Do searches for your products, brand, company
In order to stay on top of your reputation online, you must know how to find good and bad reviews on your company or product. You should do searches for your products, brand, company, and even your own employees and always use other search terms such as fraud, scam, etc.… The types of websites that you will need to keep an eye on include forums, blogs, social media, and of course Google search.
find a bad review, you will need to take action. However, do not do so emotionally. Always read through the review and see if the post has any true meaning. Did the customer contact you regarding the situation? Was one of your employees rude to a customer? Was the product damaged and how did you or your employees respond? If the review is completely untrue, then you will need to show proof on their post such as providing proof of a refund, sending a replacement, or letting them know that you talk with the employee that was rude.
Create an alert for your company or product
Of course, you cannot spend hours every day searching for all the product review websites and other social media outlets to learn if anyone has given your business a review, whether good or bad. The best option is to create an alert for your company or product at alerts.yahoo.com and google.com/alerts. When your company or product is mentioned and is crawled by Yahoo or Google you will receive an alert. This will help you monitor your reviews.
To receive good reviews to help with combatting any bad reviews, you need to ask your customers and visitors to leave a review. However, do not rely on only the reviews, you need to actually stay in contact and answer reviews on all social media outlets including your own blog. People like to know they are heard so by answering all good and bad reviews you are opening up the communication lines which in turn will give you a better rating among consumers. Showing there is a real person behind the business and not just a website will, in fact, help with your reputation more than you can imagine.
There are two main components to online reputation management:
Creating a presence
This is all about publishing, and any of the following activities can be used for reputation management purposes:
- Creating or updating websites for yourself or your business
- Publishing to social media
- Leveraging automatically generated listings or third-party sites
- Publishing photos, videos, and other media
- Generating press coverage (if applicable)
Helping people find it
When people search for something online, they don’t usually look through all the results. Less than 10% go past the first page, and less than 1% go past page two.
For that reason, reputation management is not purely about publication, it also includes techniques that boost important content to the top of the search results. In the process, less relevant, inaccurate, or misleading results get pushed down to pages where they remain obscure and unseen.