Once people learn the extent of their online reputation they are hit with a number of emotions. First is the shock and surprise. They are amazed by the fact that people have actually taken the time to write comments about their experiences with you to share online. These comments can be either good or bad. Then comes the panic or fear. You might be wondering what they are writing about. Unless you are a newborn baby there is plenty of negative information to report about you online. Anyone with any kind of history has something that they don’t want the public to know. So, we pull it together and we face our fears and brace ourselves for the truth. We are ready to find out.
When you are ready to view your online reputation you need to start at the beginning, where most people will begin to search you out. You need to Google your name or the name of your company. Google has many sites that will do a regular search for you in many different platforms to find out what people are actually saying about you. These can range from checking blogs, forums, social media or review sites to get the information needed.
Complainers
When negative information appears about you it can come from several sources. There are the complainers. They have had a less than stellar experience with your business. Whether or not their experience was really as bad as they may have believed it is all a matter of perspective. So, the sooner you find out what their comments are the better chance you have of reversing their viewpoint or do something about it.
Keep in mind that not all complainers are the same. Some complaints are really legitimate. These are the customers that have really had an unfortunate experience that was not resolved properly. When these types of complaints arise you should address these issues immediately. You don’t want an unhappy customer ever to put a negative post about you online. Try to fix the problem directly if possible or use the services for business from a company like Reputation.com.
The Malcontents
The next group of complainers is those that will not be satisfied with anything. They are constant whiners. They rant and rave about just about anything. Some of their complaints will be exaggerated, biased or just outright falsities. These types of complainers can cause you a lot of problems and some of them maybe have never even done business with you before. These types of complaints cannot easily be removed. You may have to enlist the services of companies like Reputation.com to find more creative ways of dealing with them.
Whether the reviews about you and your business are legitimate or not you need to do something about them. Most of these reviews are hidden behind a veil of secrecy. They don’t want to give their names or contact information making it difficult to track them down.
After you view your online reputation it will allow you to be better equipped to decide exactly how you will deal with restoring your online reputation.
