Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category

We are a very pro-active and believe in taking a preventative measure rather than waiting until negative results start appearing about a company or individual.  We wanted to start reporting on companies and celebrities and ranking them on how good their online PR and reputation management is.  We started with 3 completely different celebs and will be adding to it weekly.

• Jimmy Carr got into hot water about a joke he performed.
• Jonathan Ross got into trouble about a phone call prank.
• John Terry had an affair with a team mates partner

What is apparent is the lack of online presence celebs and companies have.  This is asking for trouble and with search engines becoming faster at reporting news, photos and videos if you don’t take action to protect your reputation online then you are allowing other people to write anything they want about you.  Anyone with a phone is now a journalist, they can blog you, post you, video you and with in minutes have them online.

We can help protect and defend your reputation online, we highly recommend you do this before negative things may appear about you.  It is way more difficult to push negative results down once they are there, by reducing the chances of results appearing on the first page will help soften or eliminate negative stories all together on the first page of Google.

If you need help or want to protect your reputation online then give us a call:

Call: UK +44(0)845 862 1893
Call: USA +1 646 723 3965

or fill out our online enquiry form

Yelp Extortion

Yelp, the hub for disgruntled clients to put in scathing reviews is now facing class-action lawsuit. The allegations against Yelp is that it asks advertisement money from business houses to manipulate or remove reviews. Strange, but no advertisers on Yelp has a perfect reputation.

Yelp the popular user-generated reviews website, was more popular than Google; users would search for a particular company or local business house before they wanted to deal with it. And anything that appeared negative or positive will be the final impression. So if it is on Yelp, it’s heard.

The company on the other hand denies the allegations, contained in the class-action lawsuit, but the whole affair has put a huge question mark about the reliability of Yelp.

If Yelp’s revenue was solely based on advertising, it was easy to understand why they wanted to tamper with reviews on its website, but it was not to be. Yelp will have some hard time explaining the ethics it follows. It will be interesting to see what the company has to say in its self-defense.

The situation would have been different if Yelp had a big brother with corporate backing like MSN or Google, then meddling with reviews wouldn’t be a cause for worry.

As reputation management goes Yelp needs new principles, new moral code of conduct to bring back credibility before they are totally deserted.

Having had to finally get a new PC after 4 years from Dell I opted for the 64 Bit Windows 7 hoping I had not made a mistake.  After only 48 hours I have to say the is the best thing to come out of Microsoft for a while.

It maybe that my expectation dropped dramatically after Vista but this operating system so far seem very quick and intuitive.

The Windows 7 is controlled mainly from in its Taskbar – especially in the Start menu and System Tray. Vista gave the Start menu a welcome redesign; in Windows 7, the Taskbar and the System Tray get a thorough makeover.

So will the more positive than negative feedback be enough to sell more windows 7, sure some reviews have not been totally positive but the overwhelming consensus is that windows 7 is moving in the right direction.  Lets see what happens with sales in 2010

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.

Who is talking about you

Companies spend years building a name for themselves or developing a brand or product without really understanding online PR.  The brand is your product, reputation management is what and how you deliver your product.  A great example of this happened to me lately, I used to drive a Honda and used the local Honda dealer in Perth Scotland.  The garage’s customer service was fantastic and they always pushed the extra mile to help, however with our family expanding we had to get a bigger car so decided on a Discovery 3 Land Rover.  So we bought from Stratstone, I have to say because we were spending a lot more on the new car and it’s in the luxury end, I expected the customer service to be fantastic like business class over economy in Emirates.  Oh how I have been so wrong…

It was not until I was talking to someone else who also had a Land Rover that we  started to discuss Stratstone in Perth and how we both avoided using the company.   I can’t really fault the car, the Discovery 3 is an incredible drive, everything Jeremy Clarkson said about it is right, however I wont be buying another one if I have to deal with Stratstone, their staff are so miserable when you go into the showroom its unreal.  The staff are so unhelpful, where other garages will ask do you need a lift home, these guys never offer it.   You feel that they won’t bend over backward and will charge for everything.  The next Land Drover dealership is about 1 hours drive away, so for this reason I will not be buying a new Land Drover.

It goes to show how a manufacturer can have the best product in the world but if the people representing and selling your product don’t have the best customer service it can effect your product badly.  This can be very dangerous and effect the reputation of the product, look at how Tiger Woods effected the golfing world and how some people stopped buying certain brands because of the association with him.

Monitoring reputation management is a great way to gain feedback from customers and act quickly to any issues or problems that maybe arising.  Sometimes if a negative issue is handled correctly it can  turn to your favour and show that you are listening to customers and responding accordingly.

We have seen a direct correlation to how fast a company responds to a negative comment and the outcome from a negative thread becoming positive.  More often than not companies will react when a negative discussion has gained momentum and started to work its way up the search results by which time the damage is done and very difficult to win the battle.

So don’t wait till it’s to late, get on top of your reputation management, listen and learn it could save and make you a fortune.

One of the problem with many review sites across the Internet is that the reviews are presented in a timeless zone. Although reviews are dated, it is easy to forget that a critical review is actually two years old rather than last month. As a result changes in quality are difficult to assess without careful analysis of the different reviews and their dates.

One way to solve this would be to introduce reputation trend graphs which show how quality ratings are varying over time. Sure it was bad two years, but all the recent reviews demonstrate that this place/service is much better now.  Since most review site collect metrics over time it would be easy to represent them in graphical form.  Great for consumers and great for the businesses themselves.