7 Ways to Increase Your Online Reputation
In today's blog, I'm going to avoid talking about my passionate love for WordPress and instead focus on one of the three things that I believe it takes to make a living, I call it authority but it could just as easily be called reputation or power. It's the only third of the equation (the other two being sex and money) that while we can directly influence, we can't control.
How do you influence what people think of you or your company using the Internet? Or perhaps, a broader question is how do the methods we've used our whole lives translate to the modern digital world? I've outlined seven ways to help manage your business reputation online.
Be honest and consistent.
Nothing is more insulting to an irate customer than insincerity. Years ago I was flying from Edmonton, Alberta to Fredericton, New Brunswick the day before Christmas. We had a connecting flight in Toronto, Ontario but the plane was three hours late taking off from Edmonton and we all knew that our connecting flights would leave without us but the air crew had been trained to lie to us and tell us everything would be OK, clearly it wasn't.
While the air crew choose to blame the weather for our delay, a quick search and a phone call to the airport terminal revealed that the reason for our delay was due to a shortage of ground crew staff, in short there was nobody to load our luggage.
This reminds me of a rule an Art Director once taught me, it's OK to screw up in graphic design, but do it consistently and people will just assume it's part of your style.
Learn to apologize, for real.
If there's one thing that I fear we've lost in the age of 140 character messages and email, it's the art of an apology. We all make mistakes, so learn how to be genuine and apologize. Here's mine;
I'm sorry for not posting much in the past month, I know my regular readers might have wondered where I disappeared to and that it's not acceptable for me to simply stop posting. I was caught up with the holidays, a crisis at work and a lack of motivation. I took some time away from blogging to help myself get a clearer picture of what I wanted to blog about and hope you'll approve of the new subjects.
Respond to issues before they become crisis.
If there's one thing that great politicians have taught us over the years it is that the saying 'a stitch in time saves nine' is more than a old adage, it's a way of life. Now I'm not talking about national politicians or celebrity politicians, I'm talking about the type of mayor who gets re-elected five, six or even ten times in a row. The type of political powerhouse who could easily run for a Senate seat but instead stays in the community.
These people know how to manage issues before those issues because crisis and it's a vital skill that every online business should take the time to learn. What seasoned politicians don't do is start deleting comments off their Facebook wall in response to an advertising failure. This Christmas, Zellers (Canada's version of Target) did just that when they accidentally published a Facebook coupon offering 50% off anything in the store. The proper response would have been to fix the issue, apologize and close the issue. The incorrect response ... would have been everything Zellers did.
Have a clear method of communication.
Let us lament the days gone by when we, the company, controlled the message because it's gone (if it ever truly existed) and instead accept that today customers can control the message. Look at what happened to GoDaddy this year when they openly supported the Stop Online Piracy Act, activists took to the social media channels and the result was thousands of customers leaving GoDaddy over the holidays.
It could have, if GoDaddy had listened to all of it's stakeholders but this story reminds me of working for an international software developer in Ottawa, Ontario. I was working as the web master for the company (let's pretend you don't know them) in 2000 and asked the email team, how I could access the webmaster@ email account, their response? You couldn't. The email address went straight to the spam folder, despite being publicly posted throughout our website because as their director explained .... too many people used it to complain about things. That may have worked in 2000 but with social media, your best defence against a consumer backlash is to offer a free and easy means for them to talk directly with your team.
Dedicate your best people to solving your problems.
Every company has gate keepers, they're the lower rung employee who's job it is to protect management from the rest of the company, the general public, sales people and unfortunately the customer. The gate keeper's job is to protect the important people inside the company from people who would consume their time and waste company resources.
We all hate the gate keeper but nobody hates the gate keeper more than a customer with a legitimate problem that could be solved by an effective employee quickly. Instead of hiring more gate keepers to keep the thinkers from interacting with customers, companies should be encouraging these core team members to spend more time with customers.
Be open and stop hiding behind your rules.
Customers may hate the gate keeper but we truly loathe the bureaucrat who hides behind company policy when a decision is clearly unjust and public opinion (the type that is generated through social media) doesn't care about your rules, they care about what's right and wrong.
In the 1960's, the Canadian government sprayed large areas of land outside Fredericton with Agent Orange. While not admitting fault, in 2007 the government began issuing cheques to victims of the after affects but dozens of people found themselves without compensation due to an overly complex, bureaucratic application process. The resulting public outcry led the government to reverse it's decision and compensate people caught up in the "less than perfect" program.
Learn from what WalMart does right.
You won't often hear me compliment WalMart, but one thing WalMart does exceptionally well is handle returns. In fact, they seem almost happy to take their merchandise back. It's hard to complain about anything when you show up to their store in a foul mood, wait in line for less time than you expected and then find yourself greeted by a smiling, happy person who's ready to give your money back.
In the online world, we might not always be able to do it quite as well as WalMart does at store level, but we can help customers get over their frustrations and solve their issues before they become crisis, we can be sincere with them and apologize instead of hiding behind bureaucracy and we can help our customers by opening better means to communication, directly to the people who can help them best.
