post a comment, or like on Facebook are begging for reader interaction, and they get it. Here’s the good news. Much of the social venom spit out about your business comes in the way of comments on blog posts and pages asking for commentary. That means you can leave comments which counter the bad ones, or correct the record as it were. You can’t fight every battle, but if you have serious detractors out there posting hate on high-traffic sites, that news finds its way onto the screens of prospects and customers just by way of search engine rankings. If you don’t counter it in some way, you are tacitly telling the world it must be true. The Fortune 500 companies have entire departments engaged in doing nothing but business reputation management activities.
Smart Company Growth will, under your direction, provide the online anti-venin to this poison about your company, fight a few battles and at least get the opposing story out there, allowing readers to at best believe your version of the truth and at worst, be scratching their confused heads about what is real.
Your Business Reputation Management Solutions
Gold Monthly Subscription
BRM Action 1: Monthly monitor returns, top 3 pages of Google, Yahoo & Bing, categorize chatter and report any reputation damaging items.
BRM Action 2: 4 Blog Posts¹ per month based upon information from company, posted, submitted to search engines.
Order Gold BRM Subscription today for $375.00/month!²
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Platinum Monthly Subscription
BRM Action 1: Bi-Weekly monitor returns, top 5 pages of Google, Yahoo & Bing, categorize chatter and report any reputation damaging items. Monitor live conversations via Twitter chat twice per month and report any reputation damaging items.
BRM Action 2: 6 Blog Posts¹ per month based upon information from company, posted, submitted to search engines. Spin posts into unique articles with variations, submit to top article submission sites and business blogs, article attribution at company’s direction with link backs to company website pages.
BRM Action 3: Discuss any negative chatter with management and prepare a response strategy for top 3 items. Respond online on behalf of your company.
Order Platinum BRM Subscription today for $945.00/month!²
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Diamond Monthly Subscription
BRM Action 1: Bi-Weekly monitor returns, top 5 pages of Google, Yahoo & Bing, categorize chatter and report any reputation damaging items. Monitor and report similarly to up to 5 industry or association websites or social media pages with open comment responses. Monitor live conversations via Twitter chat weekly and report any reputation damaging items.
BRM Action 2: 6 Blog Posts¹ per month based upon information from company, posted, submitted to search engines. Spin posts into unique articles with variations, submit to top article submission sites and targeted blogs, article attribution at company’s direction with link backs to company website pages. Post un-attributed articles with text links to website pages in the article bodies and niched blogs seeking naked attribution articles. Post 5 social media posts per week (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter feeds, or as directed) in any combination or all sites based upon information and happenings at the company. Write 1 submission ready press release and submit to major online PR services and 3 offline media sources at direction of company.
BRM Action 3: Discuss any negative chatter with management and prepare a response strategy for top 5 items. Respond online on behalf of your company. Write damage control blog posts as needed outlining company’s response as required.
Order Diamond BRM Subscription today for $1495.00/month!²
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Footnotes:
1- All blog posts 400-500 words
2 – Card or Paypal account will be charged monthly until cancellation
