How to Manage Your Online Reputation and 3 Examples of Companies Doing It Right

Managing your online reputation is one of the most important things your business needs to maximize performance and counteract certain conversations that are bound to harm the image and sales of your business.

Taking certain measures in the form of various strategies and techniques will help you generate more positive content and make it appear higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).

What you need to keep in mind is that while online reputation management (ORM) aims at maximizing the visibility of your positive content and boosting the image of your business, it also acts as a sort of preventive measure that shows you how to handle negative customer feedback and what you need to do to avoid negative customer experiences.

So, keep on reading to find out what you need to do to enhance your online reputation and promote your growth.

 

1. Encourage Online Reviews

The power of reviews is immense. After all, statistics show that 76% of consumers trust them as much as recommendations from people they know.

As a powerful form of electronic word-of-mouth marketing, leveraging online reviews is your secret weapon to promote your business in the most cost-efficient way.

Concerning positive feedback, your business can really benefit from it since it will show you what works within your operations.

However, negative feedback is inevitable but that doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world.

If you think about it, getting negative reviews will help you understand your customers and what got into the way of delivering amazing customer experiences.

Whether good or bad, finding a way to ask your customers for their valuable opinion is your golden ticket to collect customer feedback and use it in a way that will enhance the performance of your business.

The easiest and most cost-effective way to do that is through email marketing.

To get started, you simply need to find an amazing email marketing platform to give you the right tools to create amazing emails that will incentivize your audience to write a review about their latest purchase or your services.

If you haven’t already leveraged the power of email marketing, there are numerous Constant Contact competitors out there that can give you access to an amazing email editor and marketing automation to help you collect reviews and get one step closer to mastering online reputation management.

Here’s a great example from Lyft:

lyft

Do You Know Your Online Review Score! Check It Now!

 

2. Use Social Listening

Managing your online reputation is all about tracking mentions of your business through various social media platforms.

This practice is commonly known as social listening, a tactic that will let you track and analyze customer feedback and show you what they think about your brand and your products.

For instance, if a consumer starts to spread negative content around Instagram or comments on your posts and Facebook ads, then you need to be the first to know about it.

Letting such comments get out of hand without you intervening and offering insight can lead to controversies and, depending on the nature of the content, harm your online reputation.

So, finding and responding to negative comments and complaints is the best way to manage and prevent their negative impact.

At the same time, tracking and discovering positive comments will give you fresh user-generated content that you can acknowledge and redistribute across your social media channels to boost your online reputation and improve lead generation.

 

Question about social media? Let’s Talk!

 

3. Take Advantage of ORM Services

Taking control of your online business reputation can be a difficult task, especially when you have a strong business presence and a massive target audience.

As experience has shown us, the wrong comment or reply can create a large volume of negative responses that will pinpoint the negative aspects of your company.

While you might think that things like this can easily be forgotten, time can’t heal your brand reputation without you taking action.

Poor online reputation caused either by an unfortunate social media comment or poor customer service can be a major deal-breaker that will affect your sales and have a negative impact on your brand image.

Whether you have a stellar online reputation or you are struggling to get things back on track, getting all the help you can get to prevent or fix it can be your number one ally to success.

In this case, taking advantage of online reputation tools and services will help you see the bigger picture and offer you a valuable helping hand to fix your online reputation entirely.

Services like eBizUniverse, for instance, will assess your brand and come up with a custom strategy to boost your online reputation and get your sales back on track.

To get the most out of such services, always look for those that will give you strategies that are tailored for your business and step by step solutions that will help you thrive.

 

What’s Your Online Review Score? Find Out Now!

 

4. Join Multiple Social Media Platforms      

As you’ve realized already, consumers use and engage with several social media platforms at the same time.

As it is natural, both your satisfied and dissatisfied customers will take it upon themselves to write about their experience with your company and products, post it and share it throughout social media.

If you want to be there when that happens, then you need to have a social media account across multiple social media platforms.

Having a great online reputation is all about avoiding controversial feedback and giving solutions to your customers’ complaints, so you always need to be present across multiple social media networks if you want to maintain it.

On the plus side, setting up a social media account is completely free, so when you discover that your audience is posting about you on, let’s say, Tik Tok, then it’s time to create a new account and start catching up with your social media followers’ content.

For Chipotle, creating a Tik Tok account was a win for the company:

chipotle

Question about different social media platforms? Let’s Talk!

 

5. Be Honest and Transparent

What consumers hate more than having a bad user experience with your products is deleting their comments about it.

Well, mistakes can happen whether you are a seasoned marketer or not.

Instead of deleting and covering up what your customers already know, try to address the issue and offer a genuine apology that will prevent backlash and show your audience that you appreciate their feedback.

As we’ve seen in the past, companies that delete negative comments and try to mislead their customers will always be in the eye of the storm since sooner or later the truth will be out and you’ll have to deal with angry customers who will not hesitate to boycott your company.

Staying true to your values and admitting your mistakes is the first step to show your customers that you want to improve your business and deliver great customer experiences.

Here’s an example from DiGiorno that leveraged a trending hashtag to promote their brand:

advertising

And here’s the brand’s apology after realizing the mistake:

pizza

Amazing Online Reputation Management Examples from Established Companies

1. Starbucks

It’s only natural that the bigger and more popular your business gets, the more your customers are going to reach out to you on social media.

As social media users will grab the opportunity to express their love for your products and services, an equally large number of them will call you out on social media platforms for bad customer service or bad customer experiences.

For Starbucks, users making comments expressing their love for the brand and its products is nothing new.

facebook

Comments like these can supercharge a brand’s image and create a positive disposition that assists their customer retention endeavors.

As more and more consumers favor positive reviews and amazing customer experiences, it is important for businesses to get more positive user-generated content that will not only help them attract new customers but also show the real value of their brand.

However, positive comments are always followed but negative comments that, if left unattended, can lead to negative disposition and misleading trends.

Here’s a recent example from Starbucks:

starbucks

No matter how small or big your customers’ bad experiences are, you should treat them as equally serious and potentially harmful for your online reputation.

And if you don’t hurry to give an explanation as to why that experience occurred in the first place, then you should be prepared for additional social media user comments that will expand on the initial comment’s negative info.

For Starbucks, looking into their customer’s complaint by sincerely apologizing and asking further details is the best way to show that you value both the customer and want to improve your operations.

 

Are you proactively managing your reviews?

 

2. Samovar Tea Lounge

Getting poor customer service will almost always lead to negative reviews from your customers.

Whether it is through social media comments or review sites, the message is always clear: you failed to provide stellar customer service and here’s why.

While getting negative comments on your Facebook or Twitter page is a usual thing, collecting negative feedback on review sites can harm your online reputation more since potential customers will look through these sites to determine whether your business is worth their time and money.

Letting negative reviews without addressing your customers’ concerns can be the spark that will fuel other consumers’ disapproval of your business.

So, if you want to avoid that, then you should pay attention to what already successful businesses do to avoid that.

The Samovar Tea Lounge, for instance, usually responds to Yelp reviews by addressing the customer’s concerns, offering them a solution and showing their potential customers that any unfortunate incident stems from multiple factors.

customer

What makes this online reputation management endeavor efficient is that the person who was in charge that day takes the time to reply to the concerned customer.

By telling them that their feedback will contribute to streamlining their services during peak times better and by inviting them to revisit their business with the promise of providing more satisfying customer service, the brand shows that their customer’s satisfaction is their top priority.

For businesses like the Samovar Tea Lounge addressing online reviews and customer concerns is an essential tactic to enhance customer service using technology and minimize the impact of single negative reviews.

 

3. EA Help

Online reputation management is an essential part of every business that wants to boost its brand image and have stellar customer service that supercharges their customer lifecycle marketing.

However, sometimes it is difficult to respond to every customer comment, especially when it comes to bigger businesses with massive social media followers who won’t hesitate to leave a comment about pretty much everything bothering them.

To combat the problem, video game company Electronic Arts has created a separate Twitter account called EA Help that focuses exclusively on assisting customers with their games and accounts.

Dedicating an entire social media account that has more than 400k followers is a big step for a company that already has other customer service channels to solve their customer problems.

However, by doing so, EA manages to ace their online reputation management by giving their customers a familiar space to express their complaints and get answers.

twitter

Takeaway

Your online reputation can either make or break your business. Neglecting to monitor and take steps to fix it will create a negative disposition around your business that will affect your sales and overall performance.

To avoid getting caught in a negative online reputation storm, you should find the best ways to help you manage and maintain your online reputation.

After all, prevention is always better than cure, so next time you find yourself in doubt as to what you should do, take a look at these amazing ways and best examples and turn your online reputation management efforts into a piece of cake.

 

 

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