Do you know where you left your email address online?

If the answer to that is no, you better go and do a quick check.  Do an exact search for your own email address in Google (don’t forget to put ” “s either side of your email address).

What did you find?

Most of you will have found nothing.

Some will have found a few sites with your email address on it.  They may be directories, social media networks, business forums – maybe even your own website. You should consider removing those email addresses wherever you can and replace them with a graphic text (basically a picture of your email address) to stop unscrupulous people spamming you.

If  you found your email address on anything worse, then what are you doing reading this? You should be sorting it out right now!  And what were you thinking of!!??

There is a serious point here. When people want to get a sense of you online, expect them to Google not just your name but your email address too.  If you’ve foolishly left it somewhere you shouldn’t have then either remove it or, if that’s not possible, abandon it and create a new one, no matter how much trouble you have to go through.

And don’t think that just because nothing shows up for your email address you’re in the clear.  Persistent people (yes, like me) will search for the bit before the @ too – especially if it’s a name you’ve clearly chosen yourself.  Why? Because in my experience someone with the email address ‘kingkong99@hotmail.com’ is likely to go by the name ‘kingkong99′ in other places online too.

I did that with the email address of a recent contributor to this site.  Now whether or not that person actually frequents a site for ’swingers, sex contacts and dogging fun’ I will never know.  But can you afford to leave people even wondering?

One final thing: your choice of email itself can communicate a lot about you even if you’ve never been near a dogdy website in your life.  A mate of mine’s email address is something like ‘treblevodkaandredbullwithice’.  No problem when emailing your friends but maybe not something that will do you any favours when chasing that dream job.

It’s not rocket science – you just need the tools that your prospects have got (i.e. Google); the ability to think like them, a dose of humility and a crash course in not being reactive.

Oh, and you need to know there’s a difference between monitoring and managing your reputation.

Online reputation monitoring

The simplest advice for monitoring your online reputation is to start with the FASTEST (and therefore potentially most damaging) channels out there:

1) Set up Google alerts for your name, your company name and products and brands.  Sit back and let Google bring the good – and bad – news to you whenever it hears you being mentioned online.

2) While you’re waiting for Google Alerts to bring you news, go to Twitter and search for your name, your company name and your brands.  It’s the most ‘real-time’ network / source of content there is.  If people are going to rant at the point of dissatisfaction, they’re going to do it via their mobile, and they’re probably going to do it on Twitter.

3) If that’s all clear, next do a search in Google.  Do a broad web search first.  See what comes up in the first couple of pages of Google.  Hopefully, a lot of it will be your web site pages and things you’ve done to market and promote yourself and your products.  If not, sack your web designer

Remember: people use blog posts and forum posts to vent their anger or dissatisfaction. Learn to recognise how these posts and comments appear in the regular web results.

4) To focus entirely on blog content, do a dedicated Google blog search

5) Most of all, learn to think like a customer – an angry one and a prospective one.  When an unhappy customer wants to nail you for not listening,  they’re going to nail you by telling their trusted network how bad you are and follow up by publishing posts and comments online with words like rip-off’ ’scam’ and ‘fraud’ to the end.  They want their experience of you to be found by others researching your company – and now they have the tools to do it within minutes.  Be warned; this stuff can kill your business in a matter of days.

When a prospective customer wants to find out the truth about your company, ‘XYZ consultants’, they’re going to start by searching for ‘XYZ consultants’.  Then they’re going to add the words ’scam’, ‘feedback’, ‘rip-off’, ‘review’ at the end to see what comes up.

To manage your online reputation online successfully, you need to see these words as a code that customers and prospects use to bypass your own (naturally positive) propaganda.  So learn the code – and make sure YOU search the web regularly for these coded references to you and your company.

You wouldn’t believe how many companies’ reputations are in tatters online and yet they don’t even know about it.  It could explain that gradual drop-off in sales they’ve been seeing…

Online reputation management

Managing your online reputation priorities are as follows (listed in order of the amount of your energy you should expend on them):

1) Create the best products and services you can.  This is bleedin’ obvious, but the best way to create and protect a great on- and offline reputation is to do the basics really, really well.

2) When things go wrong, do everything you can to make your customer happy.  That means invite feedback, listen without being defensive, go out of your way to satisfy them

3) When you don’t do 1) and 2) properly, people will punish you online by Tweeting, blogging, forum posting and commenting anywhere and everywhere they can.  Count on it. When you finally find something angry / hostile / nasty (true or untrue) with your online monitoring (see the list above), the first thing you need to do is NOTHING.

4) While you’re doing NOTHING (i.e. not reacting, not getting into a fight to try to defend yourself), you should be getting really honest with yourself about what it is you might have done to create the situation.

5) Then you should be thinking about what you can do to put it right.  What you can do, and what you are willing to do.

6) Then consider approaching the disgruntled punter publicly (in whatever forum or blog his/her comment appears) and a) apologise for not having met their expectations b) apologise if you didn’t listen or respond to their original feedback or complaint.  Listen, I promise you, no matter how bad this makes you feel, you almost certainly didn’t listen the first time round.  If you can do this from a genuine place – i.e. that you really do care about helping this person to feel better about your company, you’ll be amazed what you can achieve.

7) If you’ve reacted dived in with both feet and made things worse, then call us to take the heat out of the situation on 01822 610841.

8 ) Start to create positive online content about you, your company and your brands to balance, and ultimately outweight the negative.  Beware: this only works when that content is genuine and credible.

Paying offshore SEO or Reputation Management Companies to flood Google with superficial stuff about you is a false economy (an expensive one at that!) – it will be transparent to any half-wit looking to find out what a company is really like.

If you want to do it properly, call us on 01822 610841.

]]> http://www.mukaumedia.co.uk/online-reputation-management-do-it-yourself/feed/ 2 http://www.mukaumedia.co.uk/close-ecademy-account-day-4/ http://www.mukaumedia.co.uk/close-ecademy-account-day-4/#comments Tue, 09 Jun 2009 13:55:30 +0000 Sam Deeks http://www.mukaumedia.co.uk/?p=1870 I’m no closer to closing my Ecademy account despite emailing support

The Ecademy wars seem to be rolling on.  How do I know this?  Because despite categorically switching OFF notifications I’m still getting an email every time someone else posts in the latest argument thread. So that option doesn’t work.

And it’s day 4 in my quest to quit Ecademy.  At the weekend, I used the Ecademy ’support’ option to request detailed information how I could close my account, since there are no options anywhere on the site allowing me to do this.

Guess what?  No response.  No ‘Your Support Request has been acknowledged’.  Nothing.

I really don’t want to go back in there and have to commit Ecademy suicide.  It could be messy.  Hey! Maybe that’s what all those childish, small-minded egos in there are actually trying to do!  Now I understand.

This morning I got an email from TripAdvisor entitled “Hotel horror stories you won’t believe”.  The first told of a live mouse swimming in a hotel toilet bowl.  I clicked the link and found myself on the TripAdvisor page for the Conrad Bali Resort & Spa.

The mouse-story reviewer slated the hotel with a negative review and a 1 out of 5 rating.  But a quick check of the overall listing for this hotel showed that out of 191 reviews, an overwhelming majority (138) rated it 5 stars, 35 rated it 4 and only 18 (a small minority) rated it 3 stars or below.

The fact that 38 out of 65 (!) travellers found the review ‘helpful’ is an indication of the potential damage that this review could to this hotel – despite its clear track record of excellence (above).  In addition, more than half of the 65 people who rated the review rated it useful - which means they take it seriously.

Someone at TripAdvisor thinks that this was a good marketing move.  I don’t agree. Using an email to drive traffic at a negative and completely unrepresentative review for a particular hotel doesn’t feel balanced to me.

TripAdvisor already has quite a few enemies in the hotel industry.  Some are simply the owners of badly-run hotels who have lost business as a result of reviews on the site.  Others are angry at what they see as TripAdvisor’s lack of accountability and regulation.  And some allege that TripAdvisor’s system permits – and then protects – malicious and fake reviews posted by competitors.  Those are serious charges indeed.

So, in that climate, I would have thought that TripAdvisor needs to do everything it can to maintain and strengthen its impartiality – and therefore, its credibility – not erode it.

I think today’s email was a step in the wrong direction.

“It sickens me..” spits Patrick Doyle, US CEO of the Dominos Pizza franchise speaking of the YouTube video showing two employees farting and snotting on unsuspecting customers’ food.

Join the club, Patrick.

There’s real anger in Doyle’s video – currently standing at 329,000 views. How many the original video got is uncertain since it is no longer available.  I can’t help imagining the scale of the legal machinations at work behind the scenes from over the last few days of this uniquely modern PR terror strike.

What’s clear is that the situation forced Dominos Pizza to enter the world of social media -ready or not. In a few short days it has endured a baptism of fire and emerged on the other side, breathless but alive.  Doyle’s YouTube delivery was endearingly wooden but the outrage was real.

The incident seems to have – in true internet style – polarised opinion.  Judging by the comments on Doyle’s YouTube page this incident rallies the faithful and revolts the rest.

Could Dominos have responded any better?  Probably not.  Could they have monitored better?  Possibly.

The Great Dominos Pizza YouTube Disaster of 2009 is a clear demonstration of the power of social media and the importance of the three key elements of online reputation management: monitoring, evaluation and response.

When an unhappy customer blows off steam online, you’ve got a problem. Their comment is increasingly likely to appear somewhere near the top of Google – and that means its going to be read by your prospects and existing customers.

So if you come across someone raging about the service that your company provides in a forum or on a blog, what should you do?

Should you ignore it? Or put together a response? Should you get into a long drawn out discussion with them? Or take it offline and try to deal with it away from the public view?

The answer is you’ve got to respond to it, and you’ve got to do it publicly.  Why? Because once they’ve posted their grievance, it’s out there.  You can’t undo it. You can only respond to it.

We recommend that you use this as an opportunity to win that customer back and (since you have to do it publicly) boost your reputation at the same time.  So what does that mean in practice?  Click here for a real-world example.

First, you’ve got to publicly respond directly to the comment or thread if you can.  Respond from the point of view that your customer is genuinely unhappy and you’re out to do whatever it takes to win them back. A vast majority of people complaining about bad service feel genuinely put out; very few are chancing it.

Invite them to contact you directly so you can put their grievance right – but let any viewers know you’re going to report back to the thread what you’ve agreed (and be sure to do it!)

If the other party takes you up on the offer to talk with you, be prepared that the experience isn’t going to be pleasant or easy.  You’re going to have to work very hard not to be defensive or take things personally.

I’m not overestimating this point, by the way: most online attacks come from people who don’t feel listened to when they had a problem.  Let’s be realistic here: to resolve this problem you’re going to need the exact same skills the lack of which got you into this situation in the first place.  See what I mean?

When a customer goes out of their way to post critical stuff about you online, it’s an act of revenge.  For what?  For not listening.  Which means you’re going to need to start listening.  So don’t react, don’t defend a position; don’t try to explain or justify the events that led to them feeling this way – just listen.

Have in mind what you’re able and willing to do to show that their experience matters – and offer it to them.  Don’t ask them what they want.  Why not? Because most people haven’t thought that through when they complain and they will feel uncomfortable being put on the spot.  They’re likely to ask for too much (in which case you may have to refuse or capitulate) or too little (in which case they’ll feel bad afterwards).

Better that you offer them and let them refuse or accept.  Most people will appreciate you caring enough to listen.  Being offered some kind of recompense will be a bonus.

In the unlikely event you can’t agree something that will resolve the issue, let them know that you respect their decision and value their feedback even if you can’t put the situation right for them.

Either way, let them know that you’ll post back in the thread what you were willing to do to resolve the situation.  You have every right to do that – but make sure you do it in a professional, factual way without offering any opinion on the situation.

All of us will, at some time or another, find ourselves subject to a blog or forum attack from an unhappy customer or even a malicious competitor.  I have. Other people reading such comments keep them in perspective – no company gets it right all the time after all.  They set them in a wider context of their own experience of your company and its reputation.

What really matters is the way you react to this kind of criticism in the online environment. Remember, the person with the power to turn a negative comment from a threat into an opportunity is you.

Well, first of all, me probably – in a desperate attempt to salvage my online reputation.

Can I just state here that I deliberately picked Donny Osmond for this picture? However, the truth is that last night I DID listen to The Jam, some punk, a bit of The Police, a Howard Jones track and the instrumental music from ‘Titanic’.

See what I mean? You’re already starting to form a picture of me as a middle-aged sentimentalist, going for the occasional shuffle down memory lane while blogging away on my iMac.  And you’d be right. Doh.

So in a ‘post-music-ownership’ era, what will this information be used for? And what could I learn about you from your playlists?

1) Set up a forum and then leave it empty. An empty forum will stay empty. It takes an huge amount of effort to populate a forum and breath enough life into it for it to stand on its own two feet so unless you have the energy and commitment, don’t start it. An empty forum is like tumbleweed blowing through your site.

2) Fail to notice that your only contributor is an anal sex obsessed transvestite spammer. Wonder why no-one’s checking into your forum? Uncontrolled spam kills forums stone dead.

3) Allow conflict to break out on your forum. Tempting, because it attracts viewers but unless you’re a guru of self-control and a master of clean communication, you’ll be waltzing into a minefield from which nobody is likely to emerge unscathed. Harsh, but true, I’m afraid – no matter how right you think you are.

This is a very useful little review of the following ORM packages:

• Attentio
• BrandsEye
• BrandMonitor
• Brandwatch
• Distilled Reputation Monitor
• Trackur

with added value coming from the comments made by the people behind some of these packages. Worth a visit.

What is Online Reputation Management?

Sam: It’s making sure that you know what people are saying about you online, giving people the chance to say good things about you – and being able to respond quickly and effectively when somebody says something bad about you or your business.

Does everyone with a business need to consider ORM these days?

Sam: They do. In the online world, what you say about yourself is propaganda. What other people say about you is the truth. And the first thing most people do when they want to find out about you these days is go to Google.

They look at the first couple of pages of results to see what people are saying about you on review sites, in discussion forums and in blogs – sites that increasingly rank alongside or even higher than your own website in the search results.

A single negative review can put off prospects from buying. Just think how you react when you’re looking to book your holiday hotel and you find a really bad review on TripAdvisor.

So how can you find out if your own website has slipped down the rankings or whether people are saying negative things about your company on line?

Sam: Do a simple monitoring exercise – and keep it simple. Just start looking for information about yourself in the way that a prospective customer will. Do a Google search for your name or the company name and have a look at what comes up. Use Google Alerts – they’ll let you know when your company name is being mentioned on web sites and forums.

So if you find someone talking negatively about you what should you do?

Sam: Our #1 recommendation is “don’t react!” – which, of course, is easier said than done.

You mean – don’t go on to the forum yourself and tell them right off that they don’t know what they’re talking about?

Sam: Right. The greatest damage most people do their reputation is to react without thinking to what someone has said about them – by going into ‘flight or fight’ mode. It’s as true offline as it is online. When your business has been punished or attacked with a bad review, you need time to have a look at it and get some perspective on the situation. It’s vital if you want to turn threats into opportunities.

You mean a negative can be turned into a positive?

Sam: Absolutely. Damaging reviews and comments are almost always a form of revenge and the crime is not listening. Being seen to handle online feedback publicly and positively is a great opportunity to enhance the reputation of your company as a company that listens.

We recently provided some consultancy for someone who had been the subject of allegations on a forum that were affecting his business. Other people watching the thread had clearly been impressed by the professional way that he’d begun to handle the allegations. We did a review of all the threats and opportunities in the situation – and helped him to communicate cleanly, honestly and accountably in a very difficult situation.

It’s something that we’ve found British hoteliers, by and large, are missing out on. They’re reluctant to respond to critical customer feedback in hotel review sites like TripAdvisor. Many American hotels, by contrast use it as an opportunity to win lifelong fans and advocates.

Bad reviews are the plastic bags of online reputation, remember, you can’t get rid of them and they won’t biodegrade, so you need to deal with them!

So is ORM just about handling bad reviews?

Sam: Not at all. All those communication platforms out there with the potential to damage your reputation can just as easily boost it, too, if you use them to get your happy customers saying great things about you and creating a buzz about what you do.

Does ORM mean that businesses have to be continually monitoring the internet? Or can a company like yours do that for them?

Sam: They could do it themselves, but in reality most businesses wouldn’t have the experience to know where to look, how make sense of what they find and the threat it represents or the best way to respond.  Of course, we’d be delighted to do it for them!

We do three things: firstly, we monitor a client’s reputation. Secondly, we evaluate and report the threats and opportunities on a monthly basis and thirdly, we recommend the most effective responses our client can take – including offering a range of interventions we can make on their behalf.

We also specialise in a one-off reputation review – a commonsense and easy-to-understand snapshot of their online presence that will help them understand better the whole issue of online reputation management.

If there’s one thing to remember, it’s this: the future of your business depends both on what other people say about you online and the very visible way you’re seen to respond to it.