Managing the online reputation of your brand in today’s marketing world is crucial. Many internet users turn to the web for reviews, for questions and for answers. People are constantly looking up brands and determining credibility and legitimacy. Word of mouth on the internet spreads like wildfire for both good and bad things. Here are 3 tips to make sure when things spread about your brand, they’re good.
1 – Establish your online reputation. In order to manage it creating it is the first step. This is important because for your brand you want to establish it the way you want. Many people are probably already googling you. You want to control what they see (in a good way of course). Dominating the Google SERP page is important. Social media can help to create an online presence. Blogging is one of the best ways to maximize your SEO efforts and to pop up high on the Google’s results. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn also help achieve a strong presence. The biggest thing is that you want to control as many of the channels as you can that show up on Google. This way you can chose which information gets disseminated about your brand. You want to control your brand, not someone else.
2 – Act during a crisis. Once your reputation platform is set, there are going to be times when bad things happen. It happens with every business and even happened before the internet. And by bad things I mean negative press. These unexpected problems can come out of left field so to speak but how they are dealt with has a huge impact on future ramifications. It’s important to monitor and respond to any messages during a crisis. If something goes wrong with your business, customers will be the first to point this out. By publically addressing any concerns 2 things happen, the customer becomes satisfied and it demonstrates to other current or future customers that the brand cares. It shows that when a problem occurs someone is there to help. It would be overkill to respond to every single comment individually. By simply providing timely and frequent updates during a crisis or offering a direct email address to customer service you can prevent the magnitude of a brand meltdown.
3 – Monitoring conversations. The best way to stop a disastrous crisis about your brand is to prevent it. By knowing what’s being said about your brand constantly, you assume an enormous advantage. You can correct any minor problems before they end up going viral like “United Breaks Guitars.” Maintenance is always cheaper than repair and this is especially true with brands. Constant monitoring and maintenance of customer needs can greatly reduce the risk of catastrophe. There are a few easy to use and free tracking tools to help achieve this. Google Alerts lets you track what comes up on a Google search through your Gmail account. You can be notified as to what comes up on a Google search of your brand. Another good one is SocialMention and this free tool lets you monitor over 70 social media properties to ensure your brand is getting the proper attention.
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