When it comes to your online reputation, it is important to make sure that you periodically check how you are doing. This can be once a month, once a quarter, bi-annually, or even once a year. Whatever you decide, you need to keep on schedule. The reason for this is you will get a feel about how well your reputation is coming along. It will also give you the opportunity to make adjustments where they are needed. Not making adjustments to your reputation plan would be like not making adjustments to your spending habits when you are running out of money. At any rate, we are going to provide you with some tips to use once you have decided to make the necessary adjustments.
Threats and Opportunities
As with any part of a business, it is important to constantly be monitoring opportunities and threats. Your reputation is your business. If you do not possess a real-time understanding of all the opportunities and threats, you are kind of like a ship trying to navigate in the dark without the proper equipment. If you keep track of the things that are affecting your business or your brand, you can make adjustments were necessary and capitalize on anything that comes your way. If you miss the early warning signs you could find yourself with reduced sales, less interest from the public at large, negative press coverage, and loss of morale. In short, you need to make sure that you are up to date on everything that is being said about you. To make sure that you are in the know, you are going to have to make sure of a couple of things.
The first thing you are going to want to do is Google yourself often. This may sound vain but believe us when we tell you that it is the only way to keep abreast of current things being said or not said about you. If you happen to find some inaccuracies in the results that you find, make sure to flag them as inaccurate. Then you are going to need to take the proper steps to have them removed. This is easier said than done. In most cases, you will not be able to have them removed outright. You may have to suppress the results. This will require the services of an online reputation management company. They have the tools and the knowledge to complete the task in a short amount of time. This will prevent the news from becoming too widespread and harming your reputation further.
Additionally, you are going to want to monitor the review sites. They are the best tool that you have at your disposal to see how people really feel about you. When people make posts on these review sites, they do so very candidly. They don’t have to worry about anyone finding out their true identity and therefore will say things that they would not normally say. This can be a good thing and it can be a bad thing. Beware of the trolls that are just out to ruin your day. On the other hand, you will be able to gain insight into the mind of your customers. This will allow you to make adjustments to avoid any further reviews of this kind.
Rapid Response
If it ever comes to the time that you do have a reputation crisis, it is very important that you act as quickly as possible. When you fail to respond to the crisis, you are essentially telling the public that you do not care or that you concede to the facts as they are being reported. You want to have a plan in place just in case something like this happens. Some of the things that you need to be prepared for is if you or another key employee is arrested, a major customer service problem (think Starbucks), an ill-advised comment on social media or another public medium, or a disgruntled employee situation. For these and other situations it is important you get your side of the story out as soon as possible.
While every crisis will have its own needs and plans to be executed, there are some basic things that you can do in nearly every situation. To start off with, you need to make sure that you take immediate action. If you have to threaten to use legal means to stop the defamatory accusations, then that is what you have to do. Rarely will the situation diminish to this. Barring any legal action needing to be taken, some of the most important things that you can do in the first hour of your crisis are make a social media post, draft up a press release, and get your face on any video feed that you can. This can be either a live stream on social media or the news. You just want people to see that you are truly trying to make things right.
Cultivate Positive Reviews
Moving away from the negative things that can happen, let’s take a look at some positive things. When you have a bunch of reviews that are positive, you need to make sure that they continue to grow. The reason for that is that roughly 80% of people that read reviews have complete trust in the review. That is good when the review is positive and bad when it is negative. So, when you start to get the good reviews, you need to do your best to keep those at the top of the page. In order to do this, you must make sure that you respond to the reviews. As you respond to them, they linger more than reviews that get little attention. If you have ever looked at review sites, you notice most of them have a filter for the most active reviews.
Conclusion
There are many things that you can do to make sure that you keep your online reputation the best it can possibly be. Make sure that you are taking all the right steps and then you will be harvesting more business. Keep a constant eye out for the opportunities and threats as well as any crisis that is currently happening. Ensure that you are connecting with your customers and you will be rewarded with a near flawless reputation.