e-CBD Blog

Online Reputation Management Guide

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Jesse Palmer

With the rise of Google+, Twitter and the behemoth that is Facebook it looks like the social internet is here to stay. People use social sites like these everyday. Heck, most 20-somethings check their Facebook feed before even getting out of bed in the morning!

Today more people are turning to the internet and their friends on social sites for trusted recommendations for businesses and products. If you run a business and you’re not engaging in a social network or two then you’re missing out on some very valuable opportunities to turn your customers opinion of you from this:

angry customer

Photo by Milqito

to this:

happy customer

Photo by daphenator

After reading through our 5 part* guide you’ll know what online reputation management is and learn real actionable items of how to do it yourself.

*Bonus Reputation Management Article

Qantas Facebook Announcement

Posted in Social Media, Social Media Monitoring, Strategy, Word of Mouth | Tagged , | Leave a comment

What types digital marketing do you want to learn about in 2012?

Posted on January 10, 2012 by admin

Social Media Marketing Course - screen2012 has well and truly begun. We’re hoping most of you are back refreshed and excited about what the year holds in store.

In 2011 we ran some large format information/teaching sessions on SEO, Social Media Marketing, Pay-Per-Click advertising and other relevant internet marketing subjects. This year we’re changing it up a bit and we’re planning on running some short courses for smaller groups (4 – 6) with a much more one-on-one feel.

What we noticed from the larger sessions in 2011 is that many of you have very specific issues related to your business and the type of help you need is more individual. With this in mind we thought we’d gauge some interest for which types of short course you’d like to attend this year.

Below is a poll with some suggested courses – let us know which ones you’d be interested in and we’ll get busy planning them. If you have an area you’d like to learn more about that’s not covered in the poll, feel free to leave a comment and we’ll take your suggestion into consideration.

Posted in Email Marketing, Facebook, SEO, Social Media, User Experience Design, e-Commerce | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Reputation Management Primer: Part 5 – How To Get Rid Of Negative Sentiment

Posted on November 29, 2011 by Jesse Palmer

You’ve been monitoring online sentiment, you’ve even started responding to negative content, but there’s still some lingering items on the search engine results page (SERP) that you’d rather not have your users see.

Remove Negative Webpages From Your SERP

It’s unlikely you will be able to completely remove a negative webpage which shows up when someone searches for your brand. The best you can do is push it down far enough that your users won’t see it on the first few pages.

There are a few ways to push those bad results down in the SERP. I’m going to share with you my favourite strategies for cleaning up your reputation.

Encourage More Reviews

This is so simple, but I hardly ever see anyone do it. I know a doctor that passes out a little thank you card to all his patients with instructions on how to leave a review on 4 different review sites. This is a great way to encourage people to leave a review.

You could also leave a message on a receipt asking for a review. An even better way would be asking for a review in an email receipt or follow-up and adding a link to the review site.

These tactics all work. People don’t mind leaving a review if they liked their service and you make it easy for them.

The Most Effective Way To Get Reviews

This method makes it as easy as possible for the customer to leave you a review:

  • Build a “Leave a Review” page on your website with links to various review sites that your customers use (Google Places, Angie’s List, Yelp, etc.)
write a review example

The content of your review page could be as simple as this

  • On paper & email receipts add a request for a review and link to the new review webpage
  • If you have a physical location ask people for a review and show the link on the receipt at the end of each transaction
  • If possible send an automated followup email a few days after a transaction asking how they like the product and if they’d write a quick review

This may seem like you’re bothering your customers a lot, but if you do it with tact it will be non-obtrusive and you’ll soon be swimming in positive reviews.

Don’t ask your customers to write a review for each site. That’s crossing into review spam territory and your hard work could eventually be lost.

If you had a particularly bad review on a certain site, you could temporarily remove the links to some of the other review sites so your customers will be forced to write reviews on your chosen site. This way the negative review will be pushed down faster.

Give your customers a choice though. Not everyone has a Google account and you can’t expect them to sign up just to leave a review on Google Places.

Pushing Negative Websites Down

If a webpage just won’t leave your SERP then you’ll need to create new content which will hopefully outrank it. This is where you can use Google’s recent “Freshness” algorithm update to your advantage. One thing you can do is put out a simple press release to news sites. You should actually already have a generic press release or two set aside just for this purpose.

If a search for “blue widgets” yields a website complaining about your blue widgets then you should create a new page which will outrank the negative page by writing about the same content…but better. Let’s say the title of the offending website is “blue widgets suck” with a list of complaints. A good page to create could be “Why blue widgets don’t suck”, with counterpoints to the content on the negative page.

If your blue widgets do suck you should probably fix them before your start publishing new content that states otherwise.

checkmark

Now you’re armed with the basic knowledge of online reputation management and even a few advanced strategies.

Remember: Don’t let reputation management get in the way of running your business. Reputation management is only a small aspect of business. If you have a good product and treat your customers with respect then hopefully you won’t have too much to worry about.

Further Reading

5 Tips For Responding To Negative Customer Reviews Online – Fantastic article with points not mentioned here

Mike Blumenthal – Expert in Local SEO & reputation management for the SMB

Outspoken Media – Reputation management experts

Posted in Google Places, Insights, PR, Social Media, Social Media Monitoring, Strategy, Twitter, Word of Mouth | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Reputation Management Primer: Part 4 – Responding to Sentiment

Posted on November 24, 2011 by Jesse Palmer

When someone praises your company or product, get in on the conversation. Thank them for their patronage and they’ll tell everyone how great your brand is.

reputation management twitter exampleIt doesn’t have to be much, but you should respond to every comment you can. People love knowing that a company they like is paying attention to them. This is the easiest and most pleasant bit of reputation management.

Negative Sentiment on Twitter

According to a recent survey nearly half of the people that used Twitter to complain about a business expected the business to respond. Furthermore, of the people that were contacted over Twitter by the offending business 83% of them liked or loved being contacted! A response is all that 83% needed to change their opinion about that business. Even if the problem can’t be resolved it still lets customers know that you care, and sometimes that’s all they need to give you a second chance.

How To Know When To Respond To Negative Sentiment

Before you start defending yourself all over the internet, you need to ask yourself a few questions first:

  • Is the review/comment/webpage real or fake?
  • Is the complaint legitimate or is the customer just misinformed?
  • Does the complaint show up when you search for your brand/product in Google?

Fake Reviews

Unfortunately you can’t control fake/spam reviews, it’s eventually going to happen to you. It’s best to not respond to the fake review unless it seems to be truly influencing your potential customers. Don’t underestimate your potential customers, they can recognize false reviews. If you have a good rapport with your customers then they may even come to your defense.

spam review and responseIf the review is in violation of the guidelines you may be able to flag it and possibly get removed. If it just won’t go away the best thing you can do is get as many positive reviews as possible. They will eventually push the negative review down far enough that it will be just a memory.

Misinformed Customers

People get confused sometimes, maybe they read an ad too fast or your fine print is too fine. Respond to the customer with grace. If this is something that happens a lot maybe you need to change your website a bit.

Legitimate Complaints

Make it right. Easy enough. If you can’t respond to everything people say about you on the internet, these are the ones you simply can’t ignore. Once you make it right kindly ask the customer to remove the negative post and post a followup.

Negative Sentiment on the 1st page of Google

When someone does a search for your brand and they see a negative review on the first page where do you think they’ll click first? You could have 100 positive reviews, but one negative review can trump them all if it’s the only one visible.

petsmart negative sentiment

This Petsmart store in Ontario needs help. The first listing is a negative review from over a year ago, and how could anyone resist clicking the page about getting assaulted?

You can’t ignore highly visible negative content associated with your brand. Each case is different, but in the end your goal is to get the negative content removed or at the very least diminish its visibility.

When To Let It Be

The Streisand Effect is what happens when an attempt to hide or remove a piece of information results in the unintended consequence of publicising the information more widely.

In 2003 a photographer taking photos of the California coastline to document coastal erosion for the government took a photo which included Barbra Streisand’s house. She tried to have it removed from the publicly available collection and unsuccessfully sued the photographer for $50m.

streisand effect

Here's the photo that caused such a fuss

Due to Streisand’s very public actions people found out about the photo and viewed it millions of times.

It hurts when there’s true or false content on the internet about you that you’d rather not have available to people. In most cases there’s very little recourse you can take to get it removed without causing a stink.

If the content isn’t getting noticed then you should ignore it too and monitor it in case it turns into something big.

Next Week

We’ll go over tactics you can use to get rid of negative reviews

Posted in Facebook, Google Places, Insights, PR, Social Media, Social Media Monitoring, Twitter, Word of Mouth | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Reputation Management Primer: Part 3 – Monitoring Sentiment

Posted on November 10, 2011 by Jesse Palmer

This week we’re going to go over how to monitor online sentiment, how to protect yourself from brand squatters, and what to do with your new data.

Claiming Your Brand

  1. Register your brand as a trade mark.
  2. Register the most common top level domains (.net, .org, .co, etc.) and common misspellings for your domain name and have them all 301 redirect to your main site.
  3. Register your brand name with all the social networks whether or not you’re going to be active on them. Knowem.com is an easy way to see if your name has been taken yet or not.
  4. If you run a local business claim your free Google Places listing and fix any errors. Do this for all instances of your listing i.e. TrueLocal, Yellow Pages, etc.

If anyone has taken your brand name, see what they’re doing with it before you react. Sometimes if you ask nicely they’ll give it up with no fuss, consider using them in the future if they’re already a fan.

If the user is inactive or using the account for evil then you can inform the social network, cite your trade mark, and request to have the account released to you.

Monitoring Sentiment

There are many reputation monitoring companies out there, but if you have the time you can do it yourself.

  1. Set up some Google Alerts for your brand & products. Google will email you when they find a new item containing the keyword(s) you want to track.
  2. Do the same thing on Social Mention or Topsy to track the major social networks

The majority of these reports will be full of stuff that doesn’t pertain to you, it will take a few tries before you’re able to filter out most of the noise.

For instance, my name is Jesse Palmer. If I wanted to monitor when my name is mentioned on the web I would put quotes around my name for the alert. This way I would only get results for the exact term “jesse palmer”.

Jesse Palmer

How can I ever compete with this hunk?

It seems that I’m not the only Jesse Palmer in the world, there’s also Jesse Palmer the ex-football player, ESPN commentator, Canadian cooking show host, and TV’s The Bachelor Season 1 heartthrob. That’s a lot of unrelated junk I have to filter out for my name.

An easy way to make sure you don’t get irrelevant results is to put a minus sign or hyphen before the word you don’t want. So a search query that would exclude the majority of websites that mention this other Jesse Palmer would be:

“jesse palmer” -football -espn -canadian -bachelor

One of the nice things about having a good reputation monitoring company working for you is that they will only deliver the results that matter.

What’s Next?

Now that you’ve got some sentiment data coming in, do you see any trends? Are people constantly complaining about a certain product? Is your website hard to use? Is there something everyone just loves?

If people are complaining, don’t take it personally. If you can’t do that then you should stop reading right now and hire someone to take care of your reputation management or ignore your reputation completely. I repeat, DO NOT do your own reputation management if you take every complaint personally; you will only end up making your brand look worse than before.

Next Week

We’ll go over how to react to positive & negative sentiment

Posted in Facebook, Google Places, Hot Tips, Insights, PR, Social Media Monitoring, Twitter, Word of Mouth | 2 Comments

Qantas’ Reputation Management

Posted on November 8, 2011 by Jesse Palmer

How can Qantas recover from the recent grounding debacle? The numbers differ, but it’s safe to say that it personally affected well over 100,000 people when you include friends and family that were expecting a nice visit from someone flying Qantas.

Back in the 80′s Rainman let us know that Qantas never crashed. It’s not exactly true, but that was their reputation back then. They were arguably the most respected airline in the world. Unfortunately there’s no quick recovery solution for this one; this incident has damaged the company’s reputation for years to come.

I’m sorry to disappoint, but I won’t be going into their politics or business practices, I’m only going to concentrate on what Qantas is doing right now in regards to their online reputation management on Twitter & Facebook.

Communication

Qantas Facebook Announcement
Why on earth did anyone “Like” this?

Qantas did a good job supplying helpful links to people affected by the grounding and they didn’t delete the mountains of negative comments they received.

I would like to point out that they shouldn’t have said they wouldn’t put updates on Facebook until the following morning. That only adds to the frustration their customers were experiencing. Even if they didn’t have anything concrete to report, they could have posted little updates just to let people know that they were still there.

Twitter thanks
Always thank your supporters

Today Qantas is on Twitter busily responding to customers with issues. They’re not dwelling on just the negative though; they’re doing a great job of keeping it positive and thanking the people that give them praise too.

Stephen Fry’s Lost Wallet

Stephen Fry Stuck in Dubai on Qantas

On Nov. 4th Stephen Fry was on the Qantas flight that was forced to land in Dubai after an engine had to be shut down. Fry used Twitter to give ABC News updates about the situation while he was stuck on the tarmac. About an hour later Qantas finally got in on the conversation.

stephen fry's lost wallet on qantasQantas did a good job of dealing with this very public situation, but they took too long to respond to Fry’s initial tweet. Qantas should have been all over this before ABC News started getting in on the action. Fry used the #qantas hashtag which would have informed Qantas right away if they were actively monitoring their Twitter stream.

To be fair there is a high number of people using the word “qantas” and the #qantas hashtag right now, but Qantas should have people monitoring each tweet for high profile incidents like this and they should be prepared to respond right away.

Customer Service on Twitter

qantas twitter profile
You close at 5pm? Your customer’s needs don’t go away at 5pm

Qantas is in a very tight spot right now. They should have their social networks manned 24/7 until things get back to normal. Their customers still have issues after 5pm and they’re missing out on tons of opportunities to let them know that they’re listening to their concerns.

I have noticed that Qantas have gotten much more active on Twitter following the Dubai incident and they’re doing a pretty great job engaging people. So good on them for that, but why don’t they control @Qantas?

Recommendations for Qantas

  • Contact Twitter and take control of @Qantas. It’s your brand name, people tweet to it everyday thinking it’s you and the user isn’t even using the account
  • Hire more people to monitor your reputation 24/7 until things die down a bit
  • Give whoever is in charge of responding on your social networks the power to speak on your behalf without having to wait for upper management to tell them what to do
  • Respond quickly, it will mean a lot to your customers
  • Don’t tell people customer service closes at 5pm. If you’re on the internet you don’t close

Bonus Recommendation

  • @QantasKangaroo is clearly in violation of Twitter’s TOS since they don’t readily appear to be a parody account. Request Twitter to remove it completely due to the inappropriate content. Consider using it yourself because it’s a cute idea.

Overall I’ve been impressed with Qantas and their online reputation management on Twitter. Big companies usually stuff it up, but Qantas is putting themselves out there, getting in on the conversations and keeping a personable & professional image the whole way.

If you’re looking at doing your own reputation management on Twitter you could do worse than study what Qantas is doing.

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