Managing Your Reputation Online: Part II – Communities

In part one of this series, we covered review sites. Today, we’ll talk about managing your reputation among Internet communities such as discussion boards, blogs, and the like.
Businesses tend to get talked about in the public forum that is the Internet. The Internet, much like the real world, has developed many communities where individuals with similar interests can gather and swap stories and provide support for each other.

New communities are started every day, many when consumers rally around a common cause, be it for good or bad. Is your business creating communities? And if they are, is it for good or bad?

It’s bad when you’ve gotten yourself an angry customer that starts posting at places like Ripoff Report. It’s really bad when someone starts a “yourcompanysucks.com” website and people start heading to it in droves.

The “bad” communities (that is, bad for your company) are the ones you should be most worried about. These communities can very quickly destroy your reputation and even potentially be a major player in putting you under. And while you can’t put a complete stop to this kind of behavior, there are a couple of things that you can do to block a good chunk of it:

Defend Yourself

This is exactly what it sounds like. If people are going to go around trashing your good name in forums and other communities, then you ought to stick up for yourself when possible. Ripoff Report makes it easy, allowing you to post a rebuttal in your defense, giving readers a complete picture of the situation rather than the one sided (and often exaggerated) view of the angry customer.

To make sure you know when you’re being talked about, set up a Google Alert for your company name. This will tell you anytime new search engine results get indexed with your company name.

Now, the way to defend yourself is professionally. State the facts, and just the facts. Do not come out sounding defensive, nor should you attack the original poster in anyway. Both will make you appear more guilty, and result in a worsening of your reputation.

Here is an example of how NOT to respond to a customer complaint (note that the response is not directly from the company being complained about, but from an ex-employee):
http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/260/RipOff0260796.htm#247501

Demeaning the complainant is the worst thing you can do. It shows a lack of any empathy for your customers, and future potential customers will judge you negatively for that.
Here’s an example of a good response:

http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/253/RipOff0253500.htm#240204

The facts, and just the facts, and what they are doing to correct the situation.

Make Your Customers Evangelists

What is an “evangelist”? It’s a customer of yours that is so happy with your company that they begin preaching your greatness to everybody they can. Most evangelists will even respond on your behalf to any negative posts on bulletin boards and consumer sites like Ripoff Report.

There are few things that look better to someone investigating your company than a past customer who is so passionate they are willing to defend your company to anyone who speaks ill of it.

Well-known entrepreneurial blogger Guy Kawasaki discuses how to get people to evangelize your product or service:

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/01/guys_golden_tou.html

The gist of his post? Make a great product that is worth evangelizing about.

Giving Your Site an SEO Boost

Search engine optimization (SEO) is nearly as much an art as it is a science. The complexities of SEO require the services of experts in order to keep up. However, there are several things that can be done to give your website a quick SEO boost, and potentially improve your search engine rankings.

Two things that can be done relatively easily and quickly are creating content and increasing your link popularity. Both of these items are vital and very important parts of SEO. Doing just these two things virtually guarantees a boost in search engine rankings.

Creating Content

This is mostly done by writing articles that focus on the key phrases you are trying to optimize for. Trying to improve your ranking for the key phrase “hiking boots”? Start writing articles about them.

If you’re a retail store that sells hiking boots, then articles that review different brands of hiking boots, explain what to look for in a good hiking boot, a boot fitting guide, and so forth are perfect opportunities to boost your site’s relevance in the eyes of the search engines.

Some additional SEO tactics you can implement as you write these articles is linking out to authoritative sites (sites with a high Google Page Rank), increasing usability by linking to other related pages on your site, and making sure all your code is W3C compliant and that there are no broken links.

Be sure to include your chosen keywords and phrases in the webpage title, headline, and throughout the document. Bolding your keywords helps as well.

Increasing Link Popularity

Link popularity is a score based on the number of inbound links to your site. Though all inbound links count toward your link popularity score, certain types of links carry more weight than others.

One-way links carry the most importance, while two-way (you link to me and I’ll link to you) links are given relatively low importance. Additionally, any incoming links from a page the search engines consider to be a “link farm” (a page with a very high number of outgoing links) doesn’t help your cause much, and in fact can hurt your ranking.

Additionally, a one way link from a site considered to be an “authority” on a particular subject is given a bit more weight than a link from a less authoritative site. However, quantity of links is still more important than who they come from.

So how do you get people to link to you? Well, the best way is still to have great content that is worth linking to. If you have good content, other sites will naturally want to link to you without you even asking.

However, since you’ve written all those great articles (from following the advice in the previous section) offering redistribution rights on those articles is a great way to increase inbound links. The key is to require that anybody who reprints your article include all links that you’ve inserted, and always be sure to include a link back to your website in the article’s signature.

Managing Your Reputation Online: Part I

When you hear the word “reputation,” you’re likely to think back to your high school days. The labels flew freely: geek, jock, nerd, freak, prep, and a few that are substantially less flattering. The good news is that you’re not in high school anymore. The bad news is you own or work for a company, and that company has a reputation – and a label – just like you did in high school. But what is your company’s label? Is it good, or is it one of the less flattering ones?

Are you trustworthy, great to deal with, fun, honest; or have you been slammed as a scam, rip off, or worthless?

eBay has been rated as one of the most trusted companies in the world, despite the fact that on eBay you are actually dealing with other individuals, not eBay directly. How did eBay get labeled as a highly trusted site when consumers don’t even deal with them directly? It’s called reputation management, and it’s something that eBay excels at.

Interestingly enough, eBay has provided some reputation management tools that are utilized by the community. The obvious one is the feedback system which allows trading partners to rate each other. On eBay, one’s feedback rating is a vital part of their eBay reputation. There are essentially two types of feedback that can be given on eBay: positive and negative. Receiving a positive feedback improves one’s reputation, while receiving a negative reduces it.

Reputation management can easily get to be a dirty business. Without even realizing it, eBay’s members manage their reputations by attempting to control the type of feedback they receive. This is most often done through the use of “feedback extortion”. That is, one of the trading partners (usually the seller) will withhold giving feedback until they’ve received positive feedback from the other party.

Similar equivalents can be found with other businesses. Customer testimonials are helpful in building a positive reputation. However, some companies actively seek testimonials from consumers by offering them free items or services, offering discounts, or promising to resolve an undesirable situation quickly.

Businesses who work together will also often exchange positive testimonials, even if they don’t actually like each other. This is done to prevent the other company from doing or saying anything to damage the other’s reputation.

Retail websites have several feedback options available to them that are very similar to the system used by eBay for its members. By submitting your site to review sites and shopping comparison sites, your customers will have to the opportunity to rate their experience with you.

Most sites use a rating scale, rather than the more ambiguous positive/negative system used by eBay.

Here’s a list of some of the more popular review sites:

To improve your reputation on these review sites, you’ll need to get your customers to give you positive ratings at each site. Studies show that about 29% of your customers will be willing to submit a review of your site, so long as you ask them.

You have some control over your reputation in this matter. By waiting until a transaction is completed and waiting until your customer has received the item(s) they ordered, you can gauge the likelihood that they will leave you a positive review. A customer who returns an item, for example, might not be a good person to ask to review your site.

Customers in some industries are a bit more passionate about submitting reviews than others. Computer hardware, for example, seems to get a large number of customer reviews even without the company asking for them. What this means to you is that if you are in one of these industries, you won’t necessarily need to ask your customers for reviews. It does mean, however, that you had better take excellent care of them!

Jewelry customers on the other seem to not leave reviews very often. This probably has something to do with the regularity that a person shops for these items. Computer hardware outdates very quickly, resulting in customers who buy new hardware several times a year, whereas jewelry is a rare purchase.

Soliciting reviews from your customers is just one of many methods to manage your online reputation. In the coming weeks, we’ll discuss the many other factors involved with reputation management.

Search Engine Submission Basics

With the quality, sophistication, and speed of today’s search engine spiders, submitting a website to the search engines is almost unnecessary. Eventually, just about any site will get picked up by the spiders and be indexed in the major search engines. But there are three things that you should do, at a minimum, to get listed and ranked by the search engines:

Get another website to link to you

In order for your site to be picked up automatically, it must be linked to from a site that a spider already visits. The spider will follow the link to your site and crawl it. But even if you are able to get some other website to link to you, it could take some time for the spiders to get around to you. Spiders crawl a site regularly depending on how often the content is updated. If the link to your site comes from one that is highly static and doesn’t change or rarely has any new content added to it, then spiders won’t visit it very often, which means you won’t get picked up for awhile. Additionally, you have no control over when, how, or even if spiders will actually visit you. When you create a new website, the idea is to get people visiting it. Since almost all web surfers use search engines to get around, getting listed in all the major ones should be a priority.

Manually submit your site

The way to guarantee that the search engines know about you is by manually submitting your site to them, essentially telling the search engines, “Hey, here I am! Come check me out!” It’s a bit more effective than sitting around and waiting. But before submitting a site to the search engines, you want to make sure that your site is optimized for their spiders. Very simply, this means having good navigation, a complete site map, and no dead-end pages (pages that don’t have a link to another page at the end of it). Once you’ve got your website primed for crawling by the spiders, you can manually submit your website at the following places:

Using You Tube to Promote Your Business

One way that you can promote your business for free is through viral marketing. Although not the easiest form of advertising, it definitely can create a HUGE splash when done correctly. Here are a few tips on how to make a successful You Tube video for your business:

www.onlineinlocal.com

Local Marketing Seminar in Boise, Idaho a Big Success

On Monday, July 9th, Online In Local traveled to Boise, Idaho to give a free online marketing seminar. There were 38 local business owners in attendance who listened to three different speakers discuss the opportunities available for businesses to get exposure to their local community through online advertising. The topics that were discussed were 1) Small Business Internet Marketing 2) Search Engine Optimization and 3) Pay-Per-Click Advertising. The three speakers, Cody Hunter, Alex McArthur, and Chris Finken have a combined 25 years of online marketing experience and taught the attendees the importance of building an online presence for their website.

Attendees from the conference had many nice things to say after all was said and done. The seminar lasted approximately two hours and everyone involved had a good experience. At the end of the day we raffled off an orange beach cruiser courtesy of Orange Soda, a co-sponsor of the seminar. The trip was a huge success and we had a lot of fun doing it! Thanks to all the people who helped us put this together, including but not limited to, Kathy Osmun, Jay Bean, and the Boise Chamber of Commerce.

P.S. - Look for us in your home town! If you’d like us to come do a conference in your area please post a comment below or contact your local chamber of commerce.

FREE Online Advertising Opportunity

Did you know that the number of Internet searches done by consumers looking for local services is on the rise? A Kelsey Group Report showed that in 2006 over 80% of all Internet users use search engines to find information about local businesses! If you consider the number of people in your community that have Internet access (almost all of them?) and over 80% of them are looking for local services online, the truth is that you can’t afford to not have an Internet presence.

Thanks to OnlineInLocal.com, a specialized online directory for local businesses, you can now create a dedicated webpage that will get listed in the local search results for the major search engines absolutely free! All you have to do is go to this online business profile website, and type in the promo code: onlinein.

Charlie, from Sunglasses Only, the manager of an American Fork, Utah sunglasses shop, filled out his profile and began to drive additional traffic to his website. He found it useful in a number of ways:

See the Sunglasses Only profile page that Charlie built by clicking here: http://sunglassesonly.onlineinlocal.com/

Getting listed is very easy. Simply answer a few questions and your business profile is created automatically. And because it’s completely free, there is no risk. Even if you already have a website, listing with OnlineInLocal.com will improve your Web presence and help you move up in the search engine rankings, potentially sending more business your way.Get listed today for free, and start driving local consumers to your business with online advertising and also get a free search engine submission.

www.onlineinlocal.com