What Does Your Online Reputation Say About Your Business?
Do you even have a reputation?
Did you know that 79% of consumers trust online reviews as much as they trust personal recommendations? Basically what this means is that if you wanna recommend say a restaurant or a dentist to a family member or a friend they would go online and look at the online review and trust that more than your personal word.
So why is this important for your business? Simple if you’re not paying attention to what your company is doing online and what’s being said about you, you can be turning your back on loads of potential business. Now did you know that Google yelp yell.com and many other popular online directories actually create pages for you with out you knowing?
That’s right! I know that sounds crazy but think about it every single time a knew business is established these directories go out and find all the information on these new businesses and create basic webpages for them. Now your probably asking why would Google create a webpage for my business if I haven’t ask them to?
That’s actually pretty simple as well Googles’ main purpose is to give users the best experience possible and the only way to do that is to provide the best results when someone searches. If you have a business in a local area then it’s only right that Google try to show your business because you are relevant to that area and to what a user’s actually searching for.
Here’s where the problem comes in since Google creates these pages as well as yelp and yell.com and many these other directories your new, potential, and old clients, patients, customers etc have access to be able to not only view these webpages but they can actually comment on your business and what they think about your business. Now can you see why this would be a problem?
Yeah you got it!! Since your current customers can leave comments on these webpages, basically what this also allows is the disgruntled customers the ability to leave complaints for the entire world to see, so by having these negative comments online your potential clients will see these and choose not to do business with you because of your online reputation.
The worst part about all of these negative comments and why it’s such an issue to know your online reputation is actually because many business owners don’t realise that these webpages are out there.
So because owners don’t realise that these webpages exist online they don’t realise all the negative publicity that exists out there for their business. And because they’re not aware of these negative comments they don’t understand the amount of business that they’re losing.
Now I don’t know about you but the one thing I know for sure is that ignorance is no excuse for lack of success. There is more than enough information out there nowadays, so you should be prepared to see what’s been said about your business, the problem is most people are ignoring this situation and because of it they are losing business every single day and don’t even realise it.
To sum everything up, the reality of the situation is this no matter what you may think, your online reputation can be the difference between you making money or your business closing and that’s a fact.
Now let’s make sure that we are clear on something I’m talking about actual online reputation management and marketing real-life PR I’m not talking about some random social media package that many businesses offer, because they are not the same thing.
When most people think social media they think Facebook or Twitter they think MySpace many of the other sites even Instagram however when you’re talking about negativity online you should be thinking about articles you should be thinking about websites you should be thinking about blogs you should be thinking about Videos and an understanding of language and customer service to help you deal with these situations promptly and effectively, these are things that social media as a as a package do not cover and that’s where they fail.
If you’re serious about wanting to grow a business in todays market then you are going to have to pay attention to your online efforts there is no question about that however once you do pay attention to your online effort you can’t stop, you have to consistently monitor everything that includes the good and the bad.
Obviously I’m going to pull my shameless plug and say if you need help with this kind of thing you’re free to contact me and I can walk you through some of the things that you can be doing right now that you don’t have to pay somebody for or we can discuss overall online reputation management of your entire project but let’s make sure we’re clear on something you do need to do something because if you don’t what you don’t know will hurt you and your business is going to fail because of it.
Topic: online reputation
