MeasuredUp Customer Service and Small Business Marketing Blog » Reputation management

Posts Tagged ‘Reputation management’

 A Smarter Way to Protect Your Company’s Reputation

Thursday, April 14th, 2011

From Bnet.com
By Christopher Elliott

You probably already know the value of managing your company’s reputation.

But just in case you don’t, here are a few points to ponder:

* BP’s handling of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is a classic case of a company in dire need of a managed reputation. Yeah, it tried buying adwords on Google after the incident, but it was too little, too late. By then, BP’s name had already become a punchline, and it will probably always be synonymous with a disastrous gusher, linked forever like Exxon and Valdez.
* Remember United Breaks Guitars, the video I showed you last week? That rep management slip-up reportedly cost it $185 million. Had it managed the crisis better, it might have lost far less.
* Last month, a video of GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons shooting an elephant in Zimbabwe made the rounds online. You’d think someone as Internet-savvy as Parsons would try to avert the damage with a sophisticated rep management campaign. Instead, he suggested his critics were clueless, even after calls for a boycott against the domain name registration company. “GoDaddy lost customers after that,” says Kent Lewis, president of Anvil Media. “I was on an email list of Internet pundits, where the major discussion was who offered the best alternative to GoDaddy for hosting. They all left.”

Saving money and face are great reasons to manage your reputation, of course. But experts say that’s not good enough.

Customers Demand It

Do it for your customers.

“Reputation management, and reputation management firms, are largely tasked with disaster cleanup,” says Scott McAndrew of the digital marketing firm Terralever. “They come in when things are bad, and, in many cases, use tactics that hide what’s bad, and try to court what’s good.”

But rep management like that is the rough equivalent of treating the symptom without looking for a cure. It’s crisis PR plus.

How Protecting Your Reputation Improves Customer Service, and Vice Versa

“Even the best reputation management can’t hide a business that is truly lousy in customer service and their are simply too many other choices out there then to buy from a business that does not value you,” says Marc Karasu, founder of the customer-service site MeasuredUp.

Reputation management can drive better customer service, though.

Instead of rebranding themselves whenever there’s a reputation problem, companies should try to use the tools of rep management to determine where customer service problems are — and fix them.

Yesterday, I covered one company’s bold plan to embrace the bad reviews it gets. What if negative reviews could be incorporated into a more comprehensive reputation management program?

Read the rest of the article here

 Importance of Online Customer Service and Reputation Management

Friday, June 11th, 2010

Read entire article:

http://www.b2cmarketinginsider.com/online-marketing/importance-of-online-customer-service-and-reputation-management-0496

Whether you are at an established company or at a startup the pressure on you as a marketer to deliver is immense.  To make matters more challenging it is likely that your marketing budget has been cut.  Every dollar you spend is questioned for ROI and in most meetings you are asked about developments in social networking, customer service and online reputation management because it is in the press and tantalizingly promises high return at low cost.

Whatever category your business is in, online customer service and reputation management are marketing tactics you should be employing that compliment almost any brand at very little cost.

Customer Service

In today’s economy no single thing matters as much for your sales and loyalty as building a great customer service brand.  This is an area of marketing often overlooked or muddled with expensive and hard to use tools.   If you are even aware of your customer service problem it is likely you first came across it the way most consumers do by finding a review about your company online on a search engine.

Online reviews are here to stay and many current and potential customers use internet search engines to help guide their online research in deciding where to buy.  You can leverage the world of online consumer reviews in your favor and often have more impact on thousands of active consumers’ purchasing intent then the best TV commercial.

Whether you have a large customer service department or none at all, already have a good customer service reputation or need to build one, many new online customer service tools exist today that are often free or low cost.

What You Can Do Now to Improve Customer Service and Reputation

Start asking your top customers to review you on customer service sites like MeasuredUp.com or angieslist.com.  By confidently asking top customers for customer service reviews you will have dozens of complimentary reviews of your company online in no time.   These will negate most bad reviews, increase your ranking on search engines and help interested potential customers to find and trust you when researching online.  The goal is not to have only good reviews as even the best companies have some bad reviews about them online.  The goal is to have a balance and to demonstrate through association that your brand is focused on improving customer service.

Online Comments

Individuals are talking about you on the Internet whether you like it or not.  On thousands of personal sites, as well as Facebook and Twitter, content that mentions you or a competitor is constantly being added.  You need to join this conversation even if you can’t control it.

What You Can Do Now to Respond to Online Comments

Identify a person on your staff to spend about 5 hours a week searching for unflattering reviews or mentions about your company or articles about something that is relevant to your business.  When there is a comment field have them write some intelligent and helpful content in response.  State that they are an employee of the company and include a URL to your site.  Do not try and pretend to be a consumer as this will likely be found out and create further uncomplimentary content.  This effort will help rebut negative views, show your company cares about its reputation and will help drive traffic to your company website.  If you come across compliments add on a quick “Thank You” comment and that you care about your reputation and appreciate the support of customers.

This tactic is focused totally on trolling Facebook, Twitter and Blogs to “invite” connections with current and potential customers.  This is a hard position to measure effectiveness on but you have to consider this proactive marketing.  The opportunity cost saved is that you don’t have uncontrolled rumors online.  Many PR firms are starting to offer this service but the fact is they don’t really get it and won’t be able to react as quickly as someone in your company culture who understands your brand.

With these two easy and inexpensive marketing tactics you can quickly augment your existing marketing efforts and start to raise your company’s social media presence, customer service and online profile while helping increase sales and build online reputation.

These tactics should be factored into your budget as the cost of doing business if you want to compete in today’s interconnected digital world.

About the author: Marc Karasu is a senior marketing executive and digital marketing expert with 20 years experience.  He is also the founder of Measuredup.com, the leader in online customer service and reputation management. He can be reached at MeasuredUp.com or his marketing consulting website MAKtaste.com.

 Small businesses use social media tools to attract customers

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

By Helen Kaiao ChangSDNN

 

Angela Cortright, founder ofSpa Gregories, which recently opened a branch in Del Mar, uses social media to find new potential customers.

“We’re trying to reach out to the local community through Facebook and Twitter,” she said, “It helps us by word of mouth. This is just a new mouth — it’s a digital mouth, instead of calling my friends.”

Cortright and about 75 other business owners attended a workshop on “Internet Marketing 3.0″ last Friday in Mission Valley. The event organized byScore, a non-profit business training group, was the first of its kind offered by the national network and the highest-ever attended in San Diego. The workshop will be held again on Tuesday in Carlsbad.
Read more:http://www.sdnn.com/sandiego/2009-08-03/business-real-estate/small-businesses-use-social-media-tools-to-attract-customers/comment-page-1#comment-10838#ixzz0NDvhoLOm

 How You Can Stay in Control of Your Brand’s Reputation

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009


Even If You’ve Done Nothing Wrong, One Nasty Complaint Can Taint Your Name

by Keith Goldberg 

 

My initiation into reputation management took place during fourth grade in Mr. Timberlake’s class. For some reason, long since forgotten, I wound up in a scuffle with another boy and, though I don’t believe I instigated the dust-up, Mr. Timberlake wasted no time in grabbing me by the neck (I remember that clearly) and marching me down to the principal’s office.

As I sat in the seat of shame outside of Mr. Stern’s office (what a perfect name for a principal, don’t you think?) the teachers and students who paraded by me cast cold eyes that betrayed their thoughts. “Hmm … the Goldberg kid, thought he was all right but I guess he’s a troublemaker.” By the next day, news of my predicament had spread like wildfire throughout the school.

But I didn’t start it! It wasn’t my fault!

Too bad.

Fast-forward more years than I’d like to admit, and, as a CMO of a major brand, I was so proud of how we were optimizing our search results — especially given the money we were spending. Then, one morning, I logged onto my Mac and was stunned.

There on Google, sitting solidly in the fourth position — right below three killer, above-the-fold search listings for my brand — was a listing titled “customer complaints.” Customer complaints about my company.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Keith Goldberg is senior VP-client strategy at EWI Worldwide. He was previously leader of creative and innovation for George P. Johnson Experience Marketing and senior VP-CMO, GMAC Direct.

I quickly clicked. The list of complaints were unsubstantiated, even comical, and the company they were blasting didn’t sound at all like us. But there was our name, plain as day. Were these really unhappy customers? Was this a sabotage campaign from a competitor? I didn’t know. It didn’t matter.

 

The most frustrating partI kept thinking about the dollars we spent to optimize traffic to our website. I couldn’t believe we had worked so hard to attract thousands of eyeballs and now, when we should be connecting with and converting this treasure trove of customers, a rogue listing was going to raise a red flag to each and every one of them. The most frustrating part was, given human nature, I knew exactly where the vast number of viewers would click first. Argh!

I also knew that if there was a way to measure the amount of marketing dollars wasted, goodwill squandered and customers lost by this negative word-of-mouth, the numbers would be staggering. That was the day I became a believer in reputation management.

Today, when I deploy a reputation-management protocol for clients, it is usually a four-part program (as outlined by the chart below) that begins by analyzing a brand’s true reputation in the marketplace, identifying what reputation mode the brand is in (build, maintain, repair), deploying the appropriate tools to achieve the objective and evaluating success to optimize methods moving forward.

The other key ingredient is vigilance.

In this back-to-the-future, word-of-mouth world made possible by the internet, it only takes one incident to ruin a reputation.

Even if you didn’t do it. Even if it’s not your fault. Too bad.

I learned that the hard way back in the fourth grade.

 

Bookmark/Share this page

This page is under construction.
It will be up and running soon with new features to make you smile more.
Thanks,
The MeasuredUp Team