UK online reputation management
** Theme reconstruction / tweaking in progress **
This is a very useful little review of the following ORM packages:
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.
A search on my name ‘Sam Deeks’ brings up a result from something that happened a year or so ago. I wrote a post on our blog about my experience of business networking and the kinds of characters, approaches and shenanigans we’d experienced. Although I mentioned no names – or organisations for that matter – someone felt I was referring to them, and posted a personal dig at me on their online forum.
Their online networking site and forum is very busy – hence that reference to me is on 1st page in Google. It’s a great reminder that when people try to pull you into conflict online your response is going to be around for a long, long time.
Luckily, I’m happy with how I responded then – and now.
Here are 4 tips that might help you if / when you find yourself under attack:
1) Don’t react. Reaction is usually a way of not feeling something. What was it I wanted to avoid feeling? Anger, fear. Sadness. I hate conflict. I hate being not liked. Add to that, I was a bit ashamed because the guy was right. I was referring to him, among others. That’s a hard pile of feelings to sit with. The reason we fight so quickly is to avoid facing feeling those things. Sit with them because they’ll teach you something.
2) Respond. Once. After you’ve sat with whatever feelings are there (if you’re not covering them up by fighting in the forum thread), reply. Those feelings will soften you up more than fighting will. When you reply from that place, you’ll be more human, more empathetic and you won’t escalate conflict. Say your piece, own your part in it if you can and leave.
3) Don’t take it personally. When people get angry with each other they’re just dumping undealt-with feelings on each other. Deal with yours (see points 1 and 2) and you won’t make your upset other peoples’ business. Similarly, you won’t interpret their upset as your business either.
4) Leave it. The desire to return to conflict is an addiction. Resist it, there’s nothing good about it, it will only keep you addicted and reactive.
Make no mistake, these 4 points aren’t easy – which is why the world is fuelled by conflict on- and offline. Learning how not to react takes time and effort but most of all it takes us getting to a point where we’re sick and tired of being drawn helplessly into cycles of fighting – and where we want something different
Social media is turning the world of marketing and PR upside down. More and more people are turning to what your customers have to say to make their buying decisions. Why? Because the internet means that they can – and because they trust what your customers say more than what you say.
Social media channels and tools like blogs, forums, review sites, Facebook, Twitter, Technorati, Digg and many others now elevate other peoples’ opinion of your products and services to the top of the Google results – often above your own website. Whether you like it or not, what customers think about you is increasingly what your prospects will find and take notice of.
If the social media revolution means one thing for business, then it’s this: what you say about yourself is propaganda. What other people say about you is the truth.
[image © Julian Burton at Delta7.com]
Nice to hear Nancy putting out a weekly podcast of online reputation and social media news, ideas and hints. You can find it here. I’ve spoken to Nancy a couple of times about online reputation and I really respect her approach to the subject.
If you’ve got an iPod, 20 minutes of commuting time and an inclination to understand how social media can be used to help manage your business reputation this is definitely worth a listen.
I have to say that a few times I’ve taken the first 6 or 7 podcasts out with me on a long drive and had to stop listening after a single episode because I’ve got hot under the collar and started frothing at the mouth over some of the issues Nancy raises. There’s so much stuff (and a lot of it news to me too!) in Nancy’s podcast that I find I need silence to process it. Sign of a good podcast, I reckon.
Clare and I are going to be podcasting about online reputation management soon – and listening to the TigerTwo podcast is a great help to us. I think the difference between the two will be that our focus is less on the social media technologies and more on feedback and the skills needed to handle it and use it to create a good reputation. I think, too, we’re also more critical of social media than Nancy – but I have to say that where she DOES nail her opinions to the door things is where the podcast gets most interesting.
Highly recommended.
We’ve been lucky enough to have had Julian Burton of Delta7 working with us tonight to create an illustration for our Business Life magazine feature for October.
Delta7 is a London-based change consultancy which uses pictures to help people in organisations explore the way they feel about change. (Click on the thumbnail to see the full-size image).
I’ve known Julian for over 10 years now – and it’s great to see the business getting the recognition it deserves.
Tonight’s picture started with a conversation earlier today, evolved through a couple of emails, finally becoming the image you see here illustrating one of our maxims about online reputation: ‘What you say about yourself is propaganda; what other people say about you is the truth‘
Delta7 has a huge range of powerful images that chart every aspect (good and bad) of the world of business – and we hope to feature more here on this blog.
5 steps to reputation suicide – a real life ORM case studyHere’s how to single-handedly destroy your online reputation and squander your considerable potential.
First of all, create a great product that a lot of people want and will pay for. Something like a plugin email newsletter & email list management system for WordPress. Wow. Fantastic. Jackpot!
Then do the following:
1) Don’t document your product (a sure-fire way to get paying customers to feel very bad about you, very quickly)
2) Grudgingly set up a ‘support’ forum and make sure you let people know how hard-pressed you are and how much trouble supporting your product is.
3) Be rude to people and get defensive wherever your product is mentioned online
4) Don’t apologise or admit you were wrong under any circumstance
5) Withdraw completely - but leave your forum and tags visible for prospects to see exactly how unhappy your customers are when they research you in Google.
How exactly has this guy has managed to turn a pot of gold into a crock of shit? No communication skills and no awareness.
Sorry to be blunt, but it’s commonplace and a growing problem – especially in the online world.
And if that was the nail in the coffin, then this could be the stone sarcophagus.
Scenario: you offer a service to business, one that requires an up-front cash investment. Your prospect likes the sound of it, but it’s still risky – an unknown. What do they do?
They go online to find out what other people think.
They go to Google and type in something like… “Is Bartercard any good?”
It took me 10 minutes to write a post about Bartercard and for it to appear at the top of Google globally for anyone typing that question into Google just by using the power of a WordPress blog. It’s since temporarily vanished (don’t ask me why – like many posts before it it will probably reappear in the search results!). That’s the mystery of Google.
Think of the damage I could do to your business if I was unhappy with the service and couldn’t get satisfaction. Think of the good I could do for it, too if you’d thrilled me with the service you provided. Either way, you need to know what’s happening to build and maintain the best reputation possible.
If you’d like to discuss what this means for your business, then call us on 01822 610841
The people at Reputation HQ picked up a post I made a few months ago about online reputation management and suggested we take a look at their software. We did, but there’s only so much you can tell from the developer’s checklist of benefits.
More importantly, for most people not in the business of social media, there’s only so much you can tell about whether or not you could use it from the descriptions provided. All of which makes Reputation HQ’s offer to let us try it out most welcome.
From what I can gather so far, Reputation HQ is a tool that’s designed to be used by a number of people in an organisation working collaboratively to monitor and respond to threats and opportunities to the organisation’s reputation.
We’re excited to be able to give it a whirl and keen to let you know how we find it.
If I asked you to think of the one person who could do the most damage to your online reputation, you’d probably picture some seriously cheesed off customer slagging you off in a forum or rubbishing your company in their blog. Understandable.
But probably wrong. Paradoxically, the person who’s likely to do your reputation the most damage is you – by your reaction to criticism or attack.
When someone levels criticism at us or makes allegations that are likely to destroy confidence in our products and services, it usually hurts – a lot. We often feel genuinely upset that someone feels that way about our business but we’re fearful too of the damage it may do to our reputation and bottom line.
Our instinct may well be to ‘fight’ and argue, hit back or defend our position aggressively or take ‘flight’ and avoid dealing with the situation altogether. Mix in to that how easy it is to misinterpret text, the lack of body language and the safe distance that encourages online argument and someone’s critical comments start to look like a minefield that’s all to easy to blunder into.
Our number 1 rule (in life as well as in online reputation) is to not react. Not reacting creates the space to see what’s really going on. Make no mistake, not reacting hurts momentarily (which is why most people prefer to react with anger so as not to feel bad) but it’s the only way to turn a threat into a triumph.
Remember, both you and your critic will be judged by your conduct, not the detail of the matter at hand, and it’s our aim to see our clients handle the situation with dignity, empathy, accountability and respect.
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