Reputation Management 101
Reputation Management 101 When was the last time you actually thought about your reputation? 9th grade? When Suzy accused you of trying to steal her boyfriend and spread the word you were just a “man-stealer?” That was devastating at that age. And that was just in your high school. What if your business was cooking along really well, you were servicing your clients very competently, your product was being bought and was loved by all, and someone who you can’t even figure out who they are posted a terrible review online about your company? What would you do? Look at Budweiser – they took a real hit to their reputation and look what happened to their business. And they had been respected for almost 100 years. What would you do? Well, at that point, you might have trouble if you hadn’t planned ahead of time. Protecting your “brand” – you company name, your company reputation – is a really big deal. Once your reputation is damaged, it’s really hard to climb back to the top. Just like preparing for a hurricane, you get your ducks in a row. You carefully establish your internal controls, so your product or service is effective, you monitor your advertising for accuracy and completeness, you deliver on time, you make sure complainants are satisfied, and you are careful, careful, careful. This takes a LOT of work and a LOT of attention. And you can’t let your guard down for five minutes. You must carefully cultivate brand reputation by monitoring what people think, say, and write about your product/firm. You must respond to every piece of misleading information or malicious allegation. You must watch your reviews carefully, responding especially to negative reviews in an effort to mitigate any blow-back. And you must watch trends like a hawk, keeping your company in the forefront of people’s awareness. Sound daunting? Absolutely it is. Now, let me ask you: How much time do you have, as a business owner, each day to spend on all of the above issues? 10 minutes? 20 minutes if you’re lucky? That’s not enough. Also, how much education do you have in the psychology of advertising and/or selling that will give you the background so you are confident that you are going to touch people’s hearts and get them to reach for their wallets? Have you read The Psychology of Influence by Robert Cialdini? Or Persuasion: The Psychology of Selling? Or In Demand by Ryan Jaten? Or The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg? Or even Entrepreneurial Personality Type by Alex Charfen? These books scratch the very top veneer of what It takes to understand how people think and respond to advertising, selling, and purchasing. Persuasion – the underlying method to all sales and client management Habit – how you build your day, your staff’s focus, and your client interaction Entrepreneurial – what does it take? What do people see when they see you and/or your company? Reputation online has to be built over time. A company owner can’t just wake up one morning and say, “I think I’ll get a reputation today. I’ll call on a couple of companies, tell them what a great guy I am and how my wonderful company was started, and my reputation will spread.” An online reputation is a lot harder to get and even harder to keep. Someone once told me, “It’s not the money you MAKE, it’s the money you KEEP.” Reputation is the same way. So how DO you build and maintain a reputation? Here are a few hints. Google is the largest search engine in the world, thus we will talk about Google. And Google is all about reputation. That’s all they sell – reputation. Yours is tied to theirs. If Google refers someone to a disreputable company, people will start using DuckDuckGo. If Google refers someone to a company that turns out to be nothing but a con, people will start going to Bing. And Google doesn’t like that. They are not about letting go of one teeny tiny customer. Google watches VERY CAREFULLY everything you do. Don’t believe they don’t. And sometimes that watchdog effect is very subtle. For instance: Sure, you got a website up. Several years ago. When was the last time you had your website guy go on your website and make a few tweaks and changes? Like your hours that changed last year. Like you moved your office. Like you added a new product or division of services? Or you just discovered a typo, and you asked your web developer to fix that? Google knows when you published your website and when you updated it. Google knows people (companies) don’t do one thing in a piece of their lives/corporate life and then do something else in another arena of their lives/business. That’s just human nature. Google knows if you put a website up and you don’t pay any attention to it for two years, you are probably just as lax with your long-term customers as you are with your website. Google is ALL ABOUT reputation. That’s all they sell – reputation. They are a bunch of computers somewhere in the world that is looking at zillions of websites and companies all the time (that’s called “the algorithm”), evaluating, scoring, and determining a reputation score. Google likes attention: to Google, to your website, to marketing, to customer care, and to all the myriad of little details that make up marketing campaigns. That’s how you build reputation online. Continuous attention. Exhausting? You betcha, because you still have a business to run. Another example of reputation management: There is something called “branding” out there, and it’s critical to your online presence. How this works is your Facebook ad must resemble your website must resemble your LinkedIn presence must resemble your pay per click ads must resemble …… ad infinitum. This is so people get used to seeing the same thing over and over again. Here’s an