Reputation Management for Small Business

I was catching up on Website magazines this week and happened across an issue that had a story on Reputation Management.  I hadn’t read too much on this subject before but had often wondered if companies were working on solutions for small businesses for Reputation Management.  It looks like there are a few solutions out there but they are mostly focused on Enterprise size companies.  Best Buy has a well known program for customers with questions or issues on social media.  With the number of small businesses starting Yelp and Facebook pages Reputation Management is something that they should definitely look into.  The only thing worse than not being visible on these types of sites is to have a presence but never monitor it.  Customers with both good things to say and not so good things to say will just feel like they are ignored.

I recently used Yelp to help me find an electrician for a small job.  I poured over the reviews and eventually decided on one that seemed to have great reviews.  Unfortunately my experience wasn’t that great and I promptly wrote a review summarizing my poor experience.  However, the company never responded; either directly to me or commenting on Yelp.  This was a missed opportunity by the company to show that they both monitored the entries and cared about maintaining a consistently good customer experience.  This is a good example of “being out there” but not having a complete social media strategy that included monitoring and responding to customers.

For small businesses sites like Yelp are critical to their success.  Few of the folks I know use only the Yellow Pages these days; most are turning sites like Yelp and Facebook to maintain contact with their customers and as a way to passively prospect for other customers.  Few small businesses monitor these sites to see how things are going and actively respond to entries.  The article in Website Magazine offers a number of tasks that small businesses can perform on their own to conduct their own Reputation Management efforts.  All of them seem reasonable and small businesses should be able to execute them without taking up much time.   Items like monitoring your competitors’ entries on these sites and tracking prolific contributors.  These contributors could be potential leads in the future.  If you have considered starting a Facebook page or talking up your Yelp page don’t forget to do some planning for your Reputation Management.

What are you using for Reputation Management for your business?  Are you doing it by hand as the article mentions or are you using an automated tool?