Who is in Control of Your Reputation?

Yelp?     Facebook?     Foursquare?      Google+?

I often hear business owners lamenting about a single negative Yelp review? They feel helpless against this anonymous machine. Review portals  can be a huge advantage for your business when you take control and drive to conversation. Even if you get a not so flattering review once in awhile you can turn this to your favor.

How do you control your brand and make sure you have a consistent message throughout the web?

• Claim all of your business profiles and add details about you and your business, images and a description of your products or services.
• Engage:  respond to reviews take advantage of the ability to make offers through review portals.
• Generate more reviews by asking for them and making it easy for your customers to sing your praises.

There are hundreds of portals.  Some are generic like Google + and City Places and other are specific to an industry. Type in the keywords for your business and search for portals. Here is a list of the most popular.You should always claim your listing or enter your business if you are not listed and fill in all the details about your business. Add photos and a great description. Introduce yourself, sign up yourself and give good reviews to some of your favorite businesses.

If you get a negative review,  realize this is what your customer experienced. Take steps to correct the situation if that is appropriate and invite the reviewer to give you another chance. Be careful not to further alienate the reviewer.  Sometimes if the reviewer is an unreasonable person it is best to just leave the situation alone. One complaint among a bunch of glowing reviews will not be given that much weight.

Make it easy for your customer to leave you a good review. Put links to favorite review sites on your website and have a form on your website for customers to leave a review. You can send follow up emails to ask customers about their experience with your product or service.

CK Online Marketing offers a Review system that makes all of this easy! We create a portal just for your business reviews with links to your favorite 3rd party review sites.  We have tools to make it easy for your customer to leave you a review. Learn  more here.