Protected: STEPREP UPDATE FOR JULY 6, 2011
Protected: StepRep Update for June 20, 2011
Protected: StepRep Updates
Check out the VendAsta BlogStepRep has been booming! Check out our latest blog at blog.vendasta.com for some updates.With so many changes happening to our platform and many more coming, we’ve got our hands full. So from now on, all of our blogging will be done from the main VendAsta blog. We hope to see you there!
Hearst Corporation’s LocalEdge Selects StepRep to Provide Reputation Management to Small and Medium BusinessesLocalEdge, a Hearst Media Services Company to launch reputation management as part of it’s digital product offering.
We’ve just announced a partnership between VendAsta Technologies and LocalEdge™ to provide reputation management to LocalEdge’s broad customer base nationwide. You can get the details from the press release here or from the VendAsta Blog.
StepRep helps businesses monitor online mentions of their business in social networks, rating and review sites, manage online visibility and learn how they compare to their competition. As well, reputation management allows a business to conveniently engage consumers on multiple social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, from one dashboard. Together with tracking and engagement tools, a small and medium businesses (SMBs) can measure the ROI of their social media efforts.
Why Local Businesses Need Reputation ManagementMost small businesses aren’t even aware of all of the places their business appears online. It can be a huge struggle to keep on top of them all. StepRep can help you by tracking everything that is said about you or your business online.The Basics of Reputation Management
1. StepRep monitors what’s being said – both from structured sites like Yelp and from non structured sources like blogs. By keeping track of this, it can help you improve your business and prevent negative word of mouth from being spread. It can also track how your business compares to your competitors.
2. Increase visibility by taking advantage of listing opportunities on search engines, review sites, directories, and social media. We find all of these for you – show you where your listing need corrections and where you are not being represented. Having accurate listings also enhances your rating in search engine results.
3. Interacting with your customers is essential when managing your online reputation. Our Social feature helps do this by connecting your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts to your StepRep account.
To help explain how Reputation Management could help a small business we’ve created a new marketing piece. Check it out below!
Meet Ivy, an ice cream parlour owner from Iowa…. (click each image to enlarge).
Dealing with Negative Reviews OnlineStepRep is a great product that helps small businesses know when they have been mentioned online. With so many review sites, blogs, forums, social sites etc. to check it can be easy to miss a mention or review. Luckily, StepRep does all the checking for you – every single day.
Unfortunately, StepRep can’t stop negative reviews from coming in. Nor can we respond to them for you. It is very important to respond in a timely and professional matter to these negative posts and comments because word of mouth can spread very fast online.
Here are a few things to keep in mind:
1. You can learn a lot from your negative reviews. They can tell you service and quality trends at your business (i.e. if you have a problem employee).
2. It’s important to respond to negative reviews because it will show the reviewer and other potential customers that you care and are willing to make changes.
3. You can encourage your loyal and satisfied customers to post reviews online as well so that they are represented.Responding to negative reviews:
DO:
- Stay positive and professional. Your response may be seen and judged by many potential customers.
- Acknowledge the facts and apologize. Even if you think it’s impossible, or that the person is lying, it’s best to just offer a sincere apology.
- Use your name and title. This adds credibility to the response.
- Offer a resolution. Let the customer know what will be done to correct the issues they experienced.
- Once you’ve corrected the issues, invite the customer to give your business another chance.
- Be thankful. Thank a customer for their patronage despite their bad experience.
DON’T
- Take reviews personally.
- Bribe the reviewer to remove or change their review. It comes off as insincere and desperate.
- Be defensive or critical of the reviewer. Even if a reviewer called you or your business an offensive term, do not stoop to their level with your response.
- Fake positive reviews.
- Start a public argument. If you are adamant the reviewer is wrong in their review and has malicious intentions, don’t stage a public defense. It’s best to send a private response to the customer who wrote the review. If you are going to post publicly, stay positive and professional.
- Type in all-caps. Typing in capital letters indicates yelling. Even if your reply is not meant to be angry, all-caps can make it appear that way.
It can be hard to handle negative comments online, but if you take the advice above and stay positive and professional at all times you’ll find that many customers will be willing to give your business a second chance.
Thanks to this jerk, online reviews are more important than ever.You may have read this profile in last Friday’s New York Times of an online merchant named Vitaly Borker. He runs a designer eyeglass store called DecorMyEyes.
Borker claims to have stumbled on an innovative marketing technique: abusing his customers. Whenever someone tries to return merchandise or contest a credit card charge, he’ll harass and threaten them by phone or email.
At first he did this simply because he’s a thug with poor impulse control. But soon he noticed something odd.
“Look,” he says, grabbing an iPad off a small table. He types “Christian Audigier,” the name of a French designer, and “glasses” into Google. DecorMyEyes pops up high on the first page.
“Why am I there?” he asks, sounding both peeved and amazed. “I don’t belong there. I actually outrank the designer’s own Web site.”
The only explanation, he figures, is online chatter about his appalling ways.
When his customers went to consumer complaint sites like Get Satisfaction to air their grievances, they’d link back to DecorMyEyes. All these links pointing back to his shady website, it seemed, were pushing DecorMyEyes to the top of Google search results.
So people continued to find Borker’s site and keep him in business despite, or rather, because of his mounting reputation for incompetence and disreputable behaviour.
At least that’s how the New York Times told the story.
Accused of abetting Borker’s misbehaviour, Google was forced to act. A few days later they explained on their official blog that they had tweaked their algorithm to punish sites like DecorMyEyes that, in Google’s words, “provide an extremely poor user experience”.
The details of their tweaking went unexplained. But Google provided some examples of how they’d chosen not to deal with the problem:
- They would not be blocking users on a case-by-case basis.
- They would not be “us[ing] sentiment analysis to identify negative remarks and turn negative comments into negative votes”.
- They would not be placing user reviews and ratings beside search results for online merchants, though that option is still “on the table”.
In passing, Google disputed Borker’s explanation of why his site was ranking so high in searches for designer eyewear:
[T]he terrible merchant in the story wasn’t really ranking because of links from customer complaint websites. In fact, many consumer community sites such as Get Satisfaction added a simple attribute called rel=nofollow to their links. The rel=nofollow attribute is a general mechanism that allows websites to tell search engines not to give weight to specific links, and it’s perfect for the situation when you want to link to a site without endorsing it.
But if Vitaly Borker’s negative marketing strategy was being thwarted by the rel=nofollow attribute, then why had DecorMyEyes enjoyed such high ranking in the first place? Byrne Hobart of the blog Search Engine Land investigated:
A review of their site on Yahoo! Site Explorer reveals the actual sources of links, likely leading the site’s traffic:
- Lots of spam sites.
- Suspected paid links.
- A few links from group shopping sites like Polyvore.
- A smattering of links from blogs, including the NYT piece posted above, Oh No They Didn’t, and random blogs.
Hobart concluded that DecorMyEyes was
a typical low-quality e-commerce site that used a combination of black-hat techniques and dumb luck to rank well.
Vitaly wouldn’t have customers to abuse without DecorMyEyes’ SEO success – but DecorMyEyes.com’s rankings have nothing to do with Vitaly’s abuse of customers.
So Borker hasn’t devised a diabolical new marketing technique after all. There’s nothing special about him, expect his ability to entrance a New York Times reporter with his seedy charisma.
But however he managed to get so famous, Borker has forced the internet’s biggest company to make a substantial change to its search algorithm. What that precise change is, no-one outside Google can say for sure. In a follow-up on Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan (who was quoted in the original Times story) arrives at the likeliest conclusion:
Reviews Probably Are Used
I think these are being used. As you’ll see further below, Google talks about how it is NOT using reviews as something it will display in its results, because that alone wouldn’t be enough to “demote” sites. What would? Using the reviews as part of the ranking algorithm.
Also further below, Google talks about how it’s NOT using sentiment analysis to determine if links to pages indicate something good or bad about a merchant.
That leaves Google with few options to tell if a merchant has a good or bad reputation – and yet, it says it has a mechanism now in place to determine if a poor user experience is happening. I think this means tapping into reviews that it already collects.
That doesn’t mean reviews necessarily override all other ranking signals but rather that they are yet another factor among many to be considered.
Maybe Sullivan is wrong. But if he’s right, keeping track of online reviews just became more important for businesses than ever before – because negative reviews could actually diminish your presence on Google.
SMB social media strategies – what’s the return on investment?Jeff sent this around the other day…
Social Media Use Among Small and Medium Businesses – 2008-2010
Study by Network Solutions
Dec 2008 – 12%
Dec 2009 – 24% (…of which 75% had a Facebook page)Study by Zoomerang and GrowBiz Media
Nov 2010 – 34% (…of which 80% have a Facebook page and 27% use Twitter)If you run the numbers it appears that, if the Zoomerang study is to be believed, 27.2% of all SMBs now have a Facebook page and 9.18% use Twitter.
Obviously the overall picture is one of rapid (though slightly slowing) growth.
But look at that Twitter stat. In October 2009, BIA/Kelsey’s Local Commerce Monitor study reported that 9% of SMBs were using Twitter. A year later, according to Zoomerang…it’s still 9%.
Did the Kelsey study over-report Twitter use? Is Zoomerang under-reporting? Or has Twitter growth among SMBs really stalled?
When I mentioned this to Brendan, he guessed that one or the other of the stats must be wrong. “Twitter is growing like crazy among SMBs,” he said. “You see new companies signing up every day.”
That’s true – but what you don’t see is all the companies that abandon Twitter after a month or two.
Twitter continues to grow – despite its high abandonment rate – because people think it’s fun to use. But when you do things out of a sense of obligation, they cease to be fun – and, anecdotally, it would appear that many companies are getting into social media because they think they have to. Because they don’t want to get left behind by their competitors. Because that’s what all the young people are doing. Because blogs like this one keep telling them they must.
There’s little doubt that social media can expand your company’s online audience, cement your relationship with existing customers, and attract new ones.
But what’s the return on investment?
Is your social media strategy so effective you can afford to cut back on other marketing expenditures? Say you calculate that thanks to your Facebook page, you can afford to lose your yearly yellow page ad. But a yellow page ad costs only what it costs. That “free” Facebook page requires a certain amount of time to set up, some extra time to learn how it works (and re-learn it every time Facebook makes a change), and a regular output of time to keep it up-to-date.
Now add in the time spent on Twitter and LinkedIn…and pretty soon, Foursquare and Gowalla and whatever the next trendy thing might be.
All the time you spend promoting your brand on these social networks is time not spent doing other things – like scheduling, or payroll, or inventory. Are you generating enough new business to justify the overtime you’re suddenly working?
The problem is twofold:
- Businesses don’t have time to keep up their social media presence.
- Businesses don’t have any way to calculate the return on the time they’ve invested.
But what if there were a single page you could use to maintain your presence on all three of the most popular social networks at once…?
What if that same page analyzed and displayed the growth of your social media audience over time…?
What if a certain reputation management tool for SMBs were to integrate such a page into its product…?
I’m not saying we’ve solved the problem. I’m saying, we’re working on it. Check out StepRep if you want to see what we’ve done so far.
StepRep to integrate phone call analytics, courtesy of Telmetrics.We’ve just announced a partnership between StepRep and Telmetrics, the Toronto-based call tracking company. You can get the details from the press release, but I want to talk about what’s particularly exciting about this deal.
“Call tracking” means figuring out where your callers are coming from, what time of day they’re likeliest to call, and how they found your number. You can see how this data fits into what we’re doing at StepRep. Our goal is to provide a complete picture of how customers feel about your business. So far, we’ve been focused on what your customers are saying online, because, frankly, that’s easiest – online comments are publicly available and relatively easy to parse. This partnership with Telmetrics will allow us to add in a vital chunk of offline communication.
For instance. Telmetrics has a tool called VoiceTrends that automatically transcribes customer phone calls and identifies commonly-occurring keywords.
What VoiceTrends doesn’t do – yet – is differentiate between angry callers and happy callers. A business owner has to read the transcript to determine the sentiment of each call.
But automatic sentiment analysis is one of the main things StepRep does. Mentions from sources like Twitter, blogs, and comment streams don’t come with a handy “thumbs up” or “3 stars out of 5″ to tell you whether they’re positive or negative – you need to build an algorithm to figure it out. We call ours Sentimengine and we’re working hard every day to improve it.
Take VoiceTrends and add Sentimengine, and you’ve got something really interesting.
We’re in the early stages of figuring out how all these things are going to fit together. But I think it’s clear where we’re heading with this. We don’t want to be limited by that letter O in ORM (Online Reputation Management). The barrier between on- and offline is getting pretty flimsy anyway, now that our phone calls and web searches are often originating from the same device.
Eventually, we want StepRep to be a complete reputation management tool. We’re on our way.
