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.

1.  How is the intention different from a company paying for an ad in certain media and claiming a poor product is very good?  Consider a company that has consumer reports, community feedback and perhaps even internal research which confirms to them that their product or service is poor.

2.  How is this different from an infomercial where a well know personality is paid to endorse a product or service?

3.  Is this different from a company paying a subject matter expert for a product review.  Consider different types of marketing arrangements.  Sometimes an expert is paid money for a review and sometimes there is a mutual co-marketing arrangement in place.

4.  Consider companies that pay people to send business their way on a referral basis.  Have you ever been to a place like Cancun Mexico and if you ask someone directions to a restaurant or bar, they give you a business card of a place with their initial on the back.  They are paid a referral.

5.  What about sites that just sell ads and link to ‘great services’.

I guess the key question here, is what actually makes advertising and promotion reputable?

So what is MyFrontSteps? Well, MyFrontSteps connects people over any social network allowing them to control the sharing of their home with friends, family and the world – from their front steps in. It allows them to leverage the collective experiences of their social graph – people they know and trust – to find inspiration and local service providers to improve home and lifestyle.

We have put together a video in the Creative Craft style to describe what we do.

We believe MyFrontSteps will have millions of homeowners sharing their home and home experiences on their social network of choice.

We intend to help people and companies in the real estate and home services industry to connect with these consumers via our StepRep product.

So what is StepRep and how will it work for you? Well, StepRep is going help you in at least three ways:

StepRep will help you track and monitor your online Reputation and Identity

There are lots of reasons why your online Identity and Reputation are important. Today you can monitor what people are saying about you on websites and blogs with lots of tools like Google Alerts or RSS feeds. Tomorrow, StepRep will automate that process and help you to monitor the right things. More than that, however, we will help you to monitor what people may be saying about you in places you might not even know about. Anywhere the conversation is occurring such as; Facebook, Linkedin, Myspace, Flickr, YouTube, Plaxo, Friend Feed, Twitter, Plurk , or any of the emerging platforms and services. Services that you won’t be forced to join.

It will help you manage and even build your online Reputation

Today it is a technical and time consuming chore to mange and build your online Reputation. Websites, blogs, news releases, social network profiles; the list and the work involved, is immense. We aren’t going to give you all the details just yet, but we promise to make managing and building your online reputation an order of magnitude easier.

Most importantly, StepRep will let you leverage your Reputation, via past and current customers, to gain trusted access to all the people in their social graph (people who know and trust them), on all the different social networks.

In our past lives we learned something that all technology providers should know. Real Estate professionals don’t use technology for the sake of technology; they use it to make their lives, and their customers’ lives, better. Put another way, technology doesn’t change “what” people do, it just changes “how” they do it.

We also noted phenomena in technology adoption and usage. It goes something like this. An Agent or Broker has no business so they embrace technology to attract new business. They attract new business, impress their new customers, and their new customers refer more new business. They then become so busy they cannot keep up with the use of the technology tools so they quit using them.

The key thing to note is that satisfied customers refer business – lots of it. What if you could get your customers to advertise to all their friends that they choose you as their professional of choice?

With StepRep and MyFrontSteps you will be able to do just that. StepRep will allow you to connect with your past customers as friends on the social networks where they hang out. You will be able to connect with them as “friends” on all the social networks without having to join all these networks. In short you will be able to leverage your great reputation, built by the great work you have done for past clients.

Your customers’ friends friends will see you in the context of whatever social network they happen to be on. This gives your customers a chance to connect with you as friends and hold you up to their friends as their professional of choice.

This is important, because we all know, as much as your customer may like you or your work, they aren’t going to be recommending you in every conversation. That said, today, more and more conversations are happening on Social Networks. Connecting with customers as their friend, and provider of choice, helps make you a part of the conversation when and where it occurs.

If Joining Linkedin, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Hi5, Orkut, building a website, writing and maintaining a blog sounds and feels like too much work then StepRep is for you. In fact, as your satisfied customers participate in the social networks of their choice they do the work of recommending you.