Politicians, district staff, campaign workers and government affairs consultants are welcome to attend a free online webinar with tips on how to improve your online reputation. This is important for all business owners, but particularly important for those who must win on one day to keep or get the job of their dreams.

When the majority of consumers receive at least some of their news online daily, political people can’t afford to ignore what Google, Youtube and Bing say about them.

If you’re interested in attending the webinar – click on the floating button that says Political Reputation Management Webinar or email me at julie@getonthemap.us

UPDATE: Political Reputation Management has been all over the news with the recent events in Washington D.C. If your behavior is as bad as a certain Congressman from Queens, no one can help you. But if you’re a normal politician, you’re popular with some people and unpopular with others. I’ll show you how to help the voices of the people who like you get heard.

Yikes! You go to Google or Yelp and find that someone’s written a mean, nasty review about your business. What should you do?

Write a positive review about a local business. Then write another one. Get the Law of Reciprocity working in your favor. If you send out good vibes and love into the universe, it will come back to you. Not necessarily from the person that you wrote the positive reviews for, but perhaps from one of their friends who reads your review.

The guys at GetListed.org have started a wave, and they’re hoping you get on board.

My friend Don Campbell wrote about it on his excellent blog, Expand 2 Web:

Want to help out your favorite local business in a tough economy?

Here’s your chance: the smart folks at GetListed.org have come up with a very cool idea- it’s called Review Wednesday.

The idea is to help spread the word about your favorite small businesses and help them get more customers. Online reviews are very helpful to small business owners – they help them rank better and get discovered by prospective customers.

The Golden Rule Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

Every sales call I make involves a discussion of online reviews. Small businesses are really shook by what one unhappy customer can do to their reputation. They sometimes don’t even understand what impact it can have on their cashflow.

A negative review can cost you thousands. Imagine … someone writes a scathing, but in your opinion, unfair review of your business in 2008. Every month dozens of prospects see that review and decide not to take a chance with you and choose to do business with someone else. A couple years later, how many hundreds of prospective customers have decided against you? What’s the cost?

In a report from Comscore

More than three-quarters of review users in nearly every category reported that the review had a significant influence on their purchase, with hotels ranking the highest (87 percent). Ninety-seven percent of those surveyed who said they made a purchase based on an online review said they found the review to have been accurate. Review users also noted that reviews generated by fellow consumers had a greater influence than those generated by professionals.

Although every business is different, when I’m designing an online marketing plan, I value a good, authentic online review at $500. If my customer has bad reviews, it’s worth even more. You have the ability right now to get good reviews. You have happy, repeat clients. You just have to figure out how to get them to write a review for you.

I’m starting a new project to take your good letters of recommendation and referral and put them online. If you’ve got letters from happy customers, call Julie Gallaher at 916-265-2521 to see how you can participate.

I just got back from the wonderful SOBCon conference, hosted by Liz Strauss and Terry Starbucker. It was about internet marketing and social media, but so much more. Hank Wasiak, former Madison Avenue advertising guy, has written a couple books on Asset Based Thinking – a concept that I usually call looking for the sunshine. It’s all about perspective. He works with adults and teen/tweens and here’s their video.

Read more about the teen organization at abtteen.com.

One of the biggest concerns my clients have is what to do about managing their reputation online. In this Washington Post article from Paul Carr of Tech Crunch, he describes how Twitter has sparked numerous nightmare scenarios for companies. Everyone is a broadcaster in social media and the power’s in the rebroadcast or retweet.

Really there’s only one answer and it’s one that strikes at the very heart of the established hierarchy of customer importance. Companies are going to have to start treating every single customer like a VIP. Actually, no, it’s worse than that consider the Hidden Eloise example; she wasn’t a customer, but just a humble designer. Companies are going to have to start treating every single person in the world like a VIP. In all areas of their business they’re going to have to make sure they’re purer than pure; they’re going to have to examine every one of their processes to ensure that no one is getting screwed over. Moreover, they’re going to have to treat every complaint like it’s the most important complaint they’ve ever received, lest the complainer take their fight to Twitter.

I’m offering a Reputation Management Class to help businesses and individuals develop a strategy to highlight the good things people should know about them online.

For more info on the class, click here.

Will you be jumping in to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or another social media plan?

According to the latest wave of BIA/Kelsey’s Local Commerce Monitor study, 9 percent of small and medium-sized businesses currently use Twitter to market their businesses. In addition, 32 percent of SMBs indicated they plan to include social media in their marketing mix in the next 12 months by using a page on a social site such as Facebook, LinkedIn or MySpace. Furthermore, 39 percent of SMBs plan to include customer ratings or reviews on their own Web sites, and 31 percent plan to include links or ads placed on social sites or blogs.

Reputation Management

What are you doing to make sure that your happiest customers are spreading good word of mouth for your business. If you’re going to add customer ratings to your web sites, be sure that you’re engaging your brand evangelists. Call Julie Gallaher for assistance at 916-265-2521.

What are you doing to improve your online reputation? In the past, a business had control over your public relations – you chose what you projected – you spent a lot of time thinking about your logo and what kind of business card you should design. And it made a difference. You didn’t have to worry about negative buzz unless you had a disasterous event occur.

Today, the people control your brand. One comment from a dissatisfied customer can cause a drop in your bottom line. Every individual with a computer has access to dozens of review sites where they can complain about you and your way of doing business. And there are mean people in the world who relish the idea of knocking you down a peg or two. I could show you examples. but I know you believe me.

But you are not powerless. Studies show that 10% of your current customers are willing to be evangelists on your behalf. They are the person who happily provides a word of mouth testimonial to their friends about how great you are. All you need to fight back against the mean people is to harness the words of your best customers and get them to put them on line.

All you need to do is:

1. Do a very thorough search to find where your business is listed online. Use your business name, address and phone number in Google’s search bar. Use quotes to increase the relevancy. Something like this “lakeside beach grill” “4081 lakeshore” lake tahoe (btw, I love the Lakeside Beach Grill – visit there the next time you go to Tahoe)

2. Click on each search result that looks like it could be a directory with reviews. Find your business.

3. Copy the URL where a consumer would write a review.

4. Email the URL links to your best customers asking for their help. Remind them that you don’t want them to make a review at all the sites, just one or two.

5. Thank them for their help.

Please let me know how it goes.

Taking my own advice

If you’re one of my clients, participated in one of my workshops or asked & received advice on how to market your business online from me, I’d love it if you would review my services. If you are a member of any of the sites listed below, all you need to do is click on the link and it will take you to the spot where you can write a review.

Google

LinkedIn

Yellowpages.com

Yelp

YouTube

Facebook Fan

Superpages.com

Insider Pages

Judy’s Book

Sacramento Biz Journal

Midtown Grid

Improve Your Online Reputation

If you’d like some help implementing a strategy to improve your rep, please call Julie at Get on the Map, 916-265-2521. This is just step one.

Which of these best describes your attitude about reputation?

“It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it”
Benjamin Franklin

“I wrote the story myself. It’s about a girl who lost her reputation and never missed it.”
Mae West

A recent survey claims that 1 in 5 employers in the USA check up on candidates via social networks. Should you be worried about your reputation online?

8 findings that are scaring companies away

According to this article about the survey, “the top areas of concern found on social networking sites include:

1. Information about alcohol or drug use (41% of managers said this was a top concern)
2. Inappropriate photos or information posted on a candidate’s page (40%)
3. Poor communication skills (29%)
4. Bad-mouthing of former employers or fellow employees (28%)
5. Inaccurate qualifications (27%)
6. Unprofessional screen names (22%) (a classic resume mistake)
7. Notes showing links to criminal behavior (21%)
8. Confidential information about past employers (19%)”

You can find 4 tips on what should you do before someone Google’s your name at Jobmob.

Scrubbing Your Online Reputation

Get on the Map can help you protect the reputation of your business and your family with online monitoring tools. Call 916-265-2521 for more information.

When they talk about you, do you like what they say?

Even more important, when they talk about you, do you know what they say?

As a business owner, you need to generate good word of mouth advertising to survive and the internet provides fantastic opportunity to generate word of mouth. Which would your prefer: I call my sis on the phone and tell her that I loved the great margaritas at Casa Ramos in Gold River or I post it on my blog, facebook page, twitter account etc. so that everyone who knows me reads about it.

But online, you can generate bad word of mouth just as fast.

In this post, Frank Fuchs of Locally Type* shows you how to set up an online reputation monitoring system in 20 minutes or less.

As you are busy and “just don’t have the time” to care about this internet stuff as you have “a business to run” I’ll try to give you some advice how you can set up some basic online reputation management in 20 minutes or less.

Reputation management is an awful word for something that’s naturally at the heart of every business man/woman – work hard to get a good reputation. So if you do a great job for Suzanne, installing her new kitchen she will very likely tell her friend Carie about it. Carie will tell Joe at the dinner party about this awesome company… you know what this ends up to.

And as you have to be curious and careful about what customers say about your business in your neighbourhood and as you have to stand up if someone tells untruth about you – you should do the same in the internet. That’s bad news as this may end up in work – but its good news as well as it will help you get customers, maybe even happy customers.

Google Alerts

Expert local search optimization is now available in Sacramento and the Central Valley with Get On The Map. Call us at 916-265-2521 for more information.