On Line Reputation Management

On Line Reputation Management, four words that you as a business owner should be very very aware of, why? because these four words can ruin your reputation and can directly influence whether a consumer does business with you or your company.

I’ll share a story with you about a friend of mine who has recently decided to upgrade their current home by building their own, and over the weekend ,visited a number of display homes of several well known national building companies. The sales people were very polite and helpful, the display homes beautifully displayed and as a result of this first experience, they were very excited about the prospect of building their own home.

When they got home, just to check out the credentials of both of these very well known builders, they typed into Google, “complaints about (I’ve removed the names for privacy reasons) company” and what was displayed was pages and pages of consumer complaints about the companies services, or should I say lack of service, once the contracts had been signed.

My friends have now decided not to use either of these companies because of the range of complaints against them.

One thing that stood out to me, was that neither of these builders had attempted to try and rectify or even respond to these complaints, yet this simple search has just lost them approx $500,000 in business, that was the cost of building the home.

Word of mouth has changed due to the influence of social media and where once a consumer who’d had a negative experience with a company, could only influence their circle of friends at a Sunday get together, today are able to publish their comments to hundreds of thousands of consumers via forum sites and blogs. So word of mouth brand building has changed forever, if you’re not aware of the impact of this then now’s the time to learn and quickly!

There are numerous forum sites active on the Internet, not just Google, that carry complaints from consumers about all sorts of businesses, in fact any company that has a transactional business, deals face to face with the public or advertises on the web is vulnerable.

When planning my last holiday, tripadvisor.com became my best friend, and I changed my airline or hotel choice after reading what other consumers had to say about complaints or comments about their experience with the companies.

It’s estimated that over 40% of consumers who see a negative search engine result, will not use that company, and I cannot imagine how much business has been lost to companies that feature on these forum sites, and more importantly, these businesses are probably not even aware they’re losing business on the web.

So it’s time for you to set up an On Line Reputation Management strategy for your business today, you need to Monitor, Manage and Repair.

Setting up Google alerts is a great start, include keywords that you want to monitor, and once a day Google will send you an email giving you all the information if your name or business is mentioned on the web. Sites such as trackur.com,serph.com etc will all help you monitor your on line reputation.

My advice to you is start monitoring your brand on line today, you just never know who might be searching you or your business right now.
If you would like more information on how to protect your brand on line, please let me know via this blog and I’ll be happy to assist you in setting up an effective strategy to monitor your on line reputation.

Twitters Got Worms!!

Back in January I wrote about hackers striking at Twitter and adding a few nasty little comments to Britney Spears and Barack Obama’s Twitter pages, well the hackers have done it again, with 2 worms being let loose over Easter.

The first spam worm from a web site called Stalkdaily, infected Twitter profiles and forced Twitter accounts to send updates towards the StalkDaily web site, this was then followed up by a second worm called mikeyy. This worm, posts unwanted messages on your update page and appears to be more of nuisance than a threat.

If by some chance you are a victim of this worm, you can visit this link to get it removed.

The best way to avoid these worms is to use the following 3rd party applications,Tweetdeck and Seesmic .

Good luck and watch out for mikeyy!!

The Growth Of Social Media Sites Continues

It seems there is no holding back the growth that social media sites are achieving with on line consumers month after month, and with new research published over the last few days, any company that does not seriously consider integrating a social media strategy into their marketing and communications plan really needs to rethink and refocus.

Just looking at Twitter, the latest Nielsen Online figures indicate a massive growth of 1,382% year over year in February 2009 with more than 7 million US unique browsers for the month, compare that to January when it achieved 4.5 million US unique browsers, a growth factor of 50%, in one month.

Overall, US visits to social networking sites increased 4% in February vs the same month last year, with Myspace and Facebook still competing for a share of the market. Myspace winning the overall battle according to Hitwise, with Facebook the big winner with a growth of 149% over February 2008. Facebook also achieved good solid growth from the 35+ market, which grew 23% in February, whilst Myspace's grip on the older demographics is starting to slip.

The social media revolution is also affecting the way the average internet consumer uses the medium, with the use of the internet for on line entertainment decreasing by 29%, being replaced by on line communication sites.

So if all of this wasn't enough to get you thinking about taking social media seriously, couple it with the on line consumers attitude to business and social media.

In a March 2009 Netpop Research study, 93% of social media users say companies should have a social media presence,whilst 85% believe companies should not only be present, but should actively interact with consumers via social media sites. 56% of social media users feel a stronger connection and better served by those companies when they interact in social media environment. So, there you have it.

In my travels within the real estate industry, I still have business owners tell me they have banned staff from using Facebook and Myspace in company time, well my argument against this policy, is to employ your staff to work on your company profile as a trade off, so if they spend 4 hours a day on Facebook, get them to spend 50% of the time on building your business profile and updating the site, after all the fastest growing demographic using Facebook is 35+, right in the middle of the real estate buying public.

As a start to creating your social media strategy, you can read my earlier posts here and here, these posts will help you enter the world of social media and show you how you can start to build a strategy for your business that will help you engage your customers more effectively and create the social media handshake.
Good luck and let me know of I can assist you in any way, to make this an easier journey for you.

Here is a copy of the latest Hitwise results for your information:

Social Media - Defining Your Social Media Strategy

Hi everyone, I thought you might enjoy my podcast: Mike Andrews Real Estate Technology Podcast

- - Mike