The other side of Online presence – Reputation management

We have heard a lot of positive stories about Web and we have personally enjoyed the benefits and extra dollars. Also we have enjoyed the power it offers to a customer to raise their voice. Let us take to the other side of online presence, Negative (Fake/Real) reviews/stories. I will also like to tell you a real story.

My encounter with Casino Owner from Panama (Bad people with Good stories)

I had this opportunity to meet a Casino Owner from Panama who wanted to shell a heavy money to promote a fully spammy-crappy-scammy stuff. I was very interested to understand their network. I gave my 2 full days to him understanding the network. They survived on fake reviews. I searched for his network and their name, the whole web is full of great stories about them. Most of which is paid press releases, article submission, blog reviews. No negative stories at all, all positive unless I searched for “Scam” + “Their network name” AND WOW! A hell lot of negative stories. Somehow these fellows hid all the negative stories by promoting positive stories for their brand. It was very effective for a non-technical user.

Good people with bad stories

I guess this is not rare at all. You can get a hate community for almost all famous objects, from celebs to corporates, companies to ideas. Example: George bush and miserable failure. Even Walmarting across America is great to watch.

Recent survey says opinions posted by consumers online are the most trusted forms of advertising

Recommendations from personal acquaintances or opinions posted by consumers online are the most trusted forms of advertising, according to the latest Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey of over 25,000 Internet consumers from 50 countries.

How do one handle online reputation management?

I have read many books, blog posts, tried various reputation management tools but nothing convinced me enough but atleast they are better than nothing at all. Most of the tools will fetch results from web where your brand is mentioned with a combination of words like “sucks”, “scam”, “kudos”, “didn’t like” etc to highlight possible negative ones.
You can monitor

1. Google Alerts – google.com/alerts
2. Yahoo Alerts – alerts.yahoo.com
3. RSS feed subscriptions to search results Technorati, Feedster, Yahoo & Google News, BlogPulse
4. Social Media via tags: tagbulb.com, tagfetch.com, keotag.com

Don’t run from web but fight against it tactfully

(There can be serious cases where a competitor might run after your brand with a knife. Do you have a choice? No, Not at all. Only option you have is to clean the house, find the culprit and scare them using IP tracking. Even if you remove your name from various places they will add it across the web). Follow this 10 points to rule the web:

1. Have a website and link all your public profiles from the website. Anyone can create a profile with my name, I better make it by letting the world about my official presence. Make sure that the website ranks #1 for your brand name.
2. Customer do understand: Provide them the platform to discuss and interact with the company. A blog can act us the best option, followed by monitored blog, contact us forms, live chats etc. Make sure that these are connected to your top bosses for such queries. If you don’t provide the platform they will find one, which may not be under your control. As a customer, I am interested in solving my problem rather than creating problem for companies but if they refuse to listen to me then I am left with no option.
3. Interact regularly: When we were handling communities, we kept informing the community members about possible negative reviews. We had 50,000 community members watching for our brand reputation and fighting to correct it. You need more fighters in your team. Address problems on your blog with your explanations. Address proactively.
4. Monitor Google alerts works well. There are other options like trackur, brandeye etc.
5. Resolve: Don’t panic, there is no need. It can be handled and such stories can be buried inside really soon. If the post is done on a third party site, contact the site owner, request them to remove it. In case if they are not ready to remove it, ask them to add your feedback just below the comment. This works. Don’t blast the negative review, answer the concerns and if possible interact with the person in concern. We had instances where the person with negative mouth became the biggest fan of the company. It happened as the CEO of the company addressed the problem personally.
6. Get hold of top 20 spots on search engines and the monitor the top 20 traffic sources. For a traveling site tripadvisor, kayak, lonelyplanet are as important (if not more) as Google or Yahoo. So one need to monitor these top sites very closely using notifications. Get the best reviews ranked in Google for the brand name. Even get few article published with words scams, sucks explaining how people needs to be aware of fake negative feedbacks.
7. Time is the key: The faster you address the problem, the better it is. Monitor it hourly and act as soon as you get a negative flag.
8. Syndicated results: Even after removing the posts from the main source, it might reflect on many other sites (through syndication), get it removed personally. Use the phrases used in the original thread to find syndicated results.
9. Learn from your mistakes: A negative feedback can also be motivation to improve our processes. Do take care of customers properly and accept failure when it happens. I heard that some of the top hotels even bring the unsatisfied customers back to their hotels for free. Law firms returning back the money to save their online reputation. SEO companies offering few months of free services to compensate.
10. Web is powerful: It can spread like fire, so keep a dedicated team for it. Build reputation, take care of negative ones, document the trends and keep improving.