Keeping track of what your customers and others are saying is important for your business. Luckily there’s a free tool to let you keep track of your reputation on the Internet.
This article first appeared in Smartcompany on 17 February, 2009
Last week at a major telco’s product launch a respected tech journalist piped up that while their new gadget was nice, their network was rubbish and so the gadget wouldn’t work very well.
The telco’s reaction to this deserved comment was instructive on how large corporations deal with criticism.
Rather than take the comments on the chin, the telco’s spokespeople canned the journalist and waved around a report stating their network was the greatest thing since sliced bread, or at least since somebody thought of connecting two cans with a piece of string.
Personally I’d be tempted to point out to the esteemed and highly paid writers of the report that two cans of string are probably a touch more reliable than their client’s network in notoriously remote locations like North Sydney and Martin Place.
While telco managers usually get away with head in the sand behaviour, business owners in the real world can’t. Their reputation with customers matters.
In the current business climate, you can’t afford to be dismissing your customer’s concerns. When a customers complains, action needs to be taken and lessons learned from that complaint.
How business leaders deal with complaints is a real test of how good they are. Handled well, a complaining customer can be turned into a raving fan of your business and a complaint should be an opportunity to review how well you do your job.
You don’t need to be hosting press conferences with stroppy journalists to find out what people think of you. One Internet tool for managing your reputation is Google Alerts.
With this, you can set up an email summary of each time your target word or phrase has popped up on Google and have it delivered to your inbox.
I have all my business names listed with Google’s alert service so I can see when others have mentioned them on Internet forums, blogs or websites. It’s also very handy on keeping an eye out for anyone breaching your trademarks.
Incidentally, the journo was right, and that particular telco’s network problems have been widely discussed on the net and in the media. It beggars belief the managers and PR couldn’t have expected this sort of criticism if they’d been running these tools.
The web’s a pretty effective way of getting good and bad news out about a business. If you watch it closely, you can anticipate problems before they bite your bottom line.