Want To Fix A Bad Reputation?

Want To Fix A Bad Reputation?

From the Author

The other day I received an email from a partner asking me if I could help one of his clients and clean up their online reputation.

Having somewhat proficient experience in managing and cleaning up online presences I agreed to help.

Your online reputation can be the difference between customers knocking down your door for your business or quite the opposite, where potential prospects are fleeing for the hills in the other direction.

The purpose of this article is to help those who are in desperate need of improving their online reputation. If you are not convinced that your reputation or also know as sentiment is not important than it’s just a matter of time before you begin to see your competition getting all the attention and sales.

With all the technology out there is ridiculously easy to check out any business and do some recon. Just think back to when the last time you bought something online. Did you just blindly buy whatever it was you were looking for? Or did you read some of the reviews and comments? Did you do some quick research albeit on price and or features?

We all do. It’s only common sense to do a bit of fact finding before you buy anything.

For those wanting to improve their online reputation, I have some steps you can follow.

I will begin with three easy steps and then cover 10 more detailed things you can do to improve your reputation:

The three steps are:

Step 1.
You will want to get on local the more popular review sites and create profiles, if you have not Some of the more frequently visited review sites such as Yelp,  Google Places,  Yahoo Local Listings, Citysearch, Facebook, Merchant Circle, Foursquare, Insider Pages, Angie’s List, and Local.com

It’s pretty simple but sometimes those things that are easy to do are often overlooked. If you want to build your online reputation you need to be online, which means you need to have a presence in the more popular review sites or review sites that are related to your specific niche.

Step 2.
You will want to have some automated way to monitor all these sites, in order to notify you every time you get a positive or negative review.

With technology nowadays it’s pretty easy to monitor all the positive and negative sentiment that is being said about your business.

There are FREE versions of the paid service providers that can provide you all the social media monitoring in one easy to find place as well as offer alerts to your mobile phone and or email.

Here are just a  few:

1) Hootsuite
2) Social Mention
3) Ice Rocket
4) Google Alerts
5) Google Analytics
6) Facebook Insights
7) Tweet Deck
8) Topsy
9) How Socialable

In this step it is super important to begin to carefully monitor all the sentiment about your business and begin to create new positive sentiment by working with Blogger, Twitter, Facebook leaders in your niche. You want to create a positive buzz around your business. Even something as easy as posting answers on Yahoo Answers can provide fantastic credibility to you and your reputation.

Step 3.
Once you build up that reputation you will want to market it on Facebook, a) text review b) image reviews like Pinterest, Photobucket c) video reviews/commercials, YouTube the second most searched site on the web.

Being good at what you do is one thing, but being good at marketing what you do is a whole other story.

You want to publicize your successes and of course mitigate any not so flattering reviews or testimonials.

10 More Detailed Things You Can Do To Improve Your Online Reputation

In addition to these 3 simple steps, there are 10 additional tips that will help you and your reputation management:

1) Organic Search Results

You want to own the first page Google results. Being on the first page of Google, of course can add tremendous value to your online reputation, Moreover, promoting you business on LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube can provide added value that will go a long way to your brand. Another great tool are using press releases for any new launches, partnerships, offers, or management changes.

2) Get In The Game & Be Social

Be social and own profiles on the more popular sites like: Twitter, Facebook, Google plus, YouTube, will help dramatically to improve your presence online. A side benefit is that of these social media profiles will rank high on the search engines and as a result get you to the top of the organic search.

3) Your Own Website or Guest Blog

Creating a unique website, blog, or just your own personal website can do wonders for your online reputation. It’s a good rule of thumb to own two or three sites whereas you can control the positive sentiment. In addition, blogging as a guest blog, is also a quick way to create positive buzz.

4) Press Release

With the advent of popular online press release distribution  sites such as: PRWeb or PRNewswire can help you tremendously to get your press release into the hands of some well known authority sites. You want to make sure that you use your name and or company name.

5) Solicit Feedback

It’s always a good idea to get feedback from your customers, partners, vendors, resellers, or anyone that you do business with. Try to encourage reviews, get feedback and reviews from satisfied customers to write a review/testimonies, and post them on site such as: Yelp, Citysearch, Google, Glassdoor.

6) Don’t Argue

Probably the worst thing you can do is to argue or debate on forums. Don’t rebut or debate, instead take discussion to your site or customer service site on your own site. If you defend it comes across as a negative. Take the conversation to somewhere less public and where you have more control to manage the sentiment.

7) Video, Video & More Video

With the exception of those that have limited internet bandwidth, pretty much the majority of the planet is crazy about videos, so it makes sense to be on sites like Youtube and Vimeo. Also,  creating  slideshows into videos and or doing some sort of training video or testimony with title with name of company, URL link or related search term can also make a huge positive difference toward building that online reputation.

8) Press Media

One of the best forms of creating positive buzz is of course getting published in one of the top trade or mainstream news outlets. This does take some assistance as not everyone has connections in the press media industry. Luckily for us mere mortals there are site like Help a Reporter Out, which can get you publicized and interviewed by journalists, and best of all its FREE.

9) Website Design

With the new changes to the big search engines, it seems that they are now focusing less on back-links and SEO and more on the user experience and most importantly whether or not the visitor that comes to your site via a search request gets exactly what they are looking for. The search engines can measure this by things such as bounce back ratio. That’s why it makes sense to have a responsive website that loads quickly and that is easy to navigate.

10) Be active

You want to be active in online forums like Yahoo answers . Slideshare for slideshows and answers to LinkedIn. The more active you and the more you actually help others, the more you can indirectly or directly benefit. It’s the old adage, “You can everything in the world you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”