How to Deal with Negative Feedback on Facebook

Posted on Aug 8, 2011 by Rick to Social Media

In managing social media profiles, one of the biggest client fears which we come across are related to how negative comments and criticism should be handled on social networks. For example, what should a company do when a facebook ‘fan’ posts something negative on the company wall?

Most negative comments are related to poor customer experiences. These comments are made by customers who have probably purchased your product/service, are unhappy with what they got, and have not yet been able to resolve the issue so they’ve turned to facebook to get resolution.

As I see it, there are three options to deal with negative comments on facebook and other social networks:

Option 1: Delete the negative comment and block the user

Facebook provides business page managers the option of erasing comments and blocking users. This means that their comment disappears and also that they cannot return to the page. This is the most harsh reaction of all three of our options and is rarely recommended except when comments are offensive to other users.

• Advantages: Comment is hidden from other fans and user cannot come back to post additional comments.
• Disadvantages: User may become more upset and post bad press about your company on other Web outlets such as forums, business review websites and other social networks. Remember, a happy consumer tells 3 people and an unhappy consumer tells 9! While this option is appealing in the short term, the long term repercussions can be much harder to control.

Option 2: Delete the negative comment

As a facebook business page administrator, you also have the choice to simply remove a comment, without blocking the user. There are legit uses for this when comments are irrelevant or spammy.

• Advantages: Comment is hidden from other fans
• Disadvantages: Same as option 1 except that your fan may come back and add another comment in the future

Option 3: Be Transparent

The last option, and the one we typically recommend, involves leaving the negative comment posted and replying in a concerned way with intent to correct the problem and appease the customer. This is typically recommended to avoid the negative side-effects of Option 1 and Option 2, while also showing other fans that your business is committed to keeping customers happy.

• Advantages: Negative publicity can be turn into positive publicity by publicly turning a disgruntled customer into a happy one
• Disadvantages: Not every customer can be pleased. However, making a sincere attempt can go a long way.

In the end, transparency (Option 3) is typically recommended as it is preferred to deal with criticism in a semi-controlled environment (like facebook), as opposed to having to deal with angry and motivated customers who may post the same negative comment in several other places where you as a business owner have less control.

Tags: facebook, reputation management

Owning Your Brand Name in the Search Results for Reputation Management

Posted on Oct 23, 2009 by Rick to SEO

Recently, I received a call from a new search engine company who offered me a “unbelievable advertising deal” (as the salesman put it) for pay per click ads on their search engine. The salesman claimed that their new search engine was the fastest growing engine in the world, stealing millions of Google users every month. Naturally, I was skeptical and curious.

Since I had never heard of this particular search engine, I consulted Google. I searched for this company’s brand name and, as expected, their new search engine website appeared first in Google’s results. In positions 2 through 10, however, I found a number of forum and blog posts about this new search engine. I read through all of them and found one thing in common; every other site listed in the top 10 for their brand name had negative things to say about the search engine, their marketing practices and lawsuits related to their brand.

How silly, I thought. I would expect that a new search engine, especially one trying to sell advertising to other search experts, would do a better job at managing their own online reputation. Couldn’t they have guessed that I would do at least a little research prior to signing an advertising deal? Being an unknown in any industry almost guarantees that potential customers will research a particular company. Why wouldn’t this new search engine ‘clean-up’ their brand name search results before starting a new cold-calling sales campaign like the one I was just hit with?

When your customers search for your brand name, what are the top ten results they see? Hopefully, your business website appears in #1. Don’t stop there, though. What appears in positions 2 through 10? Do the results promote the positive aspects about your business or products? Are some of these results hurting your chances at gaining new customers? What can you do about it?

What is Reputation Management?
Reputation management is not about hiding your faults, but is about putting your best foot forward. Think of it like you would think of someone looking for a new job. You wouldn’t expect a job applicant to present their weaknesses on a resume or in a cover letter would you? Then why would you let the search engines present similar information to your potential customers?

Strategies for Managing Reputation
In this post, I want to review a few strategies for helping business get more of their own content and others’ positive content to appear for their own brand name searches. Of course, there are many other aspects of reputation management that aren’t covered here. Today, I want to focus on search reputation management.

Using the Social Networks
More and more, social media profiles dominate the search results for both individual and business names. You’ll see this most often when searching for an individual’s name. You’ll also see it for companies that have active profiles on given social networks. Begin by starting a profile/fan page for your business on relevant social networks. Take a little time to build out an informational profile on each network keeping in mind that this may be the first exposure that a potential client has to your business. Once the profiles are complete, link to them from your website to help improve their ranking in the search engines. Consider starting with these networks:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Any other industry specific networks that exist

Press releases
Press releases are a great way to help control the SERPs for your brand name searches. If you’re not already doing so, submit press releases regularly. Make sure your brand name appears in the press release title and copy. Again, building links to these releases will help move them into top positions. Here are a few free and paid press releases websites which are good for this:
• PR Web
• PR Inside
• PR Log

Wikipedia
Wikipedia more or less owns the search engine results for countless numbers of keywords. The authority of Wikipedia makes it another good place to get listed. Often times, your Wikipedia listing will make it to the first page of search results for your business without too much effort.

To get listed on Wikipedia, you need to be ‘notable’. Is your company significant? Of course it is! Unfortunately, the editors at Wikipedia don’t always agree. There are plenty of articles to help you convince the wiki-gods that you belong. Once your listing is secured, link to it from other relevant articles in Wikipedia. This will help improve its ranking in the SERPs.

Sub domains and Websites
Have you ever Googled Google (say THAT 5 times fast!)?

What do you notice? You should see that Google’s many different websites and sub domains of google.com appear in the top results. This same affect can be seen for other major brands like Pepsi, Ford and others. If it makes sense, create addition company websites or break some of your content into sub-domains. Google will usually only return one or two pages from the same domain on any given search. By breaking your content out into sub-domains, you can bypass this limitation and can sometimes get Google to list more of your pages. Of course, breaking content into sub domains can have other significant impacts so plan this carefully.

Linking to other websites
In cases where there are positive articles (on other websites ) about your company that come close to ranking in the top 10, you can also try to help those link higher by linking to them from your own website. This is easily accomplished by creating a pres section and linking out to all the positive press about your company.

Over time, monitor the progress of each of these strategies to see if they helping move the best results into the top 10 listings for your brand name searches. You’ll notice that certain pages will naturally advance very quickly and others won’t make much progress at all. Focus your future efforts on the ones that have naturally moved up. In time, you’ll find that your new profiles, press releases and other efforts will give you more control of the top results for your brand name queries in the

Tags: reputation management

Reputation Management Tips

Posted on Jul 6, 2009 by William to Social Media

It truly boggles the mind to think about how complex our online world has become in just a few short years. A brand, as recent examples with Kentucky Fried Chicken and Motrin prove, can suddenly be flooded with negative publicity and feedback all due to the giant sounding board that is the Internet.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: reputation management

Monitoring your Online Reputation Part 3:Twitter

Posted on Sep 30, 2008 by Rick to Social Media

In parts one and two of my online reputation management series, I wrote about a couple of great tools that marketers can utilize to monitor online brand reputation. The two tools I wrote about were Google Alerts and Technorati. Today, I want to discuss a third tool that can yield interesting results, Twitter.

What is Twitter?
Twitter is an interesting social networking platform that allows individuals to communicate short thoughts about activities they are participating in at any given moment. The appeal for most users is that Twitter provides a good way for friends to keep each other up to date with what everyone in the group is doing at any one time. In a way, Twitter is like a mini-blog post, no more than 140 characters in length.

A typical Tweet (what you call it when a user posts to Twitter) may say something like, “On my way to work,” or “At the dentist, can’t wait to get cavities filled.” Of course, the Twitter platform is used many other ways, but this is the basic purpose.

Using Twitter for reputation management
Because Twitter has become such an important medium of communication for real people, you can expect to find all types of conversations. You may even notice that Twitter users utilize the platform to talk about consumer issues like restaurants they’ve been to, products they are using, likes and dislikes, etc. For this reason, Twitter is a good resource to monitor what real people are saying about your brand.

Here how you do it:
Start by going to http://search.twitter.com/advanced. This is Twitter’s advanced search tool which allows you to search through each and every public Twitter post.

Using this tool, you can do create specific criteria to search through the millions of Tweets on the network. You can add keyword terms, locations, date ranges and more which will help the search engine to display relevant results. In the previous example, I searched for all occurrences of the term iPhone where the post was written in English in with a negative attitude. Here were the results:

As you can see, there have been several recent Tweets where users wrote about the iPhone in a negative way. You’ll notice that the results are never perfect, but they do give you a good idea about what’s being said. Also notice in the top right hand corner that you can subscribe to an RSS for this particular search query. This makes it easy to keep on top of the conversation without having to come back to Twitter.com all the time.

Well there you go- another free, useful tool that can help help you stay on top of your brand reputation by keeping watch on how real people are talking about you.

Tags: reputation management, twitter

Simple Ways to Monitor your Online Reputation: Part 2 – Technorati

Posted on Sep 23, 2008 by Rick to Social Media

In part one of my Simple Ways to Monitor your Online Reputation series, I wrote about how you can use Google Alerts to monitor your reputation. Today, I’m going to introduce you to another free tool that will also give you visibility into the blogosphere to see who is writing what about your company.

Using Technorati for Reputation Management
In short, Technorati is a blog search engine. Technorati indexes content from over 1 million blogs in real time. It’s probably the best resource to use when trying to track global blogger conversations. You can use Technorati’s massive database and tools to your advantage by tracking conversation related to your business or industry in just a few simple steps.

Once you’ve started a Technorati account (it’s free), search for your brand name or a specific industry term using the search box provided. Take a look at the results that are returned. Are these results relevant for your business? That is, does Technorati return sample blog posts that people wrote about your company or industry? If not, try searching for your brand name using quotation marks. For example, we would search ”that agency”. Other search options allow you to determine where to search and what levels of authority results have to have. See below:

The goal in this first step is to refine the search results so that the results actually show posts that are at least partially about you. Once you’re happy with the results, click the subscribe button as shown below:

This will allow you to receive an RSS update each time something new about your company comes across Technorati. When subscribing to the RSS feed, you’ll have a choice of several options for receiving the feed. Once you’ve set this up, all you need to do is periodically check your RSS feed for updates. As updates come through, you’ll receive a link that will give you information on the blog posting content about you so you can check it out. Hopefully, most of the updates that you get will be relevant to whatever you’re trying to monitor. Of course, there will always be a little ‘noise’ in the results.

Stay tuned for more tips on managing your online reputation.

Tags: reputation management

Simple Ways to Monitor your Online Reputation: Part 1

Posted on Sep 15, 2008 by Rick to Social Media

The increasingly socially-responsive Web has made it more important to continually monitor your business or brand’s reputation online. As your customers, potential customers and the media increasing use the web to talk about and learn more about your business, you need to be proactive in monitoring what’s being said. Knowing how your brand is perceived is critical in improving your product/service and customer relations. On the Web, there are a number of great tools available that can help webmasters gain a view of who’s out there linking to and talking about their website and brand. Google Alerts is just one basic tool that you should be using.

Google Alerts
As you may already know, the Google search bots are constantly running around the internet in search of information to index. You can use this to your advantage by having Google notify you every time it finds something related to your brand or business. The easiest way to do this is to setup a Google Alert. This can be done by creating a free account with Google and clicking on ‘Alerts’.

With Google Alerts, you can setup automated notifications to be sent to your inbox each time Google comes across any given keyword phrase, such as your business name or product(s). When you receive a notification, you’ll also receive a link to the location where your keyword phrase was found. Once you set this up, you’ll receive immediate, daily or weekly notifications which make it easy to review instances where other websites talk about you.

What You Can Expect to Find
Most of the time, businesses are shocked to see the frequency and types of places that there brand name appears. Expect to find bloggers, customer review websites and press releases that mention your brand. While Google won’t find anywhere near every occurrence of your alert, you will get a taster of what’s out there.

What You’ll Learn:
* If you’re trying to get the buzz out about your brand or a new product, you’ll get a feel for how successful your campaigns have been by seeing who’s talking about it based on how many places Google finds it.
* If you’re monitoring customer reaction toward a new product, you may see reviews and blog posts written about it.
* If you find no mention of your brand or products, you may want to consider a stronger online marketing campaign.

Tags: reputation management

SEO and Search Engine Reputation Management

Posted on Aug 20, 2008 by Rick to General

I recently heard a story of a guy who went to an interview. The entire interview went great until the employer asked him one last question: “What’s your MySpace page address?” Right there in the interview, the employer took a peek through this individual’s MySpace page. Seem outrageous? Yeah, but this type of snooping has become common, even if it doesn’t happen right during the interview.

More and more, employers are ‘Goggling’ prospective employees to learn more about them. And for a while now, consumers have done the same thing before purchasing a product or doing business with a new company. As a business owner, do you know what your prospects find when they search for you on the web?

If you’re like most businesses, a simple search of your company name yields your website in the #1 organic spot. But what shows up in the #2, #3, etc. spots? Hopefully, it’s something positive like press releases or positive reviews of your business. In many cases though, you may find that negative press shows up somewhere on the first page. Imaging if one of your customers searched for your website and caught a glimpse of a couple of negative reviews that show up in the search results. Do you want to address the same concerns every time a new customer comes across a concerning review? Let’s face it; even the best companies have unhappy customers.

As more and more business-rating websites come online, the potential for other web properties to show up for a query of your name increases. So what can you do about it?

Search Engine Reputation Management
Search engine reputation management is not a new search strategy but is definitely a fast-growing one. It’s taken some time for individuals and business alike to take their online reputations seriously. It’s becoming more of the norm to research products before we buy them and businesses are starting to catch on.

So how does SEO reputation management work? First of all, it’s not about going around the web and making false positive customers reviews about your own products and services. There’s already enough garbage on the internet and there’s no reason to add to it. It’s also not about magically making websites disappear.

Online reputation management is first and foremost about identifying the negative press about your company and fixing it. This involves assessing the situation and developing a plan for addressing negative press. This may mean replying to negative forum posts or consumer groups and doing everything possible to turn the negative comments into positive ones. It may also mean creating content or websites addressing major concerns about your business. A result of online reputation management is improved customer service by actually responding to unhappy customers. For the situations where you can’t make customers happy, and this happens, reputation management is about putting yourself in a better position to promote the positive things about your business.

Search engine reputation management should be an important part of any brand’s marketing strategy. Web 2.0, the ‘social Web,’ has transformed the way consumers get information. Online reputation already has a profound effect on businesses success and will continue to do so in the future.

Tags: reputation management