Today, customers tread with a research-oriented approach before availing any specific product or service. This necessitates every venture, whether small or big, to maintain a positive and dynamic online presence, which can only be accomplished by means of comprehensive online reputation management. Easier said than done, it is really perplexing to figure out where to start, while managing your online reputation. Thus, here are a few tips that will help you get started.
1. Track your online reputation
The foremost step is to monitor what is already being said, if you want to build your online reputation. To monitor your online reputation, you can utilize numerous comprehensive and user-friendly solutions, such as Feed Reader, Google Alerts, Yahoo Alerts, BackType, BoardReader, Trackur, Social Mention, and so on.
Setting up a feed reader allows you to view the custom feeds that you’ll be monitoring for your keyword phrases. Utilizing Google Alerts permits you to track web results, blogs, news, and videos and groups. Furthermore, setting up Yahoo Alerts enables you to track news through stocks, keywords, feeds, and local news. Likewise, utilizing other solutions also provide you immense benefits.
2. Get Involved
The next step is to dive into the conversation. If people are not talking much about your brand, it is time for you to get involved. Grow your professional as well as personal networks. Search for your colleagues, friends, business partners, clients in order to get involved in their questions, answers, and conversations. Ensure to keep them abreast of the latest updates on your life and business.
You can utilize professional websites, such as Naymz, LinkedIn, and Plaxoas well as personal websites, such as Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace for growing your networks. In addition, you can work with numerous other sites, such as BusinessWeek, FastCompany, Flickr, Emurse, Digg, StumbleUpon, Amazon, Yelp, and others. All these sites help you tremendously in building both your professional and personal networks.
3. Manage Social Media
Managing social media allows you to thwart potential reputation problems. You can utilize tools like EasyTweet and HootSuite for managing multiple Twitter accounts. To track your comment threads, you can use Disqus. In order to aggregate several social accounts, you can utilize SocialStream.
Furthermore, you can employ Ping.fm for distributing tweets to numerous social profiles simultaneously. You can also utilize Atom Keep in order to update several profiles at once.
4. Invest in customer service
If you can’t afford an expensive contact management system, you can utilize tools, such as Get Satisfaction or Suggestion Box in order to build an Internet-based customer service portal on site.
5. Respond to criticism
If you ever discover that there are negative comments being made, try to resolve the issue. Contact those people and find out why they are upset. Offer a refund or a free product, if a customer is not satisfied with your current service/ product.