Can your customers find you on Google when they have a complaint?
Came across another great example of why you need to show up in Google for not only positive mentions of your brand, but negative mentions as well. I see this path constantly, and nowhere is it more clear than on this customers “beef” with Taco Bell.
The New Twitter Bird
Every company is wary of the “upset customer”, and the affect 1 angry person can have on a businesses reputation online. You don’t have to upset an entire army of people anymore to flood the internet with enough negative complaints to send you into a fit. It doesn’t have to be that way though, if your reputation management can keep up.
Picture of Keith Brown on a Subway
Part of my new years resolution for 2012 is to experiment more with rich media, getting past the basics of text based content and really seeing what Google likes as far as pictures and videos go. While posting video content is fairly straightforward, there is still some mystery behind how Google ranks images in their database.
It’s interesting how most retailers spend millions before black Friday on their website, and not a cent afterwards. Ignore black Friday reputation management, and you’re losing customers. Think about it, black Friday 2013 starts the day black Friday 2012 ends.
The day after black Friday thousands of consumers take to the internet to brag about deals they got, and voice their frustrations with deals they didn’t. Everybody kicks their SEO into high gear before black Friday and Cyber Monday, then they sleep on where the real money is made.
About a year ago as a fun project I decided to start a consumer complaints website. My thought process was pretty simple, bet on the fact that large corporations would keep growing, outsourcing customer service, and ignoring customer complaints.
12 months, 750,000 visitors, and over 50,000 submitted complaints later, I have learned a great deal about reputation management and the anatomy of a customer complaint.
Image via Wikipedia
The infamous consumer complaints website Ripoff Report is gone from Google. Not even one single page is left in the SERP’s from the hundreds of thousands that existed no more than 24 hours ago.
Early on people speculated the website got banned, but it appears that it was an epic strike from within. How exactly did a huge website like ripoff report vanish instantly from Google’s index? It appears it was a URL removal authorized by the webmaster in charge of Ripoff Report’s Google account.
Image via Wikipedia
In New Dehli, Arindam Chaudhuri filed a major lawsuit against Google and several other sites for publishing and distributing “defamatory, libelous, and slanderous articles.” Once again somebody has challenged a search engine for what they index, and writers everywhere get to act like it’s the first time it’s happened. There are a few points that I can’t seem to get away from on this issue. Maybe you can help me get to the bottom of this “problem” that never seems to go away. Why is Google is continually held to a different standard than the rest of the web?
Image by Keene and Cheshire County (NH) Historical Photos via Flickr
We are in the midst of the greatest shift in consumer behavior in my lifetime. I’m only 25, but it doesn’t take a genius to see that the internet is changing the way consumers behave, and that this is upseting decades of traditional corporate behavior.
Companies are used to strong arming their customers, giving them “if you don’t like it then leave” attitude. That stuff doesn’t fly anymore, and one bad complaint/review can cost you millions, no joke.
Image via Wikipedia
Gone are the days when large corporations could just bury consumer complaints, they have the world wide web to thank for that. If Twitter can help overthrow the Egyptian government, it can certainly take down your business.
It’s time to start taking negative brand mentions seriously, and form a solid strategy for dealing with them in a timely manner. If you aren’t a company like Google, Facebook, or Walmart, the world can do without your services. Depending on the competition level in your niche, one share or tweet can cost you millions, and that’s not an exaggeration.
Image by Roger Smith via Flickr
Searches for “Keith Brown” are up about 10,000% in the last 24 hours (that’s no joke), so of course I went searching for the cause and didn’t have to look far. It appears another man, also named Keith Brown, has been accussed of doing something very bad. As for the hundreds of people every hour looking for info on this creep, most tend to find your way to this website assuming probably, that he owns it. After the 200th+ visitor this hour who bounced while searching for info, I decided to make a post. Here’s the excerpt from the US Magazine piece, in case this is how you came to looking for me.
Image by pollyalida via Flickr
Ready or not, here they come. If you have a business of any size online you are going have consumers, and those consumers are going to voice their opinions. Whether their experience involved satisfactory or unsatisfactory service, people want to share now more than ever.
It used to be that these reviews and complaints would go largely unnoticed, but now thanks to Google instant, what people are saying about you WILL affect the way people see your company. If those words are complaints and problems, then you are going to experience what I call the Google instant snowball.
Every time I am involved in a new start-up I get a chance to learn about a difference niche. Different groups carry with them different consumers and customer behavior, and lately I have been all about reviews. Consumer and editorial reviews continue to gain swagger in search engines, and a good review is an easy way to get that bump over your competition.
Free reputation management? Now that’s something I think we can all get behind. Companies charge anywhere from $10-20k a month for reputation management.
While there is great value in the service they provide, there is no reason why people shouldn’t understand the basics of leveraging their own name on the internet in the 21st century. So I’m going to break down things to start you on the path to a stronger foothold in Google, Social Networking, and Domain Names.
I remember one time in elementary school a new girl moved into town. The first day of class I happened to tell a few friends that she looked cute, and before the end of the day rumors about us were all over school. I did my best to set the record straight, but the damage had already been done. I was doomed to endure an entire year of jokes and awkward moments. Why is it that people today act like they have to endure the same rumors and jokes as adults? It’s not grade school, and you can control the way people perceive you around the world. It’s called reputation management, and it’s actually not that difficult.