Not Staying On Top of What People Say About You Online

We’ve already established the importance of getting online reviews from your satisfied customers. Now, let’s talk about those “unhappy” customers a little bit.

If someone is unhappy with your product or service, they won’t hesitate to go online to let the world know.

In fact, customers are more likely to review something they have had a bad experience with than give positive feedback. It is human nature to complain and vent when things are negative, and the internet provides the perfect setting for people to voice these complaints.

If you’re not staying on top of what’s being said about your business online, how can you fix it?

Imagine a potential customer coming across a really nasty post about your business from one of your unhappy customers. Do you think they’ll be quick to call you up or come by? Probably not.

It all boils down to the fact that people put a lot of value in what other people think about businesses. The way consumers think goes something like this:

If other people like you, they they’ll like you too. If other people think your service is awful, they probably will too.
What you don’t know can hurt you. It is extremely important to be aware of negative customer feedback, because it can really negatively impact your business.

Lightspeed Research’s April 2011 survey found that 21% of those surveyed have decided against making purchases after reading just two negative reviews. After reading 3 negative reviews, 37% of people said they would change their mind about their purchase.

This is proof that negative feedback can really affect your profits – in a negative way.

Considering the high emphasis people put on other people’s opinions when choosing products and services, it is very wise to invest in monitoring the reputation of your company.

Encouraging positive feedback and responding to negative feedback can help protect your profits. Additionally, you can use the negative feedback to constantly improve your products and customer service, which is a tool any successful company should take advantage of.

Our “Voice Of The Customer” package includes automated email alerts to let you know when someone mentions your business anywhere on the Internet.

Business Profit Leaks – #3: Not Staying On Top of What People Say About You Online is a post from: IdealMedia.co.za

My apologies to everyone who received a bunch of blog notifications from me earlier today.

My blog notification service, which sends a short notification email every time a new blog post is made, is automated by means of AWeber’s Blog Broadcast feature. AWeber monitors the RSS feed from my blog, and whenever it detects a new post, it sends out a short message with a link to the new post.

The RSS feed from my blog is handled by FeedBurner, which offers some advantages over a ‘raw’ RSS feed.

Google acquired FeedBurner some time ago, and since the beginning of this year has been encouraging FeedBurner users to switch their account to a Google account – by the end of February.

I logged into my FeedBurner account today, and without thinking it through, clicked on the ‘Move My Account’ button.

Now…. AWeber do have a warning on their website,
“Be careful not to make any changes in FeedBurner that cause them to republish your feed, or to change the URLs for your posts, as this could cause Blog Broadcaster to think those posts are new, and need to be emailed!”

And what’s worse… I’ve made this kind of mistake before.

What I SHOULD have done is to log in to my AWeber account and disabled blog broadcasts BEFORE transferring my FeedBurner account.

So… what have we learned from this experience?

Technology is far from perfect, and human beings are even less so.

Automated systems like this work perfectly 99% of the time. It’s very easy to get complacent and assume that they’ll do the ‘right’ thing – but ultimately, they do what you tell them to do, and not always what you WANT them to do.

My apologies again if your inbox got flooded with notifications – I’ll try to make sure it doesn’t happen again!

My Apologies If I Ruined Your Day is a post from: IdealMedia.co.za

I had to go out for three hours, but in that time my previous post reached position 8 on the first page of Google. You’ll also see a link to the same post from Digg.com, listed at #2.

There’s no guarantee that the post will stay on the front page, but there’s also no reason why it shouldn’t.

And there’s no reason why that shouldn’t work in just about any market.

Johannesburg Hardware report back is a post from: IdealMedia.co.za

Perry Belcher explains how to use social media to market your business.

How To Use Social Media For Marketing is a post from: IdealMedia.co.za