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.

Here are the top 4 things that small businesses must put on their 2010 marketing ‘todo’ lists:

1. Monitor Online Mentions

More and more people are blogging, posting, and twittering about their experiences, good and bad. Small business owners must monitor the web for these mentions and respond.  First off, it’s good karma to thank people for nice comments.  They will be impressed that you are listening.  Secondly, there is only one way to deal with negative comments or reviews, and that is to respond.  A positive, helpful and humble response will go a long way to turning a potential negative into a positive in the eyes of other readers.  Obvious plug: StepRep is great for this!

2.  Connect to Everyone you Know

You may ask what’s the point of friending everyone on Facebook, following people on Twitter and connecting on Linkedin.  Simply, each platform provides a way to communicate with your connections and you will find different acquaintances on each network.   Social publishing solutions will allow you to easily create one update and publish to multiple accounts.   There are other solutions that create innovative ways to leverage your connections too. MashedIn for example lets you show people how they may be connected to you.  This is like getting a warm introduction to someone who is otherwise an anonymous visitor on your blog or website.

3.  Communicate

Small businesses have to make use of their social networks.  If you go through the work of creating connections, use these platforms to push updates to your followers.  The follow up step here is to engage in conversation, but don’t worry about putting the cart before the horse.  It only takes a few minutes to publish an update.  What should you publish?  Keep updates relevant to your followers and be interesting.

4.  Ask for Recommendations

A lot of business owners are hesitant to overtly ask for recommendations.  In the past, a lot of website owners published testimonials.  The problem with those is that few people trusted that “Bob from Dallas” was a real people who provided that testimonial.  Online ratings or reviews have provided a more reliable solution for consumers.  Not all review sites force users to use a verified account, meaning it is easy to game many of them.   But in a late 2008 study of 2,445 US online consumers (by NATRO), 82% considered user-generated reviews “extremely valuable or valuable”.  Further, EConsultancy showed that 90% of people trust recommendations from people they know.  So reviews and recommendations from places like Facebook Fan pages, LinkedIn or StepRep are hugely valuable.

For businesses that are not really leveraging technology to get the word out, it does not take a lot of effort to start managing reputation and building connections that can pay off in terms of real future business.  It just takes a small commitment to take the first steps.

What have you been up to lately, friendly technicians?

Well, Michael, you may have noticed that we’ve improved the StepRep login process.

In olden times, there was only one way to sign up  for StepRep – with your Google account. For folks who already had a Google account, this was great; one less password to remember. Everyone else had to go create a Google account in order to join StepRep, which was a confusing chore. Many new users found themselves lost in a labyrinth of signup screens and gave up in frustration.

You can still sign up using your Google info, but now you have the option of creating a completely autonomous StepRep account.

For existing StepRep users, you’ll be logging in like this:

If you want to go on logging in with your Google account, click the little G at the bottom of the green box. If you try to enter your Google info into the fields at the top, you’ll be prompted to create a StepRep-specific password which will be associated with your existing StepRep account.

Exciting stuff! What other improvements have been made in the most recent StepRep release?

Well, we’ve made some pretty significant changes to the Recommendations screen. We want to make it easier for users to build their recommendation networks, so they can promote and be promoted by their colleagues and share in the magic of StepRep rewards. With that in mind, now you can search for StepRep users by keyword and location. Here’s how it looks:

If you know the name of the user you’re trying to find, you can just type it into the first box. If we can’t locate the person you’re looking for in our directory, you’ll be prompted to invite them to join StepRep.

By the way, friendly technicians, I just noticed an error on the Recommendations page: the word “colleagues” is misspelled.

That’s how you told us to spell it, Michael.

Zoiks!

If everything goes according to plan, soon customers and advertisers on local “StepRep-powered” Yellow Pages websites will have access to all the features that StepRep users already enjoy:

• Profile pages that display recommendations from customers instead of anonymous (and usually cranky) reviews.
• Search results organized by social context, so customers can see how they’re connected to local businesses through their friends and their friends’ friends.
• One-to-many communications enabling customers to pose an open question to an entire service category.
• Reputation monitoring for businesses to keep track of what their customers are saying about them on other sites.
• StepRep rewards, a success-based advertising model that incentivizes customers to recommend businesses to their friends.

The idea is to restore the Yellow Pages to what they were in the pre-Internet era – the first place you turn to when you need to find a local business. I drew a little comic strip that covers the basics. (Thanks to Tavis and Nicole for modelling for me.)

It wasn’t a spooky, life-or-death, Dan Brown-style secret. We discussed it openly around the office and with our friends. But we didn’t blog about it or talk about it in public.

The secret concerned what StepRep was. When we launched, we told everyone StepRep was a free reputation monitoring tool. And of course, it is a free reputation monitoring tool. But that’s only part of it.

The big secret was how we were going to make any money off our free reputation monitoring tool. People wondered, were we going to start charging a subscription fee? Would we make our users look at ads? Sorry, we said. Can’t tell you yet. It’s a secret.

That went on for months, and it sucked. We’re not naturally reticent people. But we had to keep it on the down-low while we built the product so that, instead of telling people what StepRep was all about, we could just show them. (Also, we were worried that someone would come along and steal our great idea.)

We’re not quite done building. But we’re far enough along that we no longer have to act all mysterious and vague. Now when people ask what StepRep is all about, we tell them to go try it for themselves. They quickly see that it’s not just a free reputation monitoring tool.

It’s a better way to advertise.

I’m glad we no longer have to hide this, because transparency is essential to what we’re trying to do. We want to be transparent about how we make our money, and we want to bring the benefits of transparency to the advertising business.

Whenever a StepRep user pays a reward to a customer, we take a ten percent transaction fee. That’s it. That’s our revenue model. Maybe someday in the future that percentage will change, but if it does, we’ll always be upfront about it.

We want every transaction in our system to be that transparent. Say you’re a realtor. Jenny’s selling her house. Her friend George suggests that she get in touch with you. When Jenny looks at your StepRep profile, she sees 1) how many people trust you, 2) how many of her friends trust you, and 3) how large a reward you’ll pay.

Jenny knows that she’ll be splitting the reward with George. She knows whether or not George’s advice can be relied on. When she looks at the list of her friends that trust you, she makes the same assessment for each of them – can I depend on this person’s judgement?

So Jenny hires you. You sell her house right away, because you’re awesome. You take your fee. You pay the reward to Jenny and George. We take our ten percent of the reward. No secrets, no surprises.

Isn’t it great when we’re all open with each other?

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.

Hold that quote in your head for a moment while I relate an anecdote about Marshall McLuhan. You’ll remember McLuhan as the Canadian philosopher-cum-guru who coined the phrase “The medium is the message” and enshrined the distinction between “hot” and “cool” media (and had a cameo in Annie Hall).

In 1965 the journalist Tom Wolfe followed McLuhan on a speaking tour of America and watched him blow businessmen’s minds with his gnomic pronouncements on the future of the media. Wolfe describes one such encounter:

McLuhan is sitting in the Laurent Restaurant in New York with Gibson McCabe, president of Newsweek, and several other high-ranking communications people, and McCabe tells of the millions Newsweek has put into reader surveys, market research, advertising, the editorial staff, everything, and how it paid off with a huge rise in circulation over the past five years. McLuhan listens, then down comes the chin: “Well…of course, your circulation would have risen about the same anyway, the new sensory balance of the people being what it is…”

Here’s a scary thought. What if John Wanamaker was being overly optimistic? Maybe business owners should count themselves lucky if they can say with confidence that only half the money they spend on advertising is wasted.

Sometimes it’s possible to tell when advertising leads to a sale. Often it’s not.

Maybe your new radio ad brought in a dozen new customers, or maybe those customers would have found you some other way.

Maybe your business is booming because of that billboard you put up on Highway 11, or maybe it’s spillover traffic from that new Starbucks next door. Or maybe it’s word of mouth. Or maybe it’s…”the new sensory balance of the people”!

But what choice do you have? That’s the way advertising works, right? You pay for an ad, and you hope the increase in sales is greater than the outlay of buying the ad.

But what if there were another way to advertise?

What if you only had to pay after the fact, once the transaction had been completed?

What if your advertising dollars went directly to new customers…and the past customers who had referred them?

What if every time you closed a deal, it was broadcast on your customer’s Facebook page for all her friends to see?

You might think StepRep is just about managing your reputation. But that’s just one little part of our vision of changing the way businesses advertise.

We’ll be talking more about this in the coming weeks. Here’s a quick video that gives the broad outline.

Mwuh? Wazzat? Where am I?

Don’t worry, you can get back to your comfort zone by clicking the orange Reputation Monitor button at the top of the screen. But while we’re here, let’s explore this new homepage you’ve landed on.

What you’re looking at is a feed of your most recent activity in StepRep. Right now that means you’re probably seeing all the latest stories that the Reputation Monitor has dug up. But as StepRep and the MyFrontSteps community continue to grow, those search results are going to be crowded out by other new stuff:

Trusts and Endorsements

As we keep on telling people, StepRep isn’t only about monitoring your reputation and managing your presence on Google and other search engines. It’s also about building your referral network by connecting with your customers, their friends, and your fellow service providers.

Whenever your network grows – when somebody adds you to their Trusted List or endorses your services – it’ll show up on your feed here on the homepage. You can see who you’re connected to by clicking the orange StepConnect button.

Asks

We could’ve called ’em “Questions”, but we didn’t want to pre-suppose how customers chose to use the feature. An Ask might be a question, a call for help, or a request for an estimate on a project. An Ask is an open discussion thread where anyone in the MyFrontSteps community can throw in their two cents.

Pictures can also be posted inline, so that customers can be more explicit about what they’re talking about: “Here’s my window – how much to have blinds installed?” That kind of thing.

If you click on the orange Customers button, you’ll see where these Asks are coming from. There might not be that many in your hometown right now – heck, there might not be any. But when you do start seeing Asks that pertain to your area of expertise, we hope you’ll take the time to respond to them. It’s a great way to connect with new customers and pick up business.

Pop over to StepRep and check it out.

As usual, a lot of the changes will be invisible to slobs like you and me. But there are two big changes that I should draw your attention to:

Promoting stories to Faceboook

A couple weeks ago I alerted you to a workaround for getting your StepRep widget to appear on your Facebook profile. Now there’s a way to publish stories right into your Facebook stream.

Each story now has three options under “Promote”:

• Add story to your widget and profile page.
• Send the story to Twitter.
• Publish the story to your Facebook stream.

When you click on “Publish to Facebook” you’ll get a little pop-up asking for your Facebook credentials (unless you happen to be logged into Facebook already). Then you’ll have the option of adding a personal message to the story before it appears on your profile, where it will look something like this:

Interacting with members of the MyFrontSteps community

Most of our users probably don’t pay too much attention to the little orange buttons across the top of the screen, the ones that say “StepConnect” and “Referrals & Quotes”. That’s okay; so far there hasn’t been much to do on those screens except watch some Spokesmonster videos.

But if you click on “Referrals & Quotes” now you’ll see…well, depending on which city you live in, you might not see anything at all. But I’ll show you what it looks like for my hometown, Saskatoon:

Y’see, the table displays questions from folks in the MyFrontSteps community – specifically, from our new Facebook application Homebook. Click on the entries and you can interact with whoever posted the question. You can offer an answer, request more info, or post photos. Your replies will be visible but anonymous to other service providers, but the customer will be able to see who you are.

Right now when you visit this screen, the questions may or may not be relevant to your business; but as the action picks up in your town, we’ll narrow down the table so you only see questions related to your line of work.

This probably isn’t something you need to worry about right away. We’ll soon be adding a way to notify users when a potentially interesting question comes in. Just letting you know that, as always, there’s cool stuff coming your way in StepRep.

• We discovered a handy trick for getting your StepRep widget stories to show up on your Facebook profile.
• We recently (finally) managed to buy the steprep.com domain from the dude who’d brazenly snatched it out from under our noses back in late 2008.

Then about five minutes after I hit “publish”, Shawn over on the StepRep development team sent out an email announcing that a new update had just been deployed. Grr! Now I gotta write a whole ‘nother blog post.

Oh, well, beats working.

1. Optimization. Shawn and his witch doctors have rattled their monkeybones and danced the dance of the feathered serpent, and now, he tells me, the pages in StepRep will load a little faster.

2. My Content. It seems that some of y’all found it a little crazy that there was a category for “My Content” but there was no button to allow you to easily move stories into that category. Well, you can stop tearing out your hair – there’s a “My Content” button now.

But don’t worry, you can still assign domains to zap directly into “My Content” by going to the Links tab in the Settings screen.

3. Terminology. There are a number of little wording changes throughout the site, designed to make things clearer (hopefully) to new users. Most of these won’t affect you. But one new term might throw you a bit:

Promoted.

Here’s what it means. We’ve been finding that a lot of people just don’t get the widget. They don’t understand what it does and they don’t understand why they should use it. As I’ve explained before, the purpose of the widget and your StepRep public profile is to create multiple links to – and thus increase the search ranking of – the stories that you want people to see.

Which is another way of saying, you use the widget and the public profile to promote stories.

So we went ahead and changed the “Add to widget” checkbox to “Promote”. When you check off a story, instead of going into a category called “Widget”, it’ll appear under the “Manage Promoted” link on the right-hand side of the screen. And of course, it’ll appear on your StepRep widget and public profile.

We’ve got some work to do to make the new terminology consistent throughout the site, so bear with us. As always, we’re interested in hearing what you think about the changes, so don’t hesitate to leave comments, tweet us at @steprep, or use the Feedback link in StepRep.

What the heck are we talking about? What are “StepRep”, “Homebook”, and “MyFrontSteps”?

Maybe I’ll start by breaking it down graphically:

The MyFrontSteps Community.

MyFrontSteps

MyFrontSteps pays my salary. It’s the name of the company that’s putting this whole shebang together.

It also lends its name to the MyFrontSteps Directory, which (as you can see from the elegant illustration above) is the bridge that connects service providers on StepRep with their customers on Homebook.

This all probably requires a bit more explanation…

StepRep

When we launched StepRep, it was a reputation monitoring service, and that was it. Even now, most of the people who sign up for StepRep are primarily interested in finding out what people are saying about them online.

But StepRep has evolved into more than just a reputation monitor. Our tagline is “Monitor, manage, and build your online reputation.” One of the ways you’ll build your reputation is by connecting with your satisfied customers and their friends in the MyFrontSteps community.

Now, maybe you don’t have customers; maybe you don’t have a business. That’s okay. You can still use StepRep to keep track of what people are saying about your garage band or your attractive lawn or your angry bullhorn rants from the steps of City Hall.

But basically, StepRep is for people who provide a service. Or as we like to call them, “service providers”.

Homebook

The MyFrontSteps community includes everyone on StepRep plus everyone on Homebook. So what’s Homebook?

It’s a place to hang out and talk about your home. For starters, that will mostly mean sharing photos with your friends. In the future it might mean contests, discussions, decorating tips from experts…all sorts of stuff.

Homebook’s most innovative feature is the ability to share your list of trusted service providers with your friends. Next time you’re looking for a good plumber, instead of thumbing randomly through the phone book, you can go into the Directory tab in Homebook, drill down to the list of plumbers in your location, and see at a glance which ones your friends have used and recommend.

There’s more. In a month or so (we’re working on it right now), Homebook users will be able to request quotes from StepRep users. A little further down the line, StepRep users will be able to offer additional incentives in the form of referral fees (discussed in greater detail in a recent post on the Spokesmonster blog).

Where do you find Homebook? It’s not a website – it’s an application you can add to your Facebook or MySpace account:

Homebook on Facebook
Homebook on MySpace

(If you’re not on Facebook or MySpace, there’s a standalone version too, at myfrontsteps.com.)

The price is right…

Sometimes we get so excited about all the neat stuff we’re building that we forget to emphasize something fundamental: All this stuff is free. We’ve got a plan to make a little money later on by taking a small percentage of every referral fee that gets paid. But the referral fees are optional; everything else we offer up gratis. Why?

Just because we love to give.

Maybe you could express your gratitude by signing up for Homebook, trying it out for a few days, and giving us some feedback…