Managing an Online Reputation (part.2)

“If you’re stuffing the ballot box and that is detected — which it almost inevitably will be — the backlash will be really significant and come back to bite you,” said Kara Nortman, senior vice president of publishing at Citysearch.

 

Quick Tips:

 

* Set up automatic alerts to notify you when your business is mentioned in a review or blog.

 

* Local search sites are the new Yellow Pages -- make sure your business is listed. The more complete your listing, the more likely you are to get good search results.

 

* Respond to reviews to show readers that you are listening and that you care about customer service.

 

* Online reviews are a gold mine of business intelligence. Analyze metrics to get a better sense of your customer demographics.

 

* Don’t write false reviews to puff your business or trash a competitor. You can severely damage your reputation...and look really silly.

 

Indeed, the surest way to generate positive reviews is not to ghost-write them but to focus on good service. “It’s all common sense — the best way to ensure that you have positive reviews is to offer good products, good service, have integrity and be diligent,” said Greg Sterling, a San Francisco-based Internet analyst who specializes in small business and local search. “It’s really just the rules of dealing with people in the real world, translated online.”

 

Fortunately, online reviews can help you do just that. These reviewers are a virtual army of secret shoppers who are telling you exactly what works and what doesn’t.

 

Look for patterns. Are people consistently complaining about poor service? Are they constantly praising something that you can emphasize to differentiate your business?

 

At Founding Farmers in Washington, online reviews provide so much feedback that Mr. Simons stopped hiring secret shoppers. These comments have led managers to revamp how the front desk handles reservations and walk-ins, mark the vegetarian menu more clearly, coach servers who got bad reviews and even fire some employees. “

 

I would say 97 percent is genuinely useful,” said Mr. Simons. “You can tell the reviews that are written by a competitor or just someone who’s mean and angry. But generally people don’t go to a restaurant to get annoyed, and there’s at least some nugget of valuable information.”

 

Promote

These platforms do more than help you protect your good name. They can also serve as tools for marketing, analytics and aiming at customers.

 

Becoming an advertiser can buy you more ability to work the crowd. Benefits vary by site, but advertisers generally get more prominent display and other tools. On Yelp, advertisers can highlight a favorite review to appear at the top of their page (the other reviews are ordered according to how recent they are and how many user votes they received). On Citysearch, advertisers can get help with copywriting or video commercials and have their content pushed out to partner sites like MapQuest, AOL CityGuide and MySpace.

 

These platforms also can help business owners mine customer information. For example, Yelp has a dashboard that allows business owners to keep track of page views and offer promotions.

 

Danny Leclair, co-owner of Studio DNA hair salons in Los Angeles and Santa Monica, Calif., checks to see how many people come to his Yelp page — and often sees spikes in traffic after special offers or new reviews. He also uses tools like statcounter.com to see what pages his clients are coming from when they click on his site.

 

Once he started mingling in these online communities and using their tools, he got immediate traction. He said 50 percent of his new business now comes from Yelp, 30 percent from Citysearch and 10 percent from Google searches. “

 

My business began to grow exponentially,” Mr. Leclair said.

 

Source: NYTimes.com
By KERMIT PATTISON