Ducking the Issues

As a business owner, do you duck the uncomfortable questions or complaints that come to you via your Social Media applications or online in general? Do you screen the bad news and omit it from your comment feed on your blog or remove the comments on your Facebook wall so that everything appears perfect in your world?  If so, you might be missing out on a wonderful opportunity and doing yourself more harm than good in the long run.

Social media is all about letting people get to know who you are as a business entity and a person. People want to know if you stand behind your product or service or if you are just paying lip service to the idea.

The truth is, a happy customer is going to tell others about your product or service and you will get referral business. When this happens, you feel great, right? And so you should.  But the reality is, you can’t keep 100% of the people happy all of the time and no one is perfect!  And, these unhappy customers are going to find a way to voice their opinion.  Many now take to the online world to vent their frustrations.  This can have considerable impact on your business.  Negative press in the search engines can hang around for a long time – years in fact.  So, consider it a bonus when they actually send you the message rather than telling 1000 of their Facebook friends about their issue where you may or may not hear about it and suffer the consequences.

If you are at all concerned about reputation management, and you should be, then consider accepting these comments/criticisms you are receiving and deal with them right away. Thank the person for telling you about it, and encourage the conversation to continue to make sure you understand the issue and then deal with it – yes, even in a public forum and then ask for feedback. This demonstrates to that individual and others, that you take responsibility for your business and are willing to make concessions where need be and fix problems that might exist.

Does this mean that you should accept every comment and every criticism that comes your way? Certainly not, as we all know there are unreasonable people out there who are only interested in ruining your reputation not in fixing the problem. You need to evaluate these on an individual basis.  However, if you notice that there is a consistent theme or issue, chances are there are a lot of people out there with the same concern and these should be dealt with.

If you are smart, you will add Google alerts to your repertoire to make sure you know what people are saying about you and your brand. If you are a larger corporation, you may need something more robust and there are many applications out there to assist you. Feel free to ask me for suggestions.

I think it all comes down to confidence in the long run – confidence in yourself and in the fact that you have a great product or service to offer.  As a Certified Social Media Specialist, I encourage all my clients to look at this as a great opportunity to deal with the issue head on and potentially turn that customer and others around.

What do you think?  As always, I love getting feedback. Here on my blog, you’ll get commentluv.  That’s a plug in that allows you to leave a link back to your own site when you leave a comment.

Until next time, Happy New Year!  I hope it’s a prosperous one for you all.

Joanne

While physically located in Newmarket, ON where Joanne lives with her family, she is Virtually Yours, anywhere.

3 Ways to Reputation Management – Keeping An Ear to the Ground

Yes, it’s true! People talk about their life experiences – good or bad every day.  In the past, they would tell their friends, family and co-workers, but here’s what’s changed.  Now anyone can go online and spread word of that experience… with the world.  With the surge in blogging, article writing and tweeting, people now have a voice and they aren’t afraid to speak up.  If you are a business owner, how well are you tapped into what people are saying about your brand?

If people are saying great things about your business, wouldn’t you want to thank them? Wouldn’t you like to springboard off of that positive feedback to influence others to do business with you? Of course you would.  The other side of the coin however, is this.  Do you think it’s possible to keep 100% of your clients happy 100% of the time?  If you do, please tell me who you are! The reality is, that sometimes clients will go away unhappy and they are going to talk about it, potentially online.  So it’s very important to stay tuned in to the conversation that’s taking place out there.

How do you do that?  Here are a few ways to stay connected to the conversation.

1. Google Alerts

Go ahead and set up a Google account for yourself and install Google Alerts. It’s FREE! Enter the keywords for your brand – your business name, your name, your domain names, your key personnel, etc. Go ahead and enter your competition as well.  Wouldn’t it be great to be able to monitor that activity too?  GA will send you an email to tell you when it gets a hit on that search criteria and you can investigate. Yahoo also has its version too. You can find it here.

2. Twitter Search

Set up Twitter Keyword searches to monitor the conversation going on in Twitter. You use the same philosophy as above.  You can do that from whatever console you are using i.e., Hootsuite, Seesmic or Tweetdeck for example.   Don’t forget that tweets get indexed in the search engines too.  Good and bad comments can hang around the search engines for a long time, years in fact.

3. Trackur.com

Consider using an application like Trackur. It has a great Social media monitoring system and comes with a free and a premium version.

There are a myriad of other applications that you can try out as well.   Some are free, others charge a premium.  Depending on the size of your business, you may need something more robust.  Try radian6.com

Good news spreads fast on the net, and bad news spreads even faster.  So what do you do when your brand gets mentioned?  If it’s a great review, as I said above, thank the person/entity that is providing the great feedback. Foster that relationship.   They are acting as a great ambassador of your brand.  But what to do about a bad review?  Don’t ignore it.  Others won’t.  Take this as a great opportunity to engage them in conversation, listen carefully to what is being said and respond appropriately.  By addressing it here, not only are you are showing that you care, but you may be able to change their opinion and you can turn the relationship around.  It’s Public Relations.

As a Social Media Specialist, I encourage all my clients to monitor their brand and make sure they are participating in the conversation – good or bad.  After all, it IS your reputation at stake.

What do you think? Have you engaged people in this environment using these tools? How did they work?  I found an example of this just yesterday where someone included my content in his post and gave me credit for it with a link back to my site.  What did I do?  Thank him of course!

I love getting feedback.  Here on my blog, you’ll get commentluv.  That’s great for all you bloggers out there. Leave a comment and you can leave a link back to your own blog!  But you don’t have to be a blogger to leave a comment. I’d love to hear from all of you.

Joanne

While physically located in , Ontario where I live with my family, as a VA, I’m virtually yours anywhere….

Don’t Count This Bird Out!

Many businesses struggle with how to use Twitter to grow their business.  In particular, brick and mortars often time struggle to find people in their geographic area to ‘tweet to’.  Understandably, in smaller areas outside major city centres, the population of Twitter users is generally lower, potentially making it more difficult to drive business through your door.  However, with Social Media in general becoming more mainstream, I believe in the not too distant future, this will become less of an issue.

With Twitter usage up dramatically lately,  it would appear that many are beginning to realize its potential to really help drive their business forward.   Check out this interview that Chris Brogan did recently with Restaurateur Joe Sorge who owns AJ Bombers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.   See how Twitter has in his words, ‘built his business’.  Then follow @ajbombers on Twitter to see how Joe puts Twitter to work!  For that matter, follow Chris Brogan too – @chrisbrogan.

Then, to help you build your local twitter following, check out these 3 applications:

1. Twellow.com

Twellow is the Twitter Yellow Pages.  As a brick and mortar, you can not only create a great profile for yourself or your business on Twellow, but if you click on the ‘Twellowhood’ tab at the top of the page, you will be able to create targeted searches within a specific geographic area.  Within Twellow, you can even follow people on Twitter and start to grow your network.

Helpful tip: When creating your own profile, make sure you click on ‘expanded bio’ and include all relevant info for your business and make sure you maximize your exposure in the categories section. You are allowed 10.  Make good use of them!

2. Nearbytweets.com

Nearbytweets allows you to search by location and by keyword. By keying in these two items, Nearbytweets will produce a stream of tweets from that and surrounding area that include that keyword.  This is great not only for finding new prospects, but as a business owner, this is great for reputation management.  You can really keep your ear to the ground and listen for any tweets that have to do with your brand and respond to them quickly.

Helpful tip:  Nearbytweets will allow you to save your locations and keywords to streamline the process. You will find this under the preferences tab.  Nearbytweets also allows you to click on any individual tweet to get more information or review an individual’s profile. You can then follow that person/organization from there.

3. Chirpcity.com

Chirpcity is another app that will do location searches for you. It will bring up the image, username and individual tweets.  If you  click on their image, you will be taken to their page, where you can then review their profile and follow them if you so wish.

Helpful tip: If there is one particular tweet you are interested in, you can press ‘view tweet’.  This will take you to the individual’s profile page where that one tweet will be displayed and you can reply to or retweet that particular tweet right there. That’s a handy option. Saves you sifting through all their tweets.

There are other applications out there however, many have pitfalls.  Tweepsearch for example,  has a great concept in that it will bring up the person/organizations bio, and show you their followers, friends and updates, but they are sorely out of date.   It says my last recorded update was 4 months ago. Actually it was more like 2 hours ago and my friend/follower information is also incorrect.   So you will want to choose apps that are current and give you the most accurate information.

If you are still struggling with Social Media and wonder how you can make it work for your business, it would be best to seek out the assistance of a Social Media Specialist.    As a Social Media Specialist VA, I offer coaching and consulting, assessment and strategy, profile setup – customization and optimization and some ongoing support and maintenance, particularly for my blogging clients.

How about you? What applications do you use to build your twitter base?  I would love to get your feedback.  Here on my blog, you’ll get commentluv.  That’s great for all you bloggers out there. Leave a comment and you can leave a link back to your own blog!  But you don’t have to be a blogger to leave a comment. I’d love to hear from all of you.

While physically located in , Ontario where I live with my family, as a VA, I’m virtually yours anywhere….

Joanne

Who’s Next? Have you Googled Yourself Lately?

I wonder how many businesses out there are paying attention to the change that is going on in terms of brand and reputation management.  With the proliferation of Social Media,  the power to define and control  a brand is now shifting from corporations and institutions to individuals and communities.

Back in 2005, before Social Media became popular, blogger Jeff Jarvis who, among other accreditations, was creator and founding editor of Entertainment Weekly, Sunday editor and associate publisher of the New York Daily News, TV critic for TV Guide and People, purchased a Dell computer which he considered a lemon. When he wasn’t able to get the customer service he was looking for, he proceeded to take Dell down a very lonely path after writing a blog which he entitled “Dell Lies.  Dell Sucks”.  Not an attractive headline.

At the time, Jeff was not able to get Dell’s Executive to respond in the online forum. It was only after their customer satisfaction, market share and share price took a beating that they started paying attention to Social Media. Since that time, Dell has done a complete turnaround and in 2007, they began using Twitter to market its used and refurbished equipment.

Recently, they announced $2M of revenue directly attributable to their @DellOutlet Twitter id and another $1M of revenue from clickthroughs to their Dell.com site.  Jeff now says he blew Dell a big wet kiss.  If you check out their website, you will see a “community” section where they have incorporated a solid SM approach to doing business. Even their employees are now blogging on Dell’s behalf.  Bravo Dell!

This should have been a road map for other organizations to follow!  Fast forward to 2009.

Earlier this spring, Domino’s Pizza were blind-sided when a couple of its employees uploaded a video to YouTube, portraying them breaking every health rule possible while involved in food preparation.  With no one from their organization paying any attention to reputation management online, it took a consumer to bring it to their attention.  There is now a lawsuit pending.   Not surprisingly, I am now seeing Domino’s ads everywhere professing their high customer sat ratings in 2009.

I can only imagine how expensive this recovery effort is to say nothing of the cost of the lawsuit compared to the cost of  some reputation management software and a little awareness. To their credit, Dominos’ President addressed the incident by publishing its own YouTube video shortly thereafter.

It’s time for businesses to sit up and take notice.  Keeping track of what’s being said about your organization online is becoming increasingly important.  And it’s not just big business that needs to pay attention.  Small business owners are just as much if not more vulnerable to having their reputation sullied from a dissatisfied consumer.   Social Media is word of mouth marketing, and bad press can really hurt you.

It’s time to jump on the bandwagon people!  And, if you’re unsure how to track your own or your company’s reputation online, there is help out there.  While you are at it, it’s probably time to take a look at an overall Social Media strategy for your business.  As a Social Media Specialist Virtual Assistant, I can help you from strategy and action planning to profile building and on-going maintenance and support.  It’s much easier to create a positive flow of communication at the outset than to back pedal and recover from a media disaster.

So, do you know what’s being said about you?  Go ahead Google yourself…regularly.

While physically located in Newmarket Ontario where Joanne lives with her family, as a VA, she is virtually yours anywhere….