As any business owner knows, word-of-mouth is one of the most powerful forms of marketing (good or bad) a business can get. The experience of one customer can have a powerful influence on your reputation with any number of potentially new (or even existing) customers.
In “Enhancing Reputation Mechanisms via Online Social Networks,” the authors write:
Economic transactions often rely on trust. For instance, sellers usually know more than buyers about items or services offered and could misrepresent them. Without trust, mutually beneficial transactions may not take place, resulting in economic loss. Fortunately, with repeated transactions, reputations can encourage truthful behavior…
In this digital age, word-of-mouth appears to be taking on a slightly new form in the realm of social networking. With easy access to the Internet, and any number of social networking sites linking folks together, news of your business can travel quickly. It also promotes transparency, by making it more difficult for “Friends” in a social network to conceal their association. It can actually be to your advantage to embrace these tools, but there are risks. Let me show you a few options you have to develop your online reputation, as well as a few methods available to manage it.
Building Your Online Reputation – Engaging Your Existing (and Potential) Customers:
There are an endless number of ways to do this, but I will touch on the most popular:
- Facebook: With over 300 million active users, Facebook is one of the most quickly growing Social Network sites (particularly among the 30-50 year old crowd). It offers two different ways to connect with your customers: “Pages” (a profile for business that works similar to your personal profile) and “Groups” (like a limited functionality profile that you can add on to your primary personal or business profile, which only allows you to aggregate your “Friends” and post pictures/news). Both allow you to connect with your customers and interact about upcoming/past events, etc. Facebook also has built-in advertising, allowing you to get your business name in front of your target demographic in the Facebook social network.
- MySpace: Similar to Facebook in most respects, although it seems to have faded into the shadows due to Facebook’s popularity. MySpace is generally more customizable, so you can actually brand your “profile” on MySpace to reflect the business.
- Twitter: A slightly newer social networking medium, it’s considered more of a micro-blogging platform as it asks you to answer one simple question – “What are you doing?”. It provides a method for your customers to “follow” the goings-on at your business, and provides a way for you to attract attention for special events, sales, etc.
- Linked-In: More of a professional social networking site, it can provide new ways for you to build your online reputation. If your business provides a particular service, you can engage with potential clients to answer questions related to your Industry. You can also meet other business owners with which to form alliances for mutually beneficial products and services. One other benefit of Linked-In, it provides a way to locate local talent in the event you decide to add to your staff.
If you want a larger list, check out InsideCRM’s list of 50 social networking sites.
Managing Your Online Reputation:
As I mentioned above, there can be risks associated with building your Online Reputation. The Internet is a large entity, with so much activity and constantly changing content that it is nearly impossible to keep track of it. Anyone can create a webpage that negatively portrays your company or describes your company inaccurately. As you build your Online Reputation, it is important to keep track of what is being said that could be influencing that reputation. This allows you to keep a pulse on the experience your customers are having, as well as to identify if there are external entities attempting to poison your reputation with bad Internet press.
Here are a few key tools for you to get familiar with:
- Google Alerts – This service allows you to get email updates of Google results (news, web, groups, etc) based on the query or keywords you provide. This allows you to be alerted as soon as Google discovers news that you may need to know, such as a new posting or new webpage being created.
- Monitter.com – This service aggregates data from a number of different sources, which can then be put into an RSS reader (such as Google Reader) for easy browsing.
- Addictomatic.com – Another service which allows you to search across a number of sites for specific keywords (such as your name, your company name, etc). This one is helpful as it hunts media sites, such as Flickr and YouTube.
If you would like more information, there is a pretty good article regarding Online Reputation Management on LifeHacker which mentions a few additional tools.
If you would like more information, or would like help creating your social network profiles, feel free to Contact Me. Stepping into the world of Social Networking can be intimidating, but the benefits to you business could be quite substantial!
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