Reputation Archives - BOLLYWOOD SURKHIYAN

Managing Your Restaurant Reputation

Internet marketing has influenced the attitude of people in promotional aspects of their business. Social media has strongly invaded life, changing the concept of promotion itself. No longer does advertising alone work. Advertising seems to play a less significant role in promoting business. Online marketing to promote your business is now seen as an investment. The voice of your current consumers is now a very significant factor for influencing the minds of your new consumers. With the onset of social media, are you really aware of your restaurants social reputation? With just a few clicks of a diners mouse, it could change instantly. Don’t let bad reviews cost you your business. There are over 40 food and drink review sites. Can you name the top 10?

People like to know the experiences of others to help themselves make better decisions. With the economy the way it is today, the consumer is being more aware of where they are spending money. As such, you can see diners are reading reviews online before deciding to book a table. This is proved from the increased number of review postings online. This is further established by direct participation in social media.

Companies are extremely concerned about what the users say or what the published reviews are. These reviews reflect on the reputation of your restaurant that you have built; every business needs to save its reputation. After all, knowing what others say is the best way to diagnose the lapses. Never let a bad review go unanswered and don’t forget to say thank you for your good reviews as well. Interaction is key. <p>

A one-star decrease on a review site can reduce your restaurants reviews by almost 10%. Review tracking companies notify you of reviews and alerts so you can respond and evaluate the performance of your locations and strive for excellent customer support. Your online presence is an investment in your restaurants business. Take it seriously. You have worked too hard for your name and reputation to have it hurt by a bad review. A strong online presence is a must in today’s market.

Today more than ever, getting guests to dine at your restaurant comes down to the reputation you have built, wither you like it or not. Respond in a timely fashion to your reviews. Many times, people just want to know they are being heard. You can easily turn a dissatisfied customer around when you acknowledge the situation, and make good on it. A good dining experience doesn’t have to stop once a patron leaves your establishment.

How to Improve Your Business Online Reputation

Today, managing and improving your online reputation has become essential. This is due to the advent of Google Search and the ability of anyone to look for you online and find out information about your company and your personal life.

Even if there is something out there that you don’t want people to dwell on, you can make it better. It takes a little bit of work but it can be done. In fact, everyone who wants to be known online should be doing these things.

Monitor the Buzz

People are talking about you. You can use Google Alerts and other online apps to monitor your business name, personal name, product names and more to know what is being said about you online.

Listen to Your Customers

So many business owners conduct surveys, read their online buzz, check out rating sites and so forth but never really listen. It’s important to show your audience by your actions that you’re listening.

Respond Quickly

When a customer has an issue or complains about you online, always respond quickly to the complaint. Even on social media, if you don’t answer a complaint they’ll see you as providing poor customer service regardless of whether you planned to provide customer service there or not.

Remain Positive

No matter what a customer, client, or review says, it’s imperative that you never allow negativity to take over. Stay positive and try to read between the vitriol. A good tip is to copy and paste their complaint or reviews into a word document, then delete anything that takes away from the complaint. Then only answer to the complaint.

Apologize

Even though business owners know that sometimes customers are wrong, in public they are right. You must apologize to them in public and offer to make it better. It’s the only way that you can regain the confidence and trust of the public. Better yet, ask the customer what you can do to make it better and you might be surprised at how little it takes.

Solicit Reviews

When you send information to your buyers in a follow up, always ask for positive reviews and give them the link of the place you want the review to be posted. This will help increase the positive and counteract any negative reviews that might exist.

Avoid Making Social Media Mistakes

Sounds easier than done, but all this means is you need to think twice about anything you put on social media, positive or negative. Even innocent jokes can get you into trouble if you don’t know your audience well enough.

Don’t Neglect Your Accounts

Once you have a social media account, do not allow it to remain dormant. Keep it updated on a regular basis – at least once a week personally, and if you enact some smart automation it will appear that you’re more active.

Online Reputation Control – Branding, Insurance, Or Blind-Luck?

In today’s world it is far too easy to be ignorant of your online reputation. It is even easier for it to instantly vaporize and let someone tear it into a barely recognizable brand that you will fess up to being involved with. Every blog, community site, customer review, or competitor has hundreds of different options to voice viewpoints and concerns against a company. If you haven’t done it already, start understanding how to use tools to monitor social media and take proactive steps to keep your business in working order.

Your second option is to ask the simple question:

Can this happen to me?

Yep it sure can.

As a case example, I pulled a local article from Washington CEO Magazine on the Top 100 Companies to work for in 2007. I pulled some of the names off the list and did a quick query in Google. Here are some of the headlines I found on the proper names of the “Top 100 companies:

Result 7 – Zillow – Google Headline “How Good are Zillow’s Estimates?”

“Zillow came within 5% of the price in a third of the transactions studied by The Journal. It was more than 25% off target on 11% of them. In 34 of the 1,000 transactions, Zillow was off by more than 50%.”

Our view: If you are a user or an investor of Zillow, you’ve more than likely been exposed to this article and several like it. How does it make someone feel that the Wall Street Journal (considered to be one of the most respectable news sources) is saying Zillow zestimates are 50% off?

Result 6 – Comcast – Google Headline “A Comcast Technician Sleeping on My Couch” A Comcast cable technician came to replace a cable modem and fell asleep while waiting for the customer service group. As of this article it was viewed: 1,219,303 times! (At 58 seconds long, that is A LOT of bad reviews for Comcast.) It had 714 comments.

Our View: Holy smokes Batman. 1,219,303 views! I don’t know any company that wouldn’t suffer a marginal impact to marketing, sales, and customer service numbers when a million different people have watched how lackluster Comcast support is.

Result 3 – Spokane Federal Credit Union Review – Citysearch Review – “I had an account with Spokane Federal for many years and I was never really that impressed, they pretty much just took care of what I needed and nothing more, overall I would say that they met, not exceeded my expectations”

Our View: Even though Spokane Federal Credit Union has plenty of coverage, it would be easy to bump off a lack-luster review saying they are nothing but mediocre.

Result 3 – Zango – PC Hell: Zango Removal Instructions – “Zango is a entertainment site with free access to videos, music, games, and other downloads. The site is free to all users, but is paid for by advertisements. Visitors are presented with an end user license agreement that they accept before downloading any content.”

Our View: Here is a Desktop Software company that has hordes of people using Zango gaming software, and every time someone Google’s their name you get “PC Hell – Zango Removal Instructions” thrown at you. If I bought a desktop system that had them pre-installed on it, you can bet that I would remove it in a heartbeat. I don’t need some casual gaming platform slowing down my PC while I need to number crunch my data or send an important e-mail.

It doesn’t make a difference of who you are (how big, or how little), this can happen to you.

It happens to Comcast and Zillow.

It also happens to the little guys.

If you look at this problem from a strictly numbers point of view, Comcast buys it’s own keyword of “comcast” from Google so that it can keep company branding and results at the top of Google. If I were to buy that keyword, it would cost roughly $1.25 per click, and there are 5500 estimated clicks per day on it (that is a daily budget of $6000 to $8000 per day on that keyword).

If Comcast is paying only $.25 per visitor for that keyword- imagine that those 1,219,303 video views cost Comcast a minimum of $250k in lost “clicks”, not counting how many customer service problems and public relations issues it causes.