Element Fusion

If someone were standing in front of your business with a large sign claiming that you rip people off, what would you do? More than likely, you would go outside, ask them to move or figure out how you could help resolve their issue.  People no longer have to stand outside your building to be heard by thousands of potential consumers. Now they simply turn to the Internet.

Technology has changed the importance of reputation management by extending the reach of a single person’s opinion. Not only are consumers more demanding than ever, they now also have an outlet to spread the word if they feel like they were mistreated or not handled properly. The old claim that “one person has the ability to impact up to 100 people’s perceptions of your company” would now more accurately be expressed as “one person can impact thousands of people’s opinions of you."

The best thing about people voicing their opinion online is the ability for your company to become proactive with your consumers. It allows you to reach out to those who have had a bad experience and attempt to bring them back to the reason they choose your products or services in the first place. It can also provide ideas as to how you can improve your products or services in the future so you can become a better company for your patrons.

Macro online reputation management

Marco online reputation management is more about informing clients when something bad has been released on a major scale. This is easy to identify because it would manifest itself in large amounts of negative press (news sites, newspapers, television and/or radio). Don’t sit around waiting for the bad press to go away, you have the ability to react and tell people the truth about your company and highlight your strong points. 

Depending on your budget, there are a few tactics you can use to restore your reputation:

• Blog. By far the least expensive form of online reputation management is to blog about your strong suits. Depending on the situation, you may even need to formally address the issue at hand on your blog.
• Submit a Press Release. Write an article and submit it to a service such as PR Web. This will syndicate your story to the major online news networks and help create some positive press.
• YouTube. If you create a good video you can capture millions of eyes and help to restore trust and confidence.

Micro online reputation management

Micro online reputation management is much tougher than macro managing because you are dealing with individual opinions as opposed to major news releases. Even though individual opinions are not as big of a hit to your company, they are by far the most common reason one would need to implement online reputation management.

Reacting to people is the easy part. Finding out when people are speaking poorly of you is another strategy altogether. The hardest part about micro reputation management is that it takes time to search for what people are saying. However, the time spent is well worth the effort if you can proactively engage the negative sentiments about your company.

Here are a few free tools you should check when starting to evaluate your micro online reputation management:

• Rollyo - Allows you to search through content of specified websites
• Twist - Twitter Search
• Lexicon - Facebook Search
• Google Blog Search - Find topics in blogs that Google has indexed
• BoardTracker - Discussion search via message boards and forums
• Co.mments - Helps you keep track of discussions
• Technorati - Another good blog search
• Blogpulse - Allows you to create trends on your keywords, track conversations and search through blogs, videos and news.
• Ripoff Report - Consumer based complaint board
• Yelp - Review site for real people
• Summize - Another really good Twitter resource

The Internet has made reputation management easier for companies of all sizes. You no longer need millions of dollars to react when consumers have had less than enjoyable experiences with your company. Embracing the Internet and all of its possibilities should be a priority for any business no matter what its size.