Do all hotels need to give a thought about reputation management; is this a critical new function in the travel industry? The answer is ‘Yes’. In the era of volatile social networking,  how a potential customers’ buying decision is influenced by traveler’s reviews is an important factor to be considered. Well precisely; it’s about monitoring, examining and responding to reviews and opinions of your hotel and taking part in social media to mold the perceptions of your brand.

Hotel industry has realized the importance of online reputation management, but is not sure how to handle the complexities of online reviews and comments.  Hotels have been prompt to adopt social media, but I believe a lot of hoteliers are mixing up priorities.

ReputationManagementFor.com- suggests that Hotels need to have minimum Reputation Management and Social media understanding.  Why? This is because it is regarded as a marketing tool that almost touches every aspect of a hotel, from operations to revenue management.

Talking about social media, Facebook and Twitter can be competent channels to involve travelers to get them to speak, but the buying decisions are made on review sites. Hoteliers should know the difference that people go to Facebook to socialize and that TripAdvisor is not for shopping but it’s a review website. And the minimal hotels should do is to monitor and respond to online reviews.

It is also crucial to note that reputation management is not about attempting to eliminate negative content. It’s a fictitious statement. It’s about genuineness and transparency since your business deserves the best.

TripAdvisor was the first to introduce review sites for travelers, and today it has 50+ million opinions and reviews on its website. Taking into account the bulk of visitors TripAdvisor has and the amount of reviews posted directly, it is crucial hotels to monitor and react to such reviews and opinions.

We feel TripAdvisor is the most decisive factor of a hotel’s online reputation management program. If a hotel is inactive in social media circuit, it ought to be taking heed and responding to TripAdvisor reviews and use the feedback to improve their customers’ experience. As mentioned above customers have more than dozen options to air their views. Reputation Management becomes more complex with Social Media, because travelers post their views on social sites, review websites or other forums, and monitoring alone can be intense, before you decide what step is to be taken

Social media can be a massive waste of time if we don’t have a clear idea how to deal with it, and still if you clutch on to the orthodox marketing activities it will reflect on your revenue. The way travelers’ decision making and communication mode has transformed dramatically we need to have massive resources to arrest further damage. With the need to adjust to this situation, hotels must keep a tab on the latest happening and publish useful, pertinent content on review sites and social websites.

We live by five star ratings to just about anything you can buy or do in the online world these days. To plan a holiday or buy a best-seller we go by ratings and reviews online on TripAdvisor or Amazon. Real people telling you their joyous experiences helping you decide it all. Or NOT! This New York Times article lifts the lid on fake rave reviews. Here is an excerpt…

“For $5, I will submit two great reviews for your business,” offered one entrepreneur on the help-for-hire site Fiverr, one of a multitude of similar pitches. On another forum, Digital Point, a poster wrote, “I will pay for positive feedback on TripAdvisor.” A Craigslist post proposed this: “If you have an active Yelp account and would like to make very easy money please respond.”

As Reputation Managers we are constantly approached by people, firms and other service industry people about negative reviews. Negative reviews are scary for anyone and usually or mostly always done with malicious intent in our experience. If you look at it really how many times have you written about a hotel experience you did not particularly like or restaurant not having met your expectation? Its usually the good experiences one blogs or writes about with a couple of constructive criticism thrown in.

However, 5-Star reviews that we see everywhere from Amazon to TripAdvisor and review sites are being fed by the growing need to provide rave reviews to attract more customers. It is not as easy as spotting spam and people tested could not identify the fakes. The NYT article talks about Cornell researchers trying to make an algorithm to sieve out the fake rave reviews from popular websites.

There are sites that now offer positive reviews and ratings on books to music to hotels and restaurants. The more credibility and value that can be converted into hard cash will soon find an industry to alleviate the demand for them.  It will be interesting to see what the hotel industry or online shopping sites do to tackle it when this problem gets rampant and loses credibility.

From restaurants to hotels there are reviews for just about everything and doctors are no exception. There are millions of critics eager to post their last night experience about a chicken dish or grumble about a lethargic service and they will find a place to post them.  Similarly websites like ratemd.com or angislist.com is a place where users post comments about their physicians. A Doctor will have hundreds of happy patients, but it only takes one bad review to trash a Doctor’s online reputation.

These review websites are good tool for patients searching the best care, and brings in more business to doctors. But a bad review can mean empty waiting room. To avoid getting beaten online, doctors sometimes make their patient sign legal agreements or gag orders asking them not to post any comments online. These doctors say they have no option due to privacy policy they are forced to keep silent when patient bad mouth them.

Reputation Management For.com realizes it’s a matter of survival and how important a doctor’s reputation is. A survey undertaken in Texas where patients were asked ‘who do you trust the most when it comes to health hosting- Doctors, Politicians, Media, or health policy experts’ and well the answer was doctors.

It’s widely accepted that 70 percent of today’s users search for your name on Google before they decide to do business with you. Obviously when it comes to deal with medical professionals, prospective patients will tend to check a doctor’s online reputation and testimonial by just typing their name. A clean online reputation helps in obtaining new patients and maintaining trust with existing patients.

So the best way to balance the doctor’s right to fair evaluation and patient’s right to quality health care is to have a third-party review those comments. This will protect the rights of a doctor from an unfair online trial. Doctors may not agree on how to reform health system, but the bottom line is that patients trust their doctors and want to hear what they have to say.

We have been approached by many tourism companies both agents and hotels alike requestiong help with negative comments appearing about them on the search results.  More often than n0t they come from sites like tripadvisor whose business model is based on customer feedback.

There are 2 big issues with this:

1. You tend to get more genuine feedback from customers who have had a negative experience rather than a positive one.
2. Competitors write negative things about another company which are false.

So quite often Tripadvisor will not give a overall balanced feedback from customers because the same old saying is true “a customer who has had a bad experience will tell a 100 people where a customer who has a good experience will tell 10″.  Customers will normally only give feedback to a site like Tripadvisor if they have had a negative experience rather than a positive one.

We are also now seeing what we believe to be competitors writing bogus negative feedback about competing companies in order to trash their reputation.  It’s very bad practice and something we frown on and will certainly not get involved in.

What can you do about negative comments on Tripadvisor?

1. Make sure there is genuinely not an issue that needs addressing if  many customers are complaining about the same thing.
2. Offer customers a gift if they write something positive about their stay at your hotel on Tripadvisor
3. Hire a company to help protect your reputation online and bury negative results in the search results.

The outcome, although you can’t get rid of negative comments totally is you can show a much more balanced view, in many ways this is much better than just positive or negative views.

What would you do if a customer was standing outside your business front door shouting negative things?

There are certain types of industries that seem more prone to getting negative comments and competitors playing dirty tricks and trying to trash their company’s reputation.  Here are some of the main industries our clients come from recently:

• Recruitment and HR
• Construction and building
• Celebrities
• Travel agents / hotels and other accommodation types
• Dating websites

I used to hear business owners talk about the Internet and not really understand it, back then companies just missed out on another great sales channel.  Today, however, I have to say when I hear a business owner having the same attitude I have to hold back from calling them crazy and telling them they will be out of business in 5 years.

Why do I feel so passionate about this, well in the past when you played ignorant to the Internet you were just loosing possible sales, but now people and competitors could be killing your business by trashing your reputation online.  Never has it been more important to take SEO and Online PR more serious, as a business owner you may not use the Internet much, but I am sure as hell your customers do.  You may not only be missing sales but loosing them when customers Google your company and see negative feedback and unhappy customer experiences.

If you had someone standing outside your business’s front door saying “your company was a scam, sold terrible products, had terrible customer services” then what would you do?  I am sure you would do something rather than ignore them, well the same thing could be happening online right now.

Every company now needs to take reputation management serious and not wait until negative comments and results appear on the first page of the search engines.  Businesses need a to have in place a proper procedure for complaints and feedback.  Monitoring or having a company like Reputation Management For defending your reputation online could prove invaluable.

Reputation management is here to stay as it will be an ongoing threat. The social media has made it easy for all to plug in and play. When user feeds in a negative comment it is more likely to generate new type of threat for your brand. Your infrastructure vendor will be good at blocking malware, but not the negative comment circulating on the web. So most companies will need to find way to shield their repute. We need not have to dig deep to take into consideration what the future holds, but we’ll see that in coming year companies will take a serious stand to monitor their reputation.

One of the main factors why I chose to pick on social networking sites is because they are a very important part of reputation management. If there is one thing that we learned from social media is that user content ranks very well in the search engines. Just sit back and do a search, I am sure you will come across at least a couple of social media sites in first page of your search. So imagine the height of damage these hi-speed information portals can do in a click of the mouse. The usage and access to social media in workplace will be on top priority to help protect companies from getting their brand tarnished.

If you notice many of these social websites allow users to register in company user ID and even generates URL that ends with the name of your company.

http://twitter.com/companyname

http://companyname.Wordpress.com

http://www.myspace.com/companyname

You need to be the first to register with your name and URLs on these sites and do it fast. The problem with such provision is that you are always at risk and someone use these sites to damage your brand reputation. It will be immature to say that such things will go off and settle down by itself. Companies should not take for granted the power of social websites and its impact. The one-click-connect-to-all kind of platform is powerful to damage your reputation and is an established form of media today. Remember when a user tweets about the pathetic service you offer, it will obviously put your business in trouble, that’s the power of social media

While you want to remove bad press or comments on social website, you need not have to change the way you do your business. Even if you run your business perfectly you are bound to get a dissatisfied customer who will do the rest to tamper your reputation. The best way to counter malicious content on the web is to hire a reputation management firm to take care of your stake. They will counter these allegations, build up your profiles and gets them listed on search engines with keywords that are important to your reputation. It’s one method to gain access and be in control. It also provides you with a chance to reach those customers who never visited your official company website.  Safeguarding your brand reputation comes with a cost and should be included in your business budget.

What’s else can motivate you to stay at home this Christmas?  With the fall of Flyglobespan, BA managing to stop a strike, Eurostar trains not working and the roads, well quite frankly a nightmare.  Why bother having all this stress and just enjoy what I hope is a White Christmas back in the UK.

It was crazy how Eurostar dealt with the crises of people being stuck on the train for 7 hours.  The first thing that sprung into my mind is what would happened if that was a fire?  Would you be stuck on the train in the middle of the tunnel for 7 hours with smoke building up.  I hope not.

What I don’t understand is why so many companies get it wrong when it comes to keeping its customers up to date. I hear time and time again that people are left standing in stations, airpots, etc and don’t have a clue what’s going on.  This can be just about the most damaging thing for a companies reputation, management should have responded to their customers immediately, even just to say, sorry we’re on it just not sure what the problem is.  If a negative situation happens, sometimes this can turn a potential nightmare into a dream situation if its dealt with correctly.

This is just another blow to tourism in general, with the recession, new flight taxes, companies failing and strikes imminent, you can understand why staycations have become so popular.  Unfortunately for Eurostar 1000′s of people are going to remember how they ruined their Christmas.  What should Eurostar do now to fix their reputation and win back customers?

Flyglobespan, British Airways, where does it stop, the tourist industry has been hammered with negative news and press.   On the BBC last night they were talking about the average staff’s wages, the average BA cabin crew gets almost double what they get at Virgin.  Either BA is paying way to much or Virgin is under paying either way there are no winners when figures like these are released.

The tourism industry as a whole is under attack with hotels reputation being tested with negative feedback on sites like Tripadvisor putting potential customers off.  This latest news about Flyglobespan certainly will not help the industry, who wants to go abroad and worry about not getting back.  The hotels miss out big time on all the destinations that Flyglobespan flew to.  The knock on effect is massive, restaurants, shops, taxi drivers, the list goes on.

The Internet can be very one sided, hotels, air carriers, tour operators by the very nature of what they do have tens of 1000′s of customers.  It is totally down to the laws of average that no matter what you do or how fantastic your customer service, you will have someone, somewhere not happy about the service.  Obviously having a bad customer service and ignoring issues can compound negative press online.  In the good old days word of mouth was normally the only place annoyed customers would vent their frustrations.  With the dawn of the Internet came along blogs, social network site, forums and other avenues for people to write about a bad experience they might have had with a hotel, restaurant etc.  Now the whole world can listen rather than just friends and family.

Customers who have had a very good experience do not often tell people about it unless asked, and they certainly don’t write about it, so because of this the Internet can become a company’s worst enemy rather than best friend.

Fixing this could be easier than you’d think, yes it does take time, resource and require systems in place, but done correctly it can not only help manage your reputation online but even attract more customers.  Having for example a facility to capture customer feedback and publish them to the web is a good example.

The big lesson with PR and reputation management is don’t leave it until it becomes a crisis and you are loosing business, make sure you are take a proactive approach and protect your businesses reputation.

Most businesses want their websites to show up on the first page of search engines. How good is it if your website  appears on the first page of Google or Yahoo? You search for your company/product name and to your surprise you find one or more listings on top. You have been waiting for this, but then the sudden change in weather on search engines is astonishing. Have a closer look, do you see anything unusual? Well it could be those negative comments about your products doing the rounds and inviting so many visitors and obviously putting your website on top. If it is so, you are in big trouble.

One negative comment is enough to frighten away many likely customers. How genuine these reviews or complaints are is not the question, but it is about the impact. Your company’s reputation is at stake besides loss of revenue in millions.

Reputation management has become a crucial tool, but then very few companies go for this service to counter negative propaganda waged against their firms. Airlines, banks, hotels are the most vulnerable and are always at the receiving end, by disgruntled customers or envying competitors. By being ignorant of reputation management these firms end up sorting issues through litigation, which is twice as expensive and time consuming as compared to hiring reputation managers.

In such situations, our suggestion is to ‘nip it in the bud’- suppress the negative comments and bring up the positive ones. It is all about customizing a strategy to corner negative comments and design a campaign to keep positive reviews of your company above others.

Safeguarding your business from on-line damages and ensuring its smooth run is tantamount to running a business itself. New and small companies need to understand how vulnerable they are and how important reputation management services are for their business.

The hospitality industry is yet to master the tricks to deal with reviews on social media. The user-generated reviews are exploding and consumers are gaining greater power to broadcast on communities like  Facebook, Twitter, TripAdvisor, Expedia, Yelp, or any group of the social networking forums. The pace of this change has certainly caught many hotels off guard. A recent survey conducted by the Market Metrix and Trip Advisor found that 85% of the hotels have no guidelines on how to handle the negative guest reviews.

The hotels have always worked hard to keep their guests happy, in part because of the fact of repeat business to maximise occupancy, they fail to realise that one unhappy customer can take a huge toll on their reputation. This could result in losing  five other likely guests. With the advent of the social media, the hotel management needs to keep track of a huge crowd viewing an online negative comment or review which may be untrue.

This puts us back to the square one and the question is how to deal with the negative comments.

The standard responses like repeatedly stating how you value their feedback, without properly addressing the specific comment does not do any good to change the negative review online. Instead you could even address it to  the concerned online forum or review site could be the answer.

The hotel management could perhaps follow the comments on TripAdvisor and can prove foul play in those cases which they think it is a fabricated story. Therefore, complaint recovery acts as one of the best ways to build customer loyalty and negate your negative reviews.

So, look out for your online reputation, negative or positive, private or public, its time to take a more active role in the online dialogues. Keep an eye on your business reputation before it gets too bad or out of your control. Never ignore the online reviews, because in a later period it might cost you dearly!