What’s true of individuals is true of your business: what people are saying about you becomes your online identity. While Google is the most obvious place to maintain your good reputation, it’s not the only relevant site where your character can be judged publicly. Whenever I plan a vacation, I make sure to read as many customer-generated reviews of the relevant hotels and rental car companies as possible. I quickly learned that sometimes great deals are too good to be true and that I shouldn’t necessarily trust the gorgeous pictures of sun-drenched beaches that every hotel website seems to share. But not every experience on these sites needs to be a negative one. With the recent growth of user-review sites, it’s well worth doing your homework to make sure that your best foot is put forward.
Jon Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing expounds about this idea, listing five ways to take advantage of customer review sites. Here’s Jantsch on the basics:
[G]o through the process to claim and take control of your listing and then look at this listing and profile as a brand asset and take the time to complete it fully – think of it like a brochure – add photos, links, brands, products and anything else that helps describe your business.
But beyond that, Jantsch recognizes that the Yelps and the Google Maps of the world can be a source of valuable customer feedback:
Use it to make you better – If you find a bad review or two, and you might as negative people tend to be more motivated, don’t freak out and start crying foul and spattering hate down on the reviewer. Look at the review and see if there’s something you can add to further explain what went wrong and if the review is clearly off base or possibly an attack from a competitor (it happens) review the policy for resolving these kinds of issues and take some action. However, some bad reviews are a legitimate reflection of the experience your customers are receiving. Step back and ask yourself if this bad review might be a gift in disguise and dig into the core of your business to see if there really is something that needs fixing. (How many dissatisfied customers just go away without a review?) Use reviews, good and bad to help you get better!
Jantsch has absolutely the right approach here: do the best you can to communicate your value on the sites where people bring an open-minded approach, but make sure to take what may be valid criticisms to heart.
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