The rise of the digital age brings a whole new threat to companies large and small. Web pages that never expire and simple tools for creating viral campaigns have catapulted the damage one person can do to a company’s bottom line beyond anything we could imagine twenty years ago. Your company insures itself against liabilities and catastrophes. You take steps to reduce these events and their impact on your business. However, if you are not actively protecting your company’s online reputation, you may be putting everything your company has built at risk. Online reputation services can protect your company’s good name and mount a defense as needed.
Online Reputation Services
Optimum7 offers many reputation management services and can advise your company on the best response to negative publicity. Our team recommends the following regimen to contain customer service issues and maintain a positive brand image.
* Monitor brand conversation;
* Build SEO content on-site;
* Seed other domains with content;
* Incorporate feedback;
* Respond to rising threats.
Monitoring Brand Conversation
A watched pot never boils, which also means it never boils over. In order to contain threats to your company’s online reputation, you have to be aware as soon as the conversation begins. Monitoring services watch for mentions of your brands and alert you when there is new content associated with your company.
Monitoring has become so ubiquitous that some consumers expect it of all companies. Some people believe that if they ask a question about a company on Twitter, whether that company has an active presence there or not, they can expect that company to respond. Failure to respond only fans the flames of negativity and draws otherwise disinterested parties to choose sides and add their voices to the complaints.
Most companies are using Google Alerts to be notified of new content as it is published. While Google Alerts is a nice, free alert system, it no longer catches everything that is published online. At Optimum7, we use a more complete system that allows us to keep tabs on social media mentions, blogs, review sites, and press releases to ensure your company is able to respond in a timely manner.
Building SEO Content On-site
Protecting your online reputation also requires you stake your claim at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) for your brand name and other related keywords. Bad publicity is so damaging online because it can keep popping up on the top SERP for years; however, growing and nurturing your company’s strong presence there can prevent most negative information from ever rising to that top page.
To that end, you need to build on an SEO content management system like WordPress that can tag all the content elements with the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) search engine crawlers recognize. Advanced plugins can add a sitemap and even more SEO options, all of which make a website’s content friendlier for the crawlers.
A steady stream of content on your website should incorporate your brand names naturally. The more content you have on your site, the more variety of keyword phrases you will be able to cover in the search engines. A blog makes it very easy to add content on a regular basis and also encourages visitors to comment. Drawing unhappy people to make their complaints directly on your site may even keep some problems from ever getting out of hand.
Seed Other Domains with Content
Content on your site is all well and good, but the search engines look to your website’s inbound links to see if other people deem your content worthy of the connection. Besides, many search engines limit the number of results from one domain that they will allow on a page of organic results. Placing SEO content on other domains can help your company control the conversation on more of the links that appear high in the rankings, and may also create inbound links.
At Optimum7, we recommend a steady stream of syndicated articles, press releases, and guest blog posts to publish SEO content on other domains. This strategy will help you keep the top SERPs for your brand keywords full of content that presents your brands in a positive light.
Link building is extremely important to any winning SEO strategy, but it has an added benefit for protecting your reputation: many of the relationships you have formed online will stand you in good stead when you are in the midst of a reputation crisis. Your prior publication with these sites saves time and effort when you want to tell your story your way or when you need to blitz a keyword.
Incorporate Feedback
The world has gone transparent, and no company can afford to pretend away customer issues. Protecting your online reputation means doing whatever it takes to live up to the reputation you are trying to maintain. The same Internet tools that make it possible for one irate customer to blow a bad experience completely out of proportion can also help your company gather feedback that improves the customer experience and eliminates many bad publicity events.
Your website should make it clear what your company does, where it is located, and who runs the business. Include a “Contact Us” form and make sure someone is monitoring the email address that receives those messages.
Simple surveys can help you learn more about the issues customers see. Sometimes the problem will not be with your company, but rather with the customer’s expectation. Improved communication about the limitations of your offers or the proper use of your products and services can help more customers succeed and reduce the number of complaints you receive.
Committing to customer service sometimes requires you go above and beyond to satisfy the squeaky wheel. It is often easier to settle with a refund or future discount than defend against a scathing review for years to come. Your company should ensure that all employees understand the importance of customer service and where they should go when they are unable to resolve a complaint to the customer’s satisfaction.
Responding to Rising Threats
Monitoring will let you know when negative stories surface on the web. The worst thing you can do is ignore them. You would do better to confront issues head on, admit fault if appropriate, and make adjustments where necessary. At Optimum7, we recommend the following actions when faced with an online reputation crisis:
* Answer questions asked in social media or on your blog;
* Take the conversation offline;
* Offer to appease unhappy customers;
* Avoid drawing attention to negative information;
* Ask to have offensive material removed;
* Buy time to prepare a public response.
The sooner you respond, the better, but do not be afraid to respond with a comment like “we are investigating these allegations” while your research and negotiation is ongoing. With a social media crisis, you have to let everyone know that you are on it, but you should not attempt to tell your side of the story until you have all the facts.
Always negotiate out of the public eye. Twitter and other instant messaging media encourage snippets taken out of context, so it is better to keep all conversations private. These conversations also tend to feed the ego as it demonstrates respect, concern and a desire to resolve the issue. Besides, it is easier to be civil on the phone.
If you link to negative reviews or you send a lot of people to go read them online, you are going to add to the SEO of that content. Try to respond in a way that does not increase traffic to the offending material.
Whenever negative publicity about your company appears on a third party website, review that site’s terms of service to see whether the content violates the terms. If the content is not in keeping with site terms, you can petition the site to remove it.
www.optimum7.com
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