A brand’s online persona is the first impression for potential leads or clients, which counts for a lot in cyber space. Study after study demonstrates that web surfers have notoriously short attention spans. Failure to capture someone’s attention, or worse, if pegged with a negative association off the bat, odds are you won’t get a second chance to make your case. For this reason it is vital that you keep a positive online reputation intact.

The first step is to monitor your brand all over the internet. Make sure you find out about everything that is being said about your brand. First things first, you need to monitor all the keywords that are associated with your brand. This can be your brands, products, brand abbreviations, company director, public relations officer, also common misspelling of all of these variables.

Second step is to monitor your online reputation on a wide range of two-way internet mediums. This will be social networks, blogs, groups, forums, social media sites, consumer websites, and maybe most importantly on SERP’s. Use to RSS feeds to track these comment mediums with ease.

The most important step and technique is how to react to the negative comments. This can be described as damage control. The truth is that there will many different circumstances and not all negative comments will be the same.

There are the “trolls” and the “rager”, usually focused on degrading others, ranting, making jokes etc. These types of comments do not deserve a response, but mediums that host them should be monitored for information. Responding to specific comments could potentially exposure the comments more. Consumers hate being overly marketed to and a very aware of the marketing and PR practices that companies try to implement. Stay away from exposing your brand as being overly concerned with laughable comments it can only make your brand look worse in the eyes of consumers.

Then there are the “misguided” or “unhappy customer” comments. Now this is the time to stand up and pay attention. Misguided negative comments will contain nonfactual information about your brand and requires a response. An unhappy customer will have encountered a negative experience with your brand, service or product and also requires a response.

Both of these situation should not be viewed as irritating nightmare, but should be viewed as an opportunity inform the audience and turn a negative brand experience into a positive one. The opportunity is there to build your brands online reputation and initiate the development of a strong brand equity.

In order to do this you have to produce the perfect response.

1. Be transparent. Let them know that the response is coming from the brand, this will be respected
2. Reference your sources.
3. Make the time to create credible responses; you may need to spend a few hours of a day to do this. Respond on negative comments in a timely manner, don’t let the comments sit there for all to see for long before you correct or rectify the situation. Word of mouth online is powerful and fast.
4. Use a tone that portrays a respectable front and is in line with your brands identity and image
5. Focus on those comments that are the most influential in changing the perceptions of your brand.

Comments on your brand can be transformed from a nightmare situation into opportunity creation.

Tags: brand comments, Brand Management, brands, Customer Relationship Management, online brand management, online reputation management, online strategies

This entry was posted on Friday, October 23rd, 2009 at 8:17 am and is filed under Brand Management, Brand reputation management, Internet Marketing, Social Media Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.