StepRep 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.

Your reputation is what you say about yourself and what others say about you.

Reputation management is nothing new. Every business has been doing it for as long as business has existed.

What we’re really talking about here is how the Internet and social applications have changed the way reputations spread.

Did you ever see the movie Outbreak? Remember how they kept asking, “How contagious is the virus?” and, “Is the virus airborne?”

Reputation for SMBs today is airborne and contagious.

Reputation is local.

Online Reputation Management, or ORM, has been around for some time. It’s used by pretty much every big brand. Companies like Nike use tools like Radian6, Scoutlabs, and Alterian SM2.

These tools cost from $600 to $10,000 per month. And while they’re very effective at monitoring Nike’s brand overall, they do a poor job of monitoring the reputation of a Nike Store in Dallas.

You’ll notice a recurring theme in my presentation. For a small or medium business, reputation is local. A Starbucks franchise in Dallas doesn’t care about a Starbucks in LA, or even a Starbucks on the other side of town.

The local ORM space is still in a very early stage. In the headings below, I’ll discuss what I think is the basic set of functionality for local ORM for small and medium businesses.

Visibility, or Presence Management.

In other words, Where is my business listed? Where is my business NOT listed? How does my anchor data look?

Strictly speaking, presence management isn’t necessarily part of ORM. But we think it’s part of the package that needs to be delivered to SMBs.

Data on the Internet has inertia. Once it’s there, it tends to stay out there, even if it changes in the real world. Businesses might not even realize how often their information appears online, and how often that information is wrong.

Presence management has three components.

The first, obviously, is to make sure your business is visible in all the places people are searching for you.

The second is to make sure your anchor data – your business name, address, and phone number – is accurate.

If someone tries to call you and gets a wrong number, most of the time she won’t take the time to hunt down the right number. She’ll move on to one of your competitors.

The third component is consistency. This is less intuitive. Businesses don’t realize that even small variations in how their anchor data appears can have a negative impact on how prominently they turn up when people search for them.

For instance, Google considers these things to determine if a business is included in their new 7-pack. These are the listings that are highlighted in a box at the top of the page when someone searches for, say, “Milwaukee plumbers”.

Monitoring of structured data.

It’s essential to monitor reviews. Thankfully it’s pretty easy because review sites contain what we call structured data.

That is, every review is laid out in a certain way. It’s associated with a particular business. It’s ranked or rated using a common standard.

Here’s a screenshot from our product, StepRep. These are the results for one of our customers.

This is a dentist’s office, by the way. Just reading the reviews made my teeth hurt. (I’ve blurred out the name.)

Because the reviews are all rated on a scale of zero-to-five stars, it’s easy to tell which are bad and which are good, and to calculate an average rating, as you can see on the right.

But SMBs need to know about more than just the reviews. In fact they can find the reviews themselves.

Monitoring of unstructured data.

Unstructured data sources are more difficult to monitor. But they’re quickly becoming the most important.

This is the stuff that small businesses are unlikely to find on their own. This would include content from blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and all the “hyperlocal” sites that people tend to forget about, sites with names like saskatoon.com or dallasweb.com.

Because SMBs are time-starved, because they want to see the most important information first, the monitoring needs to be automatically filtered by sentiment so the most positive and negative comments can be separated from the rest.

This is harder than monitoring review sites, because the data isn’t laid out in any particular way. Nowhere on the page does it say “five stars out of five”, or “zero out of five”. You need to build an algorithmic engine to interpret the sentiment of these pages.

Comparisons to local competition.

Reputation management should allow busineses to easily keep track of how they stack up against their competitors.

For instance, our Share of Voice graph counts all the online mentions for the category of dentists in Latham, NY. In that data set, how often was this particular dentist mentioned, compared to his competitors?

You’ll notice that we also separate the data for recent results and all-time results, so the dentist can judge if he’s losing or gaining ground.

Local trending.

Local trending is useful for discovering latent marketing messages.

For instance, the keywords graphic for Kells Irish Pub in Portland showed a huge spike in mentions of the World Cup. It turned out the local soccer community had identified this pub as the best place to watch the games.

The ultimate goal is to deliver information businesses can use in their real offline operations.

Trending keywords can give businesses valuable hints on what to focus on in their promotional efforts. Or it might tell them where they can improve their customer service. For instance, if you see a lot of tweets from customers complaining about your disgusting bathrooms…

Clean your bathrooms!

Nobody wants to do anything.

Oh yeah, and this important. Everything that I’ve showed you…has to work without anybody doing anything.

Reputation management needs to perform well with a minimal set of accurate anchor data.

Because the SMB doesn’t want to learn how to operate a whole new piece of software.

Neither does the salesperson.

People hate to learn new stuff. So until they get hooked, you need to make it all automatic. Alerts of new reviews, negative mentions, comparisons to the competition – they all just have to come automagically to the customer.

How to sell ORM.

The people most qualified to sell reputation management are directory publishers like the people in this room.

You’ve got the salesforce. You’ve got the trusted brand name. And ORM is a natural fit with your services.

The way to sell ORM is in a bundle with other features. It needs to be completely done within your brand.

Consider the benefits.

ORM has a high perceived value for SMB customers. But the unit price is low. It’s a good feature to entice customers into a higher-priced bundle.

It’s a useful tool for keeping in touch with customers you might otherwise communicate with only once a year, when it’s time to renew the ad.

Make your customers love you.

ORM delivers very relevant results that businesses will come to anticipate and love.

Let me give you an example. A business owner in Vancouver, an early StepRep subscriber. She runs a women’s clothing store.

She told us how, when she first started getting the New Results emails from StepRep, she found them annoying. She never really looked at them, just booted them to the spam folder.

One day she opens one of the emails. She discovers that a line of clothing that she has the exclusive rights to distribute in Vancouver is being offered by another retailer in the city.

She calls the manufacturer and calls them some dirty names and regains her exclusivity.

Now she tells us she can’t wait for those emails to come. It’s the first thing she reads in the morning.

She loves us now.

For instance,

1. In the past you might have created a new search and were annoyed to discover that StepRep didn’t allow you to save it. That’s because, for the present, users are limited to creating 5 searches at a time. Now there’s a handy error message to explain what’s going on when your sixth search gets snuffed out.

2. The numbers next to the menu on the left, showing how many stories you have in each category, used to be a little sluggish to update. Now those numbers will change immediately when you move a story from one category to another.

3. You know your StepRep public profile? Wait, you didn’t know that you had a StepRep public profile? That’s probably because you had to dig around in the settings to find the link. Now the profile link is prominently displayed at the top of the screen, where users are more likely to stumble across it…and maybe now that they know it’s there, they’ll start filling out their profile with information about themselves and their business.

4. Speaking of your public profile, it’s been redesigned. If you’d like to see what it looks like now, I’ll modestly provide my own page as an example. It’s nothing fancy, but the profile page is designed to be super easy for search engines to find and index. For example, as of February 12, if you Google my name, my StepRep profile page comes up fourth in the results. My profile page, in turn, points search engines toward the stories that I’ve chosen to promote using the StepRep widget.

5. One more thing about the public profile: we’ve changed the URL. I don’t quite understand the technical reasons, but apparently the new URL is a little Google-friendlier than the old one. If you’re using the StepRep widget on your blog or website (and if you’re not, why aren’t you?), you might want to re-install it so it points to the new URL. But if you don’t feel like re-installing, no worries, the old link will redirect to the new location.

6. Are you a StepRep user from outside the US and Canada? If so, you were undoubtedly irritated at sign-up time by the fact that your home country wasn’t available in the drop-down box when you selected your location. We apologise for the inconvenience. For new users, we’ve created a comprehensive list of countries for the drop-down box. And if you’ve already signed up using a fake address, you can now go into your settings and select your actual country from the list. So all you users in the South Sandwich Islands can stop with the hate mail, already!

Today, social media has opened up a new era of transparency. People are cynical about marketers. You know those old testimonials that we used to put on all of our websites from “Bob Jones in Chicago”. Those ones with no link to Bob, his email or any information that Bob was a real guy and his testimonial was real. Those don’t have a lot of impact anymore. Thus it is important to promote verifiable comments, opinions, recommendations and views about you and/or your business by 3rd parties. These are more legitimate when they come from a 3rd party and they are published on a 3rd party site.

So when I promote all of my own profiles to increase their collective search rank, I also link to and mention stories, articles and comments about me on other sites so those rise higher in the search results for my name.

StepRep helps this process first by helping you find comments and stories about you. It helps you find them early and allows you to comment on things in a timely manner. You’ll often want to reply to comment and stories whether they are positive or negative. StepRep further helps promote these stories by putting all of the good ones on your StepRep profile. As you promote this profile, the links to your good stories become more and more valuable. An easy way to promote your StepRep profile is to place the StepRep widget on your other sites and profiles. It rolls through your good stories and it links back to your profile.

In the end, you want a good mix of results when someone Googles your name. You want some of your websites and personal profiles to show up and you want 3rd party comments and stories to show up.

I’ll use myself as an example right now. If you search for Jeff Tomlin, most of the results on the first 2 pages of Google will either be my online profiles or articles about me. I’ve achieved that primarily by linking my profiles together. That is, on most of those profiles and websites, I list all of my other profiles. Next, I link to other articles about me on my blog. This gives rank to those other articles about me. Lastly, I try to list my sites and profiles on other 3rd party sites, directories, blogs and news.

There are a few things to note. Let’s go through the list of link attributes I mentioned in the last post.

1.Page Rank of the Linking Pages

I have about 12 personal sites and profiles that I link together. Each one I add means they will all generate another link. But linking them together isn’t enough. Each profile needs to have independent incoming links. I can’t write for and market all of these profiles effectively so first I syndicate content to some of them. An example of this is friendfeed. It aggregates content that I’ve posted from my other accounts and thus it updates regularly, but I never really go to the site. Secondly, I really focus on building a small number of them. As I market 2 or 3 of them, their individual rank goes up. As they build popularity, the links from those 2 or 3 to my other profiles carry more weight.

2.The Number of Other Links on the Linking Page

To maximize the value of the links I have to each of my profiles, I manage the total number of links on my linking pages. To do this, I simply ensure that I don’t populate my pages with links to too many other websites.

3.The Topic of the Linking Page

I want to maximize the topical importance of my linking pages. This is one reason I’ve created so many different online profiles. Each profile or website is about me, Jeff Tomlin. Thus when I link to all of my other sites, the link is highly relevant. Google now recognizes that these sites are all about the same person.

4.The Text of the Link

When I link to one of my sites or profiles, I use proper link text. The key is to ensure the link is descriptive, yet optimal from a search engine point of view. That is, you want to describe what the link actually links to, and you want link relevant value from the text. So I’ve formatted links to my profiles including a short name of the profile along with my name. An example is: “Jeff Tomlin – Linkedin”. A good clue to use is to try and make the link text similar to the title of the page you are linking to.

5.Reputation of the Linking Site

I always ensure that I don’t engage in linking schemes. I am careful of the sites I link to and I only promote my sites to other reputable sites. This happen naturally when you market yourself with ethical online practices.

The topic on how links work is rather old news to many, but complicated enough to leave many others still in the dark. I’m going to discuss this at a high level. Google ranks the relevance of a page by many factors. In general, a page is ranked based on it’s topical relevance to a keyword search and how many links point to that page. The most important factor would be the links a page has pointing to it. Here is what makes a link valuable:

1.The Page Rank (PR) of the Page the Link is From

The more popular a page is, the more valuable links from that page will be. Google has a patented algorithm that calculates the popularity of a page. You can see the page rank of a page using the Google toolbar on a scale of 1-10. This number is not the actual PR that Google uses, but it shows you the ballpark popularity of a page.

The idea here is that if you receive a link from a well established, popular page, that link will give your site more value than a brand new page or a page with few or no links pointing to it.

2.The Number of Other Links on the Linking Page

The value of a link on a page is diluted by the total number of other links on that page. For example, if a page has a page rank of 5 and there is only one outgoing link on that page, that link will carry a relative value of 5. But if there are 99 other links on that page, that link will carry a relative value of 5/100.

3.The Topic of the Linking Page

This point is simple. If my blog is all about real estate in Denver, a link from another Denver real estate site (or page) is more valuable than a link from a casino site.

4.The Text of the Link

This is a big one. Link text matters a lot. So a link to my Denver real estate site that looks like this: Denver Real Estate, is a lot better than a link that is formatted like this: click here.

5.The Reputation of the Linking Site

This relates to point three. Google gives websites a relative weighting based on the links they attract and the sites they link to. The idea is that they recognize the types of ‘neighbourhoods’ you associate with. So if a link comes from a site with a good reputation, the link will carry more weight than a link from a spammy site. For clarity, if a site is linking to other low value sites and receives links from those sites, its links will carry less value than a site that is being linked to from CNN, Yahoo, educational institutions etc.

Take a look here for a more in-depth discussion on building links:
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002357.html

In the next post, I’ll use some more examples of the above concepts and show you how to build out a strong profile to increase the Googlability of your name.