With the massive proliferation of online information about individuals and businesses, it’s natural for people to be concerned about what others are saying about them. The primary sources are Facebook, Twitter, and local business review sites like Yelp which all easily allow anyone to create a short snippet of feedback about a person or business.
As a small business owner, it’s important to stay on top of this feedback so you can address and make changes in your product or service where needed.
Staying Informed
By far, the easiest way to know what people are saying about you or your business online is by creating a Google Alert for your name or your business name. You can choose to be notified immediately when a new bit of information about you or your business is indexed by Google. Anything Google crawls is fair game so this includes news websites, blogs, and images.
To create an alert on Google, go to alerts.google.com, and type in the phrase you want to monitor. You can preview results by clicking the “Preview results” link. Otherwise, select “Everything” to include all sources, set the notification frequency, number of results, and the email address where you want to receive the alerts.
Managing Negative Feedback
If someone makes a negative comment about you or your business on Facebook, Twitter, or Yelp, it’s best to acknowledge the described issue and provide some detail about what you’re doing to address the issue. On Facebook and Twitter, you don’t usually have enough room to provide a full description of what you’re doing to change, but you can easily link to a blog posting that lets you be a specific as you need. This is another great reason why your business should have a blog.
Most importantly – never argue with a negative reviewer. It’s difficult to satisfy everyone, and any response by you that smells of “defense” only strengthens the point of the negative review. Reach out to to the reviewer privately to make sure you are clear on why they are unhappy, then take that feedback and figure out what can be changed to prevent the issue in the future. This may require staff training or a change in procedure, but can have a greater impact than just satisfying that one individual.
Change is good, especially when your reputation is on the line. Make good on your negative reviews, and you can easily change your detractors to promoters for your business just because you listened and reacted positively.
Image by hashmil
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