Managing Your Online Presence

It's amazing how much preconceptions can affect how someone views your company. Rarely does someone read many bad reviews on a restaurant or coffee shop, walk inside, and have a wonderful experience. Often simply viewing the negative opinion of others can affect the flavor and enjoyment of something like food, whose judgment is subjective enough to be altered by expectations.

So when your company is developing its customer strategy, hoping to create customers that are more satisfied and loyal, it's online presence matters. That's why you need to make sure you're correctly managing your online identity.

Search for yourself in Google, Bing, and all of the popular search engines. Make sure that what comes up under your name includes things that make people want to shop at your store. Sometimes customers share their frustrations with your company on blogs and other websites, and if those websites are a high enough page rank, they may show up on the front page directly above or below your company website.

If these are positive, keep them there. If they are negative, you may want to find ways to reduce their impact on your ability to win over customers. What to Do and What Not to Do You should never interact with negative webpages directly in any negative light.

Never threaten legal action or angrily comment on articles related to your company or products. Do that, and you're almost guaranteed to create more negative press about you. You can start by being friendly and generous with anyone that writes negative things about you if you like.

It's risky for some businesses because the site owner may decide to write negative things about you even if you extend an olive branch, but niceness works wonders. You can also develop your own positive online presence by hiring an SEO company to market only positive websites until they outrank the negative Google pages. It can be tough, especially if you are competing with websites of a very high page rank, but it's certainly possible with the right marketing budget.

Finally, look for alternative ways to give yourself a better online presence. If you find that some of the negative comments are from things you can't change, like Yelp reviews, encourage customers to post their own positive Yelp reviews and see if you can't offset some of the damage. Also, continue to work on your customer service and satisfaction techniques to reduce negative reviews in the future.

Managing your online presence is a very minor part of customer satisfaction, but it does play a larger role than many companies would like to believe. Try to make all first impressions of your business, including those online, as positive as possible, and you greatly increase your chances of getting reliable and satisfied business.