Caring For Your Online Reputation
Many potential clients will do an online search for a company before committing to doing business with them. So needless to say, you should always be aware of your online reputation.
It is impossible to fully separate your professional, personal and business presence on the internet. One way to do so is to refrain from having a personal online presence at all, or, failing that, monitoring your personal online reputation closely. Some sites let you do so more easily than others though. Facebook, for example, lets you remove tags from photos of you posted by other people, while YouTube does not let you so easily remove such offensive content.
Managing Your Online Reputation
Perhaps the most important aspect of managing your online reputation is through customer service. An excellent example of how refusal to admit liability can lead to an online reputation nightmare is the now infamous “United Breaks Guitars” video on YouTube. The message in this video is that United Airlines has such poor customer service that you are better off flying with someone else, and it has already been viewed by over 10 million people worldwide. Needless to say, this is something United Airlines could easily have avoided had they simply offered better customer service from the start.
These days people have myriad ways of being heard online and they will use every one of them to tell the world that they were wronged. They will create online Yahoo! or Facebook groups, such as the ” TD Ameritrade – I hate TDAmeritrade’s horrendous customer service” Facebook group. They will also rate your product or service negatively wherever they can do so, such as on Amazon.com, or elsewhere. They will tweet about their bad experience or your poor service, and Twitter posts have the capacity to circle the world in a matter of seconds. And yes, they might even make YouTube Videos about their bad experience. The problem is that any one of these pieces of negative user-generated content can easily go viral over night.
Online Reputation Management and Repair
The best way to avoid getting a negative reputation is to establish and maintain a positive and strong web presence of your own, closely monitoring it, and addressing anything negative as soon as you become aware of it. For example, keep an active Facebook profile and monitor it constantly, answer all customer queries and try to solve all customer problems in a timely manner, monitor what people find when they search for you in Google, and try to answer any complaint the best you can.
Obviously you can’t control and fix all of it, nor can you satisfy everyone. But by aiming to satisfy most, you are putting your business on a good path to having a positive online reputation.
Yash Talreja, Vanja Kovacic
on March 22nd, 2011 at 4:44 am
Technology Wisdom » Caring For Your Online Reputation…
Many potential clients will do an online search for a company before committing to doing business with them. So needless to say, you should always be aware of your online business, as well as personal, reputation….
on April 11th, 2011 at 3:20 am
Absolutely smartly written. Real props. Usually, I do not comment on blog posts unless I feel a great desire to do so! I’ve worked in various hedge funds in my life and just wanted to supplement some information on trading . The biggest new craze now is Forex trading which I see a lot of my customers do. Playing Forex can appear alluring, but the majority of people who try it lose money. All you have to do is do a web search on the words “Forex” and “lose” to see this is the consensus. Forex is similar to what we call a “zero sum” game. You are making a bet with someone else about whether a currency will rise or fall. For every winner there has to be a loser. The net winnings of everyone combined equals zero. If you are smarter than the average player, you may make money. If you are dumber than the average player, you are likely to lose money. Most of the people making the “bets” in Forex are highly trained professionals at banks and other institutions. You are unlikely to beat them at this game. Actually Forex is not quite a zero sum game. It’s a slightly negative sum game as the Forex broker takes a small percentage each time in the spread. It’s a small amount but over a hundred trades, it ends up being a considerable amount of money. So the average player is likely to lose money, and remember the average player is a highly trained professional and probably smarter than you. There is a lot of luck in Forex, and if you play it, you will have some periods of time where you make money. This is usually because you are having a lucky streak, not because you have suddenly become an expert Forex player. However, most people are unwilling to admit their success is due to luck. They become convinced they have a system that works, and lose a lot of money trying to refine it. I would recommend not trying to do Forex at all, unless you are a trained professional. It’s like playing poker with people better than you, with the house constantly taking a small percentage from the pot. I, myself, prefer index funds, particularly the S&P 500 – just read the NOVA article by Delos Chang – there is a great deal of arguments there that you can wrap your head around.