Yesterday I talked about some of the free tools you could use to monitor your online brand/reputation. Today I want to talk about what to do when you find out that someone is bashing you or your company. Let’s say you’re using google alerts or serph and you find a blog post talking about how much your product sucks, what do you do? Here are a few steps that you can use to help fix your reputation.
Find the negative comments/blog posts/etc.
The first thing you have to do is find the people out there who hate you, who are bashing you, and writing negative blog posts about you. Typically, the larger the brand or company, the easier it is to find some negative feedback.
Don’t go into defensive mode
First thing you need to remember is not to immediately get defensive about what was said. This applies for large corporations or for individuals. Try to understand the situation from the other persons point of view.
Read before you act
Before you jump right into the discussion read the whole argument and do a little bit of poking around online to better understand the situation. If someone is bashing your product then look around online to see if others are doing so as well. Perhaps find some positive feedback about the same situation. Get an idea for what the problem is and what the overall “mood” for the situation is.
Think of a solution
Sometimes this can be as simple as sending someone a tutorial explaining how to use a certain product or feature. If someone is not satisfied with a service perhaps you can offer to refund their money, give them a discount on a future purchase, etc. This is up to you, but you need to have some sort of a solution in mind. Sometimes saying you are aware of the situation and are working to fix it is also enough. The important thing here is that you ACT.
Contact the user
Once you have an understanding of the scope of the problem and have a solution in mind you can reach out and contact the user. Write a personal email explaining that you have researched the issue and that you are willing to work with the user to solve their problem. You might even want to ask the user for possible solution ideas. Try to turn the user into a brand evangelist, get on the phone with them and talk about their problems if you have to, do what you can to build a relationship.
Repair the image
Once you have understood the problem, offered a solution, and made the customer happy, ask for help in repairing your image. Usually tarnished images come from blogs where a user was upset and voiced his frustrations. Ask the user to either write a positive post or perhaps update the already existing negative post.
Rinse and repeat
You need to repeat this process for as many users as you can. Scour the web and reach out to every single users who has said something negative or bashed you or your company. This is a never ending process and you probably won’t be able to solve all of the problems that come your way. However, you need to reach out to as many users as you can and you have to build relationships with them. My issues with Businessweek is a great example of this. I wrote a post about it called “the power of tribes: a lesson from businessweek and social media marketing.”
What are some of the tips that you can offer to repair a tarnished online presence?
thanks for reading
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