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.

Our finding shows that most doctors worry about negative reviews posted about them on review websites. Physicians’ know that it’s just the mouthing off unhappy patients. Review website often doesn’t take the responsibility to ascertain the negative reviews are baseless and fictional. For example In one case we found a “review” that was demeaning beyond belief, the so-called patient was an ex- girlfriend of that physician and she had a personal agenda in doing so. But not everybody will realize the quality of such information and the significant impact it has on the physician.

Doctors’ knows that all patients do not agree with their opinion. And the disgruntled ones go online and post their opinion, despite the doctor being absolutely right based on the medical condition of the patient.

We have another sticky situation here, happy patients do not bother to go online and post their experience, but on other hand disgruntled patients’ response accumulates. Either way the doctor has to bear the brunt and live with the general belief that a section of patients believe he is not a good doctor.

Reputation Management For.com understands that patients posting their reviews about doctors on review websites are more inclined to amplify. Online reviews about doctors are informative that helps find low-quality physicians, but not as effective in picking out quality physicians from average ones. We are not sure how many physicians’ know to deal with such a situation and that they need a legitimate system in place for their patients, to defend quality of information that beams out from your not so good wishers.

We’ll explain a little why physicians should be worried about online reputation management (ORM).

As the online world is wide and handy, bad reputation takes shape here. Online Reputation Management is the monitoring process that addresses or alleviates the SERPs (search engine result pages) or entries in the online media and social networking domains.

Just like anybody Physicians are as visible as anyone on the Internet and they can be at the receiving end too. Physicians, though they are never considered super-humans, are role models so the expectation and responsibilities is obvious. But looking at the speed information travels on the Internet (through blogs and social networking media), the reputation of a physician can be grounded in no time.

We, at ReputationManagementFor.com did an advanced search on Google on selected Physicians and took screen shots of the first page results. Some of the Physicians were shocked – the negatives that showed on the first page were purely false. In several cases the errors were momentous. Some doctors expressed their helplessness; they are worried when any misinformation appears on sites like Yelp, HealthGrades etc.

A senior doctor once reflected on how it took several months for him to persuade a patient to retract the scathing review posted about him on a review website. The problem starts when doctors or Hospitals do not have enough knowledge about such reviews and by the time they realize, the post might have received thousands hits. Now that’s what we say is a reputation management problem!

We know more patients are doing research about physicians online. Some doctor keep a tab on what is been said about them.  Another example is about a doctor who overlooked this factor because he was employed, but it was a collective reputation so he along-with the Hospital took the beating.

Ignoring online reputation is like endorsing somebody’s view that you are a burglar. It is your professional reputation that’s at stake. You’ve worked hard to get and you owe it to defend and manage your ORM.

Yesterday we did a piece on the Top Ten Reputation Management Tips, detailing 10 things you really should be doing to preserve your own/brand name on t’internet. And, while we freely admit that the list wasn’t exhaustive, there are also some things which – equally as importantly – you should NOT be doing. Whilst amicable that you should wish to fix any issues that may arise, within you is the potential to make things a whole lot worse, too.

The following are examples of the top 10 things not to do to manage your own reputation. When they say the road to ruin is paved with good intentions, they’re talking about this list:

1/ Don’t Engage In Bad Business Practices

Yeah, like, duh. You shouldn’t even need to be reminded of this (and most of you don’t), but the quickest way of landing yourself in hot bother is by making bad ethical business choices. But it’s not just your archetype evil business tycoon that’s prone to doing this, it’s pretty much anyone that runs a business. The economy is utter trash at the moment and making cuts is necessary for a lot of people, but you need to be careful what you’re making cuts to. If you’re cutting corners on normal business procedures, customer service, customer aftercare (for example) – it will reflect reflect badly on you and it will get out. The safest bet you can make is that nothing you do is guaranteed to stay private, or behind closed doors, and that for every irate customer or business partner it’s a potential bad story appearing on the internet. Just think “Should this get out, how would this reflect on me/the company?” and you’ll make far fewer bad judgement calls.

2/ Don’t Rush To Admit You Are Wrong

Seems a bit of a u-turn on that last one, doesn’t it? Well, no, not really. We’re not suggesting that you intentionally hide mistakes, mishaps or unfortunate coincidences, but rushing an apology doesn’t always help either. If something happens and you’re perceived to be at fault, showing a bit of humility and holding your hands up might go a way towards clearing your conscience. But that’s about all the benefit it’ll have, as admitting liability publicly is the only thing anyone’s going to hear. Sure, you might have a solution – you may have already sorted the situation out – but the minute you say “Yeah, our bad”, the only thing you’ll hear about is that you/your company has admitted complacency. And regardless of what the problem was, or how great you were at rectifying the situation, the headlines will all read “[Company Name] Admits Fault”. IF something happens, don’t feel like you have to be brutally honest and hope people will respect you for it. Sort the problem, and issue holding statements (i.e. “We are aware of the issue and are working towards resolving it. We will be issuing a full statement in due course.”) until you can confidently say that the issue is behind you. At which point, acknowledge the existence of the issue, explain what the issue was, how you fixed it, and what provisions are in place to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

3/ Don’t Ignore Misdirected Negative Content

“He aint talkin’ about me” logic doesn’t work. Not when it comes to businesses, and not when it comes to preserving your reputation. It’s all well and good safeguarding against your brand/company name receiving negative attention and taking measures, but is that enough? Well, say you ran a company called Big Mike’s Tyres and had a solid reputation. Congratulations. Unfortunately, a few streets away some guy is running a company called Big Mike’s Tiles and, well… his reputation isn’t as good. In fact, he’s pretty much a cowboy; he rips people off and does a terrible job installing new tiles. So naturally, a lot of people take to the internet to complain about him. But, because of keyword similarities, his bad press is appearing on searches for your company. And, if anyone sees a story saying “Big Mike Ripped Me Off!”, you think that each of them are going to take the time to distinguish between different companies? It’s also not completely beyond the realms of possibility that somebody’s going to see the article about Big Mike ripping people off, assume it’s talking about you, and write their own piece criticizing your company. I hate the use of clichés, but don’t let yourself be put in the position of ‘guilty by association’.

4/ Don’t Threaten Legal Action

Speaking of clichés, I also strongly dislike the “exception to every rule” concept. There are undoubtedly going to be exceptions to this one, but you should at least know what you’re getting yourself into. There’s ultimately no definitive answer to the prevention of negative content arising, but there are certainly rules about how you should conduct yourself when it does. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is threatening legal action against authors/publications out of anger. What they’re saying might well be defamation, it might be inaccurate, it might be a whole lot of things that make you look bad, but you can’t get angry about it. Or, at least not outwardly so. You might even have legal grounds  to have it removed, but have you consulted legal counsel? If there are legal implications, leave it to the solicitors to sort. That’s what they’re paid to do. Once you threaten legal action, you make it a far bigger story. Bigger stories attract more attention, and not just from readers. Once a topic becomes popularized, everyone will want a piece, and so instead of one piece of negative content, you’ve got ten people writing about the original story with the extra bit about your ill-advised response. It used to be a concern that when a story got out, people would hear about it. Now though, you need to be far more concerned with who writes about it. Don’t give them the ammunition they need to make their story any better.

5/ Don’t Try To ‘Pay-Off’ Bloggers

Generally speaking, Bloggers write about whatever they want. A lot of amateur writers also feel that in order to maintain a ‘cutting edge’ to their work, they can only do so by being overly and often cynically critical of others. So yeah, you might at one stage find yourself at the receiving end of a good tongue-lashing, compliments of RandomBlogger569. His article is highly critical, unfairly bias and at points is blatant fabrication. How dare he?! Right, what can you do? Well, as established above – threatening legal action is out. What about trying to pay him off? This guy writes blogs as a hobby, and using his words to try and get attention and is rambling on hoping to cause a scene. How much bigger do you think the ‘scene’ is going to be once he’s written a follow-up post about the guy he wrote about trying to bribe him to remove his content? The best advice is not to respond (rather than fan the flames) and take the usual RM steps to ensure it doesn’t get the attention it deserves.

6/ Don’t Argue On Review Sites

There are review sites all over the internet covering practically every subject under the sun (and some above it too). This is the by-product of Web 2.0 and the User Generated Content generation. This is mainly because people have found they can make a lot of money off of hosting a platform for people to share their experiences/opinions. It requires very little effort, as people will now actively seek out a website they can share their thoughts on; and the more people who share their thoughts, the more people will look to the site as a point of reference. And, with that kind of traffic, comes advertising revenue. So these sites are out to make money and they don’t care who is made to look bad in the process. As such, there might come a time when people take to one (or many) of these sites to write about you. Which, you know, if you’re perfect in every possible way, is most likely to be positive content (though still not guaranteed). Sometimes though, people just want to rant. Let them rant – they’re doing what they think they need to do to feel better. If you start replying in an attempt to refute what’s being said, you’ll look petty. It doesn’t matter if you’re right or not, there can be no good from arguing with somebody on the internet. Under any circumstances. It will look unprofessional, it’ll grant greater credence to what’s being said and you’ll make a bigger thing out of it than it needs to be.

7/ Don’t Post On 3rd Party Forums

A successful politician will, when questioned, often ignore the premise of a question altogether and respond with an answer that sounds like it’s answering, but is actually deflecting on to different matters entirely. They do this not just to be awkward, but because they know that if they answer the question directly, they’re acknowledging that the question has a degree of validity. If negative content starts appearing for searches on your name/company/products in the form of forums, the worst thing you can do is respond to it. For one, it’ll just prolong the story. If you’re taking the proper Reputation Management measures, the story will disappear soon enough, but not if you answer/get caught up in active discussions. For every time you issue a response, you’ll get (at least) one response which counters everything you’ve just said. Your choices then are to continue arguing (with everyone) which is going to make you look just as unprofessional as getting into debates on review sites, or stop posting. At which point, they’ll have won the argument, you’ll have lost and you’ll look worse for it. It’s like thinking “water puts out fires, water is a liquid; paraffin is liquid, I’ll use paraffin to put out this fire”. Yeah, good luck with that.

8/ Don’t Fret Over Neutral Content

Wouldn’t it be nice if everything everyone said about each other was nice, supportive and gratifying? Well, besides from being boring, it just wouldn’t make an awful lot of sense. Nothing and nobody is perfect, and so if you wangle S.E.O. (Search Engine Optimization) to reflect nothing but positive content, it might look artificial and suspicious. Sure, get rid of negative content, but what about all the pieces that are ultimately indifferent? Some people are so paranoid about looking good that they’ll try and manipulate everything that doesn’t imply butter wouldn’t melt in their mouth away from the top rankings in the likes of Google and Yahoo. There are those that are of the mindset that if something isn’t singing their praises, it’s making them look bad. This is crazy. Not only does neutral content (or ‘Swiss Content’) make related searches pertaining to your name/company look more natural, but if it’s ranking high it’s helping to push the negative content down too. Leave it alone.

9/ Don’t Post Compromising Pictures

We said yesterday that it’s good to share pictures. And, while we don’t like blowing our own trumpets, we were right. Sharing pictures will at time help put a face to a name, make people feel a closer, a more human connection to your business. That’s great, you’re human too after all. You lead a life outside of work, just like your customers. You socialize, you have parties, you… Oh, wait! Don’t you still have those pictures from the Thanksgiving  party you had after-hours at the office last year? That was such a good party! Remember when Rodney from Accounts had a few too many to drink and tripped over the carpet and landed face first into Deborah? How you all laughed! Wouldn’t people think you were great people if you showed them you were just like them? No. Rightfully or not, when people give their custom to a company, they hold them to higher, professional moral standards. It’s due to a need for trust, and they need to trust that you’re being professional at all times and they can rely on you to deliver the goods/service they expect. If you show them any pictures which cast doubt over that trust, or cast any aspersions over the professional integrity of your business, they’ll likely not give you their custom/take their money elsewhere. And this is the internet, there’s nothing people like more than a potential scandal.

10/ Don’t Contribute To Wikipedia

Last on this list, but often the top of Google searches. A lot of people assume that if they can make a Wikipedia page, or add to a Wikipedia page, that’ll be a high-ranking page for related searches. This almost always backfires. First of all, it’s difficult to create a Wikipedia entry dedicated to a company or business that’ll pass the requirements to feature in the online encyclopedia. Most pages get removed pretty quickly anyway, making any effort to write a piece a waste of time. But then, we’re forgetting the main point of Wikipedia. It’s the ultimate UGC website. It’s comprised almost entirely of user-generated content as, the ‘beauty’ of it is that literally anyone can edit it. An email and password later, and any Tom, Dick or Harry could edit what you’ve written. You could have said the nicest, brightest thing about your company and an 11-year-old could edit the article, and add the story (or cited references to the story) you’ve been trying to cover up in the first place. And all of a sudden, there it is – at the top of Google results page. And we can guarantee you – as hard as it is to bury random bloggers or news columnists, getting rid of Wikipedia entries is infinitely more difficult.

Again, this list is probably not the be-all and end-all of everything-you-could-possibly-do-to-shoot-yourself-in-the-foot, but it’s a good start. The trick is just to keep in mind “in what way is this likely to backfire?” and a bit of common sense should keep you on the straight and narrow. Sure, doing any of the above would certainly be considered a mistake but not an unrecoverable one. If you have any issues and aren’t sure how to proceed, get in touch with us – as ever, details are on the home page.

[Updated 13/06/2011] I don’t envy the work of a TV Network President. I envy the salary, sure – but trying to ensure that television continues to make money at the cost of quality, principles and a core fanbase can’t be easy. That’s probably not the way the job should work, but just try telling that to Dave Howe, President of NBC Universal’s ‘SyFy’ television network. Hordes of fans are turning their backs on the cable channel, and it’s primarily down to the decision to cancel fans’ favourite: Stargate Universe.

The decision to cancel the show affectionately known as ‘SGU’ (or, to be more specific, ‘not renew it’) was made back in December 2010 at a time when the show’s ratings were already dwindling. Again, not being involved in the television industry, it’s probably not for me to observe that messing about with timeslots and airdates (read as: total inconsistency) is going to mess up viewing figures. What I can tell you is that by alienating your fans, Dave, you’ll lose out in the long run. And when you alienate fans (and lose out in the long run), be prepared for the backlash that comes with it.

For reasons that go beyond the scope of this article, there is a correlation that exists between people who spend a lot of time on their computers/the internet, and people who are fans of either comics or science fiction (or both). Yeah, I’m one of them. I hate the stereotype, but I don’t deny it. Either way, it’s the people who spend more of their time on the internet that are most likely to use it to voice their opinions and speak out against perceived injustice. And this particular instance of SyFy vs Sci-Fi Fans is the perfect example of all the things that can go wrong for a company on the internet, going wrong.

Part of my job is to identify different forms of negative content on the internet, and observe and measure the effects and implications it can have on and for the company it’s directed at. There’s been a huge surge of late in the utilization of social network sites (such as Facebook and Twitter) to not only voice discontent but also organize groups at a level of efficiency previously impossible. You can reach out to people all over the world with a few keystrokes and mouse clicks to advertise your cause, and gain rapid awareness and amass followers in an extremely short space of time.

This is exactly what’s happened with SGU. One guy, not content to sit back and take the disregard being afforded to him and other Stargate Universe fans over the globe, set up a Facebook group called “Save Stargate Universe”. Simple and straight to the point. I’d normally suggest searching for the group rather than me spoon-feeding people everything, but I’m going to break a personal habit and link you directly to them: http://www.facebook.com/SaveSGU by way of using them an example. Led by social networking socialite Dean Bairaktaris, this group has amassed over 54,000 members before and since the ending of the show. Using this Facebook group as a platform for protest, several individuals have strategized and formalized plans to convey their feelings to the SyFy network.

That’s just one group. There’s an entire website dedicated to campaigning against SyFy’s decision to cancel Stargate Universe, with ‘live chat’ coming in from thousands of fans via a Twitter feed and in the 60 seconds or so I was watching, over 20 posts came up complaining about SyFy and the network’s apparent ‘loss of identity’. The network is being lambasted on forums all over the internet, both on dedicated science-fiction based forums and general community-based forums covering a whole range of usually unrelated topics. There have been picture-campaigns in which people have taken their time to create (although admittedly not always from scratch) images promoting the “Save SGU” sentiment (as well as other comments made at the expense of certain networks and network presidents too explicit for me to share here). Multiple petitions have been signed (and repeated), mailing campaigns have seen people send letters and postcards in to SyFy telling of their discontent and there doesn’t appear to be any signs of letting up. I’ve even seen a YouTube video of a guy cancelling his cable contract and returning his equipment to his local cable company in outrage. Oh, and you can also (allegedly) do your part by buying episodes of SGU on DVD and Blu-Ray.

Since the cancellation of the show and the airing of the final episode, MGM have further angered fans by stubbornly releasing the 2nd season on DVD (but not Blu-Ray) billing it as ‘The Final Season’. Still this hasn’t deterred fans nor has it hindered their progress as renewed campaigns are starting up all the time, with a greater emphasis on the international audience being considered (enter ‘Save Stargate Universe UK‘).

Whilst serving as a blatantly obvious example of the dangers of turning your back on your core market in favour of advertising revenue, it also highlights all the potential types of negative media a company can expect from the internet should they give people cause. Dave Howe has incurred the wrath of hundreds of thousands angry viewers who are annoyed with the identity crisis his network is suffering. As the last genuinely decent Science Fiction show coming out of America at the moment (we still have Dr. Who in the UK, which is clearly much lower budget, but adored by millions [which in itself is a bigger thing for us, given comparative populations of UK vs US]), Stargate Universe marks the end of what was a great era of television.

The clearest lesson to be learnt here is “don’t do anything so stupid as to offend your core market”. Still, you can’t please everybody, and you certainly can’t expect them not to “Rush“ to the internet with lists of reasons why you’re the devil incarnate. There are ways of handling negative media, but that’s another topic for another time.

Dialing out,

Ken

They say imitation is the greatest form of flattery. They say that impersonation is a form of imitation. Ergo, shouldn’t impersonation thus be considered flattery? Well, no – not really. Especially not if, whilst impersonating you, they’re actively making you look bad. And unfortunately, this is becoming an increasingly ‘popular’ practice amongst social networking sites.#

We did a piece last year in which we covered an example of Eric Schmidt (former CEO of Google) having his identity “borrowed” by techcrunch.com (done simply for the express purpose of illustrating a point). This was an excellent example of CEO’s needing to manage their personal presence online, in order to preserve their online reputation. Now however with an increasing number of companies opting to have Facebook ‘business’ pages and the likes, it’s more important than ever to maintain your presence over social networking media to save your business from suffering.

When ‘business’ pages were first introduced, as with any new system they took a while to catch on. Only a handful of businesses had pages on Facebook or Twitter, so unless people were specifically advised to; they wouldn’t think to search for companies on the ‘off-chance’ that they’d find content at the end of their websearch. Now however, given the large number of people who’ve put their company names to Facebook pages, people are taking it upon themselves in increasing numbers to search for companies speculatively.

What are these people finding? Are they finding pages that you’ve set up to manage and represent your company in the best possible way, or are they finding a page set up by a third party for malicious purposes because you either didn’t think you should, or hadn’t gotten around to doing one yet? Let’s say you haven’t, and somebody else does it for you. A disgruntled ex-employee, perhaps, or a dissatisfied customer – or maybe even a competitor. All they need to do is a quick image search for your company logo, stick it on this fake Facebook page and all of a sudden people are listening to this person on matters concerning your company as if they were coming from you.

If you’re lucky, this person will be a harmless prankster, looking to make a bit of fun and impress his mates. People aren’t generally complete idiots and wont take a Mike Myers-esque “this man blows goats” comment seriously, but anything written even semi-seriously might pull the wool over a few eyes. The more ‘legitimate’ the page is made to look, the more damage it could do to you if left unchecked. For the same reasons you wouldn’t allow your receptionist to conduct themselves improperly when answering the phone, you don’t want anyone with ill intentions being left to speak to either current or prospective customers or business partners. And if you’re company is traded on publicly, one embarrassing ”announcement” could cause almost immediate financial backlash. Perhaps worst of all, the person might be looking to impersonate your company in order to perpetrate fraud.

That’s not to say that imitation pages couldn’t be setup even in addition to your existing presence, but these pages are easier to deal with. And, if you’re in the habit of pro-actively managing an existing online presence (or outsourcing the work to save the time constraint), negative comments and harmful fake pages will be identified and addressed faster as to minimize the possible damage caused.

We strongly advise that even if you don’t feel you have the time or resources to have a continually updated Facebook or Twitter page, you should still at least have a profile set up to hinder impersonators causing you a headache. 20 minutes work now can save a lot of work later on. For more information on managing your reputation online, and how to handle the intricacies of social media and search engine optimization, give us a call.

There is a saying that even bad publicity is good publicity, but that may work for Hollywood and that is not the case here. Reputation Management For.com conducted a study and learned that corporate crisis might very much result in online negative publicity, lowering the repute of the company. It was further found that most companies still tend to follow public relations and don’t see the value in ORM (online reputation management) until they get bonked in the head with devastating bad publicity. It’s in such situations that the effect of public relations becomes invaluable.

The study was an experimental test to see how corporate companies behave to regain their battered image. Public relations online is different than ORM, whilst both accomplish a similar purpose. But the fact remains that both include different factors. Public relations attempts to curb the message you represent to your audience. It’s a kind of technique about what you want to make others think of you and your business, more associated to quality control catastrophes.

ORM (Online reputation management) on the other hand is a set of methodologies that helps remove online negative publicity while monitoring any mention of your company. Regularly monitoring comments mentioned in your name will allow you to react and control the subject matter.

An unexpected finding in our study showed that most companies responded the least to bad publicity; surprisingly we found that an inappropriate reaction by a “bad” company resulted in an increase in respect for the firm, whereas the same reaction by a “good” company led to lose respect.

Negative publicity, if it stays for long, will be hard to shake off. By applying a fully integrated Reputation Management program for a strong positive internet presence, any brand or business firm can bring up awareness levels and necessarily raise sales.

Reputation Management For.com is an integrated RM company based in the UK. For more information, please visit our website for online reputation management

If your company is doing well in business, you can expect anything from scams to complaints being suggested by Google that will only do it harm. Today, Internet is a huge virtual market place and it is important for any business to maintain a positive feedback or image on the web in order to do well. It is certain that you’ll get some negative reviews or listings even in your Google suggestions when your company name is searched.

The number of companies coming under attack from unscrupulous competitors, ex employees and anyone with a grudge  are increasing.  These third parties have enough time on their hands to submit a false complaint or allegation against your company in the hope that it will be seen by potentially new and existing clients. This is done with the intention of creating enough doubt in the minds of your clients that they will continue to search for competing companies.

There is no difference between large or small companies in getting affected by such scam complaints and these companies often may not have any idea as to how they can protect themselves against this. These scams or complaints are often almost impossible to have removed or cleared from Google dropdown suggestions!

To defend against such attacks which are often the result of competitors wishing to disrupt their rivals’ success, companies need to establish effective online reputation management campaigns.

Here are some tips for you to deal with these forms of attack but given the nature of these problems in each case has to be investigated and handled best according to the gravity of problem.

• Great use can be made of new social media sites and blogs which show your company in a positive light
• Don’t approach the companies who host the negative comments and never offer a fee. These are often simply scams designed to extort money from you.
• Get the help of any popular reputation management company to deal with such serious issues.

Rebuilding your online reputation is a task which can take a few months if done correctly and remember its an ongoing process.  For further details on how to remove negative comments click here.

Now much of the attention is on Japan’s nuclear power plant blasts following the deadly earthquake and tsunami.  This could soon be the worst nuclear accident after Chernobyl. Radiation levels are a shocking 1,000 times above normal around the Japanese nuclear plant.

Japan had the misfortune to declare its first-ever emergency at a nuclear power plant because of a cooling system failure at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor, thanks to emergency generators being knocked out during the 8.9 magnitude earthquake. As the emergency grew, the evacuation area and level of panic grew by the minute.

The reputation of nuclear energy was boasted wildly over the years as the savior for the power crunch the world has been facing. The one prime reason was to satiate the growing need of energy, particularly for countries with limited or no reserves of fossil fuels. Ever since then reactors of all sizes and shapes mushroomed across the world to square the need for energy, without which huge populations of the world lead a miserable future, according to them.

We always knew there are some intimate and integral links between nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. To split the two was not talked till the Permanent Five members of the United Nations Security Council (P-5) had all armed with nuclear weapon themselves.  Once that was done, the big Five started negotiating on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in an attempt to desist outsiders from entering.  So once we assume there is no such danger of nuclear weapons based on NPT signatories, the rest can have the right to access to nuclear power for energy purpose.

Does the world need nuclear power plants or not? This is the big question post the Japan earthquake and Tsunami of 2011! A clear proof to how vulnerable nuclear reactors are when hit by a natural catastrophe. The first concern is the Radiation; the heat and light that is generated travels at supersonic speeds and will radiate from its source to over 5 miles per second. So that means if you are within a five mile radius, you’re going to be turned to ashes instantly. So what is at stake and for whom?

Lesson from Japan-

Certainly all the money in the world will not help—the money has to be used in the right way. The public has to know how to react in times of disaster. Japan’s reputation has been messed up on this front. Now this takes me to something more disturbing – How good are the nuclear power plants in other parts of the world? We all know now that the earth has the tendency to shrug every now and then, who says similar events won’t happen in other countries?

“A complaint is an expression of dissatisfaction made to an organization, related to its products, or the handling process complaints itself, where a response or resolution is explicitly or implicitly expected.” (Definition from ISO 10002:2004)

Enhancing customer satisfaction, loyalty, and Corporate Image through reputation management is vital to every company or organisation. It is said that it costs an organization at least four times as much to gain a new customer as to maintain an existing one. Organizations that regularly lose customers, struggle to repair their damaged reputations. In today’s competitive environment, product and service innovations are re-defining accepted levels of performance.

For this every company needs a good Complaints Management System, which is one of the crucial requirements for successful businesses when managing customers’ needs and protecting their brand. Even the best companies sometimes get it wrong. They fail to deliver what is promised.

What happens when people, processes and technology don’t complement each other and work in harmony?

1. Service delivery can stall
2. Customers end up dissatisfied

This puts the customers at risk of churning and giving bad word of mouth to their social networks. Companies, therefore, need to design their service delivery strategies to “get it right the first time” but, recognizing that even the best sometimes fail, also have recovery processes in place to identify and retain valued at-risk customers.

Customer dissatisfaction can damage the business- How it happens?
An average of 25 out of 26 unhappy anonymous customers will subsequently drive away 1,560 of their friends from the business.

Smart management will always find ways:

1. To differentiate themselves from competitors
2. Define customer service standards
3. Deliver an effective complaint handing system for customers

The way an organization handles complaints can affect its reputation. Poorly handled complaints can be an expensive exercise that reflects badly on the organization and reinforces defective business processes. If complainants feel they are being ignored or not taken seriously, they may look for redress by seeking external review or by publicly exposing their experience, which could directly impact on an organization’s reputation.

There is much to lose by ignoring complaints and much to be gained by having an effective customer management system.