Having a naturally appearing, “good” online reputation can send many new customers your way. However, a negative online reputation can cause a whole lot of damage across the web and cost a business dearly in lost revenue. If your business listing on Yelp or other sites show negative reviews – there is no doubt, you are losing business. In…
Read more
As a disclaimer, this post contains quite a bit of personal conjecture. Online reputation management for small businesses is one of my personal passions. Managing a company that helps businesses utilize new media successfully is something I really take pride in. The thought of review sites taking advantage of user generated content to eek extra cash out of…
Read more
In today’s day and age, it’s extremely important to know what is being said about you online. We use this free and ultra-simple method of monitoring our brand: Google Alerts. With this service, Google will send you an email as soon as it finds content on the web with your name in it; It’s simple…
Read more
Less-than-happy customers are a part of doing business. As much as you try, there is no way to ensure that every transaction will be perfect and everyone will be happy 100% of the time. More often than not, unhappy customers vent frustrations on a public site for the world to see and where a business…
Read more
Word spreads – fast. When your business starts to get “meh” reviews, it can entice others to jump on the band wagon; and without official response from the business, it often goes downhill from there. If you aren’t sure if you should respond to neutral or mediocre reviews, let me give you an example that…
Read more
Have you Googled your company name in the past couple weeks? You might be surprised to see that just below your homepage in the search results you now have multiple links pointing to internal pages of your site with a line of description text beneath. Sitelinks aren’t a new thing, but these new, “expanded site…
Read more
This week Google made changes to their local Places product which play down the role of 3rd party websites and make the ability to write a review directly within Google Places far more prominent. Google states on their Lat/Long blog that the actual ratings and review count that we currently see when performing a local…
Read more
Today’s post requires a little bit of imagination. Please humor me for a moment as I paint a mental picture: Imagine, as a small business owner, that as each customer left your shop they were allowed to place a sign right in front of your storefront that told everyone what they thought about their experience…
Read more
Companies make mistakes. It’s part of doing business. It’s how companies handle mistakes that either cause their customers to adore them or form an angry mob and rise up against them. It happens. Let’s take MailChimp for example. First off, I love the chimp. Mailchimp’s light-hearted approach to email marketing makes me happy when I…
Read more
While I will be the first to tell you that it’s always better to respond to negative reviews than to try and delete them, Facebook is one of the few places where you can actually remove negative reviews (sort of). For businesses with a fan page, you may or may not have the “Reviews” app…
Read more