Should You Respond To Negative Comments About Your Business?
Should you respond to negative comments about your business on other websites? Ideally, you’d want to have those conversations on your own blog. A good strategy to use to get people over to your blog for a conversation about your products and services is to write a blog post that addresses a concern made publicly elsewhere. Then, visit the site on which the comment was made and make a short statement about the comment with a link to your site for the fuller explanation. Your comment might look something like this:
Thanks for addressing that issue. You might be interested in this explanation (and include the link here).
This tells people that you take their concerns seriously. It also tells them that you are willing to talk about it. But it also gets them to your blog to talk about it. By getting the conversation going on your website, you can control the flow of the conversation while giving people a chance to voice their concerns and deal with the issue directly where it makes the most sense to do so.
Call it reputation management. But we call it common sense.
The Best Reputation Management Tool You Have
Reputation management is quickly becoming one of the most important aspects of doing business online. You never know when a competitor, an employee, or a customer will go on the warpath and start messing with the world’s perception of you and your brand. But you can combat the negatives long before they start cropping up. And you can do it with a tool that you should already be using.
I’m talking about your blog. Your company blog is the best reputation management tool you have. You know why? Because you own the means and the velocity of production.
Look at it this way: A blog can be updated every day – even multiple times a day. And every blog post is a separate web page. The more web pages you produce that use your brand or company name, image, or likeness in, the more content you spread around. And the older that content is with the more links it can gain, the better off you will be in the long run. It makes it harder for the naysayers to move their content up.
Of course, you can never make it impossible for them. But why give them a small hill to climb when you can manage a daily blog and make that hill bigger. A blog is your best reputation management tool.
Keeping Your Company Blog Safe And Secure
These days, it seems like everyone has a blog. While the vast number of blogs on the Internet might seem to lessen the chances that your’s will be the victum of hacking or spamming, the greater quantity of blogs out there only encourages more of these annoying pests to attack.
In the Internet marketing world, spamming has unfortunately become a popular way to get free links, referals, etc. While legitimate Internet marketing firms such as Reciprocal Consulting look down on these sorts of black hat practices, the most annoying thing about these spammers is that some people actually click on these links, hence giving them a reason to continue to do it. If everyone knew how to spot spam and no one ever clicked a spam link, they would probably die out, but unfortunately this is not the case.
So, as long as there will be spammers and hackers, there will also be those who wish to put an end to it, and a lot of these programs are not only free, but coded specifically for your needs. The best example is a self-hosted Wordpress blog. Due to ever growing popularity, the Wordpress blog has become a prime target for spammers, both human and robot controlled, but by the same token, so has the number of anti-spam Wordpress plug-ins increased. There are also a few other ways to protect your self hosted Wordpress blog.
- Choose your password wisely- it may seem like elementary knowledge but believe it or not, many people don’t know what makes a password good. The first step is to choose something that is easy to remember, or something that you can write somewhere you will always be able to look it up if you forget what it is. Worst case scenario, you can always have the password sent to your email address, but that should only be the last resort. I personally have a password that includes numbers and letters, both lower and upper-case. The further your password is from a coherent English word or phrase, the better, which is why the combination of numbers and letter is best.
- Check your settings- The Wordpress self hosted blog has a lot of built in features to help protect your blog, many of which can be found in the settings. Many times, an effort to allow more user interaction via comments on a blog will result in more spam, so what I have found to be the best settings for comments is allowing anyone to post, but first requiring myself or another admin to approve the comment. Once a comment is approved for a user, then comments from that user no longer require approval. This way, anyone who’s posted before can feel more welcome posting, which could increase visitor loyalty. There are also a number of great plug-ins available on the Wordpress.com site which can help you deal with spam and security. These are conveniently organized by category, so performing a search for “anti-spam” or “security” should get you a plug-in that works the way you want it to.
- Watch Those Links- Wordpress blogs have a handy feature on the dashboard that tells you who is linking to you. This is a great way to network, but also a good way to see when people are linking to you, even if you don’t want them to. Should you encounter a website that is saying bad things aboout you, or one with a large readership that might send unwanted traffic your way, you can easily see this and send a kind email over to ask the administrator at the other site to remove the link.
There are plenty of more advanced tactics to protecting your blog, but these are the most basic, and believe it or not, the ones most often overlooked.
Just How Much Has the Internet Changed Marketing Efforts?
For those of you just popping online before work, I’ll give you the short answer: To immeasurable lengths. For those with a little more time on their hands, I’ll try to sum it all up the best I can, but don’t be surprised if I leave a lot of information out – this is a very broad topic.
In fact, I may not get very far from a single topic concerning how the Internet has changed, because something occured to me the other day, as to just how different the world is with the Internet, and how hard it would be for most of us to go back to the early 90’s, before everything we know and love about said Internet. What came to mind was not how many great resources for information are available thanks to the Internet, or how easy it is to book a hotel, buy a car, find a friend, or stay in touch. I’d like to say that the simple pleasures of cuteoverload.com popped into my head, but the thought was not so quaint.
No, my mind decided to remind me how easy it would be for a 13 year old to ruin me. Odd, I agree, but hear me out.
In 1992, what would a 13 year old need to accomplish in order to get his or her opinion seen, spread and confirmed? Perhaps a paper route, a friend who’s parents worked at the Daily News, a good deal of editing, a petition…the list could go on, but to quickly convey my point, that child would need to go to great lengths to have even a few hundred people see his review on the newest Nintendo game, or perhaps his favorite place to eat in his small town.
Fast forward to 2008, and what do we see on the Internet? Blogs, review sites, forums – and lots of them – many members on these sites of which are 13-18 year olds ranting about their uninformed opinions, trashing companies, and incoherantly attempting to disuade the world from making the same mistake they did by going with the cheaper model. Don’t let their lack of formal education and bad grammar fool you – these people have an amazing influence on the world.
But a few hundred-thousand teens aren’t so scary, right? What can they do to hurt your business? Well, imagine someone searches for your company because they can’t remember the website URL, and just as they’re about to click on your site they see the next search result, an excerpt from a high ranking blog: “Company makes crappy products”. Or maybe it’s worse. Maybe, the excerpt under the result, chosen by the search engine, reads something more like: “Company owner John Smith likes little boys”.
Yeah, that’s pretty scary.
Fear not, friend, the Internet is a very big place, so the chances of someone singling out your business over the rest is as unlikely as the number of businesses out there are many; but who really wants to take the chance? The fact is, simple Preventative Reputation Management can save you a huge hassle, as well as a lot of spend, later on.
The basic idea behind Reputation Management is to populate search results with positive content concerning your business, and it is much better if all those good pieces of information reguarding your business show up in the first 20 results, instead of those frightening 13 year olds who know more about the Internet than a lot of adults, with a brutal opinion, and 120wpm typing “skillz”.
If you’d like to know more about how to protect your online reputation, please don’t hesitate to contact an Internet Marketing Firm such as Reciprocal Consulting today, and ask how.
Self Hosted Blog or Website?
In case you’ve been dying to know the answer to this question, the answer is both.
A personalized, custom built Website gives a business many freedoms concerning structure, content, and additional applications, such as shopping carts, forms, dynamic flash interfaces, and more, plus a very fresh, from-scratch, start. While many of these things may be available on a self hosted Blog, there is a difference between having a recognizable format and having one that may very well cause a user to bounce from your page. Self hosted Blogs, while capable of hosting many things that a website can, have an expected format, and should be used primarily for content. Content refers to onsite, html readable text, and links. This includes headers, footers, side bars, body text, posts, etc.
Now, what is the meaning behind this question, and more importantly, why the need for both?
The simple answer:
Blogs are becoming increasingly popular, to the point of absurdity. Every other person who is active on the internet these days has at least one blog to which they contribute, and many have two or three. Still, some have more even than that! So why join the crowd?
First of all, all the well tuned on and off site optimization in the world will not turn leads into conversions. For your sites ROI (return on investment) goals, more than likely there is a thank you page, order confirmation page, or some similar page which contains a tracking code. This is how you tally conversions, and when pitted against clicks, impressions, or monthly budget (depending on your campaign), you can measure ROI. There is a key factor between the initial lead and the conversion: Your Website
I’ve discussed how your optimized keywords and on site content need to relate to eachother, but these things should also be related to the design and structure of your website. If a lead comes to your site expecting to find a list of available products, easy to use shopping cart and easy checkout, more than likely, they will not find this on a Blog.
Another example, on the flip side, is content. While your site’s page content is crucial to optimization, suppose there is a good deal more information pertaining to your business that you wish to share with your potential clients or customers. Having all this information on a website that is also being used for checkout and browsing may bog things down for the user because, as I mentioned earlier, the quicker and easier it is for them to order and pay, the better the chance they will do just that. Adding a link on your site to a Blog about your company and it’s products, as well as news about upcoming products or services, is the best way to share large amounts of information without interfering with their shopping or browsing experience.
Additionally, having “sister sites” which link to eachother, one of which being a Blog containing feeds, news, links from Social Media Blog profiles, and lots of key content, is a good way to increase relevance and page rank, as well as targeted traffic. You can link relevant posts in the Blog to product pages on your site (and to other relevant posts within the Blog itself), give the user more opportunities to contact you with questions, and provide more than enough information that may already answer their inqueries.
There is a good deal of optimization that goes into a successful Blog (be it Sponsored Ads or Natural Search), but the beauty is, traffic coming to one site will lead to the other, and there is a clean, concise, well designed format which makes it easier for your leads to convert to sales.