Online reputation

thumbs downBy Blair Kuhnen, BDX

This is the third of four blogs in our online reputation management series.

We previously covered online reputation management and steps in auditing and monitoring your online reputation. Now we will address responding to bad reviews.

Home building is a very human business and we, as humans, all make mistakes. The Internet amplifies those mistakes making them more visible. Gone are the days when you would address an issue that made it into print media and then quietly went away. Online reviews don’t go away. They have to be handled differently than other potentially negative public relations issues.

Don’t let negative brand or employment reviews cause further damage by going unanswered. Delays allow the current situation to escalate leading to lost sales or potential employees. That said, we believe there are right and wrong ways to respond.

It is uncomfortable to admit mistakes and takes courage to publically acknowledge them. Online, that is exactly what you have to do. This is important for two reasons: (1) When done right, it keeps the PR issue from escalating, and (2) it minimizes the ongoing damage of negative information that remains visible. This second point is what differentiates handling online vs. offline reviews. Potential customers and employees are going to see your response or lack thereof. Reviews handled with care will both prevent additional negative reviews and reduce the impact of the bad reviews.

We believe a builder should respond to a negative review in a timely, authentic, and humble manner. A personal and conversational tone is generally preferred. Here are some guidelines:

  • Show empathy: Apologize and express that you understand the pain/inconvenience caused. It does not matter if what they are saying is 100% accurate, you don’t want to debate or seem defensive. Try to understand their point of view and how the situation made them feel.
  • Demonstrate your contrition: Empathy alone is not enough. Express how your actions were wrong and what you are doing to fix it. Show that you are taking steps to make amends and prevent similar issues.
  • Without making excuses or sounding defensive, stress the positive: This is the tricky part, but an opportunity to turn lemons into lemonade. Let’s assume something positive (e.g., company growth) contributed to unintended employment related results. In this case, you should point out the jobs and advancements made possible through your growth, but admit to the negative consequences.
  • Ask for feedback: Ask the poster to come back and comment on how you did with resolving the issue.

When a prospective customer or employee reads your response, they should be thinking: “Some of the reviews I see here are bad but at least the company has acknowledged the issues and are seeking to find a resolution.” If someone wants to come to work for your company, they want to believe your story. If they don’t, you probably don’t need them.

Is this easy? No, but you can do it. I ran across this blog post from SEER Interactive that gives a good critique of several reviews on Yelp. It is worth a read before you draft your first response to a negative review.

When You Should Respond to a Poor Online Review

In general, faster is better. However, do not write a response while you are still angry as that could cause even more damage. Additionally, you don’t want to seem like you are in denial about the allegation even if the complaint is unfair.

There are times when you will not want to respond and maybe should not. When a negative review is pure slander, you might not respond. You might try to have the review deleted from the site or even consider legal action. These cases are few and far between.

Who Should Respond to a Negative Online Review

Unless you are Amazon, you probably don’t want your reply to come from someone with customer service in their title. In many cases, you should consider your president or a regional department head, but most importantly make sure someone is responding. You may want to consider providing a direct dial phone number that you can be reached at. Sometimes talking it out is better than corresponding through the web or email. While we are talking about negative reviews, responding to positive reviews humanizes the business and is a lot more fun for your CEO.

A colleague recently shared Glassdoor reviews of Zillow, a massive online real estate site with more than 500 employees. Their CEO, Spencer Rascoff, directly responds to many of the Zillow reviews with humility and a style that probably helps their recruiting effort.

An Example of How to Respond to a Poor Glass Door Review

This builder used in this example is growing quickly. Strong revenue growth creates huge opportunities for all employees if they seize them. Start by thanking the poster for their feedback. Read the review carefully and make sure you directly address specific issues.

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This company needs to support its current strong employees while only recruiting the best. This response is crucial:

  • You want to communicate to prospective posters that you recognize your growing pains and are taking action. We believe employees will be less likely to post negative reviews if they see a solid response followed up with action.
  • A solid response allows prospective employees to see the opportunities your company has to offer while minimizing their hesitations.

A Hypothetical Recommended Response to this Review:

“Thank you for pointing out some of the problems related to our recent growth. We did not do well. Our team is the backbone of our success. Our rapid growth has created tremendous opportunities for career advancement, but it stretched our systems. We are sorry that we have left some employees feeling they are not supported and in some cases we asked for more than what was fair. That is a terrible feeling especially when you work as hard as our employees do.

This has been an area of concern for executive management. We left employees far too stretched and failed to delegate authority that would have made your lives easier.

In response we are implementing our company-wide leadership training and development program in January and are speeding our recruitment efforts to handle our continued growth. We need to get new employees up to speed faster with our processes and procedures so they can serve customers better. We will not grow revenue and profits at the rate we desire without a well-trained, motivated, and loyal team leading the charge.

Finally, we need to push authority down further and are currently experimenting with ways to give additional decision making and spending authority to our field personnel.

Please return later and re-post or reply anonymously to tell us how we have done.”

Over the top? Maybe, but this type of response can make an immediate impact. This may be difficult the first time, but it gets easier. You will feel better having responded and may have more clearly identified how to improve your business.

This blog series has given you a good understanding of how online reputation management works, from how to complete a reputation audit to providing recommendations for responding to negative reviews. Do you still have bad reviews out there on page one or page two of Google search results? Stay tuned for the final post in this series where we will show you how to get your positive reviews ranking higher in Google search results.

 

text-boxBy Blair Kuhnen, BDX

This is the second of four blogs in our online reputation management series.

If you read our previous article, we took a deep dive into Builder Online Reputation Management. The first step to managing your reputation is to assess your current reputation. Start with a benchmark audit.

3-Steps in the Audit Process:

1. Gather and categorize reputation results through relevant lenses. We pull 3 pages of Google search results for keyword searches that are reflective of your reputation. Our main focus is on page 1, but on page 2 and 3 are your best opportunities to promote positive references. Feel free to use our reputation audit spreadsheet as a guide for this step.  I have filled out the spreadsheet based on this example.

2. Identify the results on pages two and three that you want to promote and develop a plan for making these results more relevant.   You want to cause things you own/control or are highly positive to be considered more relevant in the search results.

3. Continue to monitor your reputation online. Update your audit sheet bi-weekly while actively seeking to drive changes in the results, but monitor at least monthly for changes. Set up monitoring of your brand mentions. Many tools are available free or at moderate costs.

Gather and Assess Reputation Through Google Search Results

You need to view your reputation through three lenses: (1) a general brand view, (2) the view as someone looking for brand reviews, and (3) the view as a potential employee. We can assess your online brand reputation by using Google to search for:

[Your Brand Term only]

[Your Brand Term only] + reviews

[Your Brand Term only] + careers

For each search above, we are looking for two key things: (1) Positive information on sites you own/control or influence, and (2) results that are harmful to your reputation on the first two search results pages. Ideally, you will own/control most of page 1 and what you don’t own is influenced by you or favorable to your brand. Further, we want no negative reviews, particularly on the first 2 pages of Google search results. Based on your own situation, you may choose to modify or add to these guidelines. Just be consistent.

We care most about what shows up near the top of search results. Page 1 of Google is key since less than 6% of searchers will ever get to page 2 and less than 2% will get to page 3 (Source: Advanced Web Ranking’s 2014 Google Organic CTR Study).

For this example, I am going to pick a local Austin auto dealer, Henna Chevrolet, who we do not work with.  So, let’s search for:

  1. Henna Chevrolet
  2. Henna Chevrolet reviews
  3. Henna Chevrolet careers

Save the first 3 pages of results.  To make this easy, we use the Moz toolbar.  While we are most concerned with page 1 and page 2, we may want to promote positive reviews from page 3. So, we pull these as well. Save all the results for possible analysis later. You will also want to put your findings in a spreadsheet that will make it easy to visualize results. In this sheet, we gather the following fields:

  • URL
  • Meta Title Tag
  • Meta Description
  • Moz Page Authority
  • Page Links
  • Page Linking Domains
  • Moz Domain Authority
  • Links to Domain
  • Domain Links to your Domain
  • Sentiment: Positive, Neutral, Negative, Not Applicable
  • Relationship: Own/Control, Influence, 3rd Party

The finished product looks like this (title and descriptions hidden):

blair blog 1This gives you a wealth of information. The goal is to make the positive and Owned/Controlled content more relevant so it ranks higher in Google. What is controlled content? This would include pages like your LinkedIn page and 3rd Party sites where you control the content. For example, the 6th listing in a branded search for Drees Homes on Google links to New Homes Source’s profile and reviews page for Drees Homes.

You want to own or control most of what is displayed on page 1. Ideally, the only 3rd party information showing up are positive reviews or information.  Coming in a future post in this series, we will give you steps you can take to push down negative reviews while promoting positive information about your brand. This does not mean you don’t take the other steps to address reputation issues, but promoting your positive press is critical.

Monitoring Your Brand Online

Monitoring your brand is easy and many tools are available. Some can be costly, but free options exists. You need to monitor two things: (1) your social media mentions and (2) anything showing up in Google search results. For social media monitoring, one of my favorite tools is Trackur.com. They have a 10-day free trial and costs $97/month after that. Want a free option? You can set up Google Alerts at no cost. To use it effectively, you need to know a little about Google advanced search operators, but it’s easy to set up and manage.

How to Set Up a Google Alert in 3 Easy Steps

First you need to have a Google account. It’s free and you can access all the tools Google offers at no cost.  If you do not have an account you can sign up here.

1) Go to Google Alerts: https://www.google.com/alerts

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2) Set Parameters for the Alert

Type in the search query and modifiers you want. For example, if I were Drees Homes I might want to search for exact matches on the full brand name “Drees Homes.” Since we don’t want to track mentions on our own website, we use the qualifier ‘-site:www.dreeshomes.com’ and looks like the example below. Google even brings up an example based on recent news for Drees Homes.

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3) Select your options for the alert

For most of us, we only need to decide how often we want email alerts to come when Google finds something new. The options are: “As-it-happens,” “At most once per day,” or “At most once per week.” Then just hit the “Create Alert” button. You can edit or delete the alert at any time.
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That’s it. You can set up as many as you want. You might set up alerts to track your executives mentioned in the news, specific negative review sites like “pissedconsumer”, competitor brand mentions, and community names. Each alert will send a separate email, so make sure you are being specific and sending at the frequency you want. Give it a try, you will like it.

In the next article in this series, we will share best practices for responding to negative reviews online. Remember, the number one way to build a better online reputation: be better.