Author: AX Admin

Protecting Your Brand Reputation on Social Media

There are over 4.2 billion active social media users which is around 53.6% of the global population. Social media helps businesses find, connect, and interact with their customers. They greatly help companies grow their customer base. However, in social media customer feedback (negative/positive) can turn viral and be seen by millions of people in a matter of minutes. Though stories of brands going out of their comfort zone to make customers happy do gain attention, it is mostly the barrage of negative sentiments or feedback that often becomes viral.

So, in the age of social media, how can you protect your company’s reputation?

Here are 5 ways:

Respond in Time

In the event of a fallout with customer sentiments, brands need to develop a habit of responding to criticism or feedback rather than keeping quiet. Silence is not a virtue in the virtual world as it results in negative feedback gaining more credibility and reach. People do not wait for factual evidence to come out, they react based on assumptions. So, the first thing to do when negative feedback is being circulated about your brand on social media is to respond to it.

Be Accepting and Professional about Negative Sentiments

Accept negative feedback as an opportunity to help your customer, be courteous and professional in your interactions, and improve your product or service from such feedbacks.

If the negative feedback turns out to be fake or malicious, you can present your case in the same forum with evidence to the contrary.

Have a Crisis Communication Plan

Keeping a set of positive response quotes that can be generically applied to negative social media sentiments can be handy as the first line of response. Also ensure that the right personnel are assigned to quickly handle situations on social media with the right response and prevent further escalations.

Translate Feedback into Action

The critics that bashed your brand online can be your brand ambassadors. Take their feedback, identify how to incorporate it, and portray the results on social media along with an appreciation to these folks who helped you improve.

Stay Neutral on Highly Sensitive Domains

Brands often gain widespread publicity for supporting or standing up for causes. While doing so it is wise to stay away from highly sensitive topics like politics or religion which can drastically impact your business by turning away sections of your customer base with hurt sentiments.

Social media can make or break a brand in no time. While it is nearly impossible to avoid negative feedback on social media platforms, these 5 tips can certainly help you preserve and improve your brand reputation on social media. ‘If you are looking at partnering with an ORM company that can do all this and more for you, please drop us a line.

June 11, 2021
4 Ways to Manage Negative Feedback in a Positive Way

Everybody loves acknowledgement and appreciation for the work they have done; even brands. When everything goes right, there will be praises. But when things do not go well, then negative feedback is also bound to happen. And this is something that is tough to handle irrespective of the industry, profession, or business that you are engaged in.

For a business, customer sentiments are a key metric to identify the acceptability of their operational model, products, or services. In today’s highly connected world, any feedback has the potential to reach millions of other customers in a matter of minutes thanks to the power of social media and the internet. And brands will want this viral feedback to be positive to ensure they do not suffer any backlash. But unfortunately, negative feedback from customers also makes it into the queue and is often more propagated than positive ones.

Rather than being bogged down, here are 4 tips to manage negative feedback in a positive way:

Be open about clarifications

Accepting negative feedback is an important step in dealing with customer sentiments. After an initial message or communication about accepting the feedback, the next step is to collect more details or evidence from the critics to understand the negative feedback better or to identify the root cause of the issue. It should be noted that such questions or clarifications should never be aimed at intimidating critics or questioning their motives.

Classify the Feedback

Identify whether the feedback is constructive or destructive in nature. If it is constructive feedback, use it to learn from your mistakes. If the person made destructive feedback, with no clarification, then he or she might have ulterior motives and the best thing to do is ignore the feedback.

Do not be biased

While analyzing negative feedback, always put yourself in the shoes of the customer who gave the feedback. Then you will understand the perspective of the situation and how they were challenged by your business’s service or product and ultimately forced them to provide negative feedback. It will help in focusing on the core issue to be solved rather than trying to cope with the negative emotional narrative.

Keep Communication Active

Once a careful and unbiased analysis of collected evidence and facts surrounding the negative feedback is made, you can find out if the feedback was true or just aimed at tarnishing your brand. If the feedback was false, you have every right to defend yourself and put out a communication exposing the false attack on your brand. If the feedback was found to be true, then an immediate corrective course of action needs to be planned and announced to ensure customers that your business is open to feedback and is willing to change based on customer concerns which ultimately improves brand perception in a positive way.

Negative feedback should never be seen as a demotivator for individual or business performance. It is important to analyze it and find out what went wrong and take measures to ensure that the next experience you provide doesn’t invite the same feedback. Consider it as one of the best ways to improve your quality as an individual or a business, and always take negative feedback in a positive way.

If you are looking for an online reputation management company that can proactively manage your review and feedback, just drop us a line.

June 8, 2021
What Do You Do When Your Online Reputation Sucks?
Is your online reputation at its worst? Are people saying bad things about your brand on every platform? Don’t worry. It’s time to clean up the mess.

In this article, we’ll take you through a detailed set of steps to help you improve your online reputation. So, let’s begin.
Start with an Online Audit

Before you start any online clean-up, you need to understand to what extent your online reputation is at stake. The best way to do that is through an online audit.

An online audit helps you understand:

What your customers are saying about you?

Which social media platform has the maximum number of negative reviews?

How many and what ratings do you have on the review platforms?

What are your employees talking about you?

With data on all these, it will be easier for you to chalk out a clean-up plan.

Create an Online Reputation Strategy

It’s time to develop your online reputation strategy. You should set clearly defined reputational goals first to set the direction for your strategy. The first thing you should do is to set a Google alert for any mentions about your brand keywords.

Categorize and Prioritize the Things you Need to Clean-up

The entire clean-up process can get messy unless you create a list of priorities. Aggregate all the comments, ratings, reviews that you see online and prioritize which concerns should you address first. There are comments that could be ignored, some might need a generic reply; that’s it. However, some comments, reviews, etc. might be actually critical and require immediate action.

Reputation Management Needs a Skilled Person

This is an important aspect of your business and has to be assigned to someone who understands this space. The person has to be trustworthy and reliable since you’ll have to share the credentials of at least some of your accounts with this individual. Also, have an oversight as to how things are progressing in the space.

Begin the Clean-up

Now that you have an online reputation strategy in place and assigned a skilled and trustworthy person with the responsibility, it’s time to start the online clean-up. The process may be tedious since you need to delete/edit/reset information wherever required. However, try to remain patient as you’re handling a sensitive aspect (your online reputation).
Wrapping Up..

Always keep in mind, any prospect will first research your brand online before deciding to approach you. So, make sure that you have a good online reputation that can compel your prospects and customers to conduct business with you.

Use these simple steps to accelerate your online clean-up. Trust us, things will get better.
June 7, 2021
How to Manage a Brand’s Reputation on Search Engines
If you’re running a business, one of the most essential things you MUST focus on is maintaining your online reputation. No entrepreneur would prefer a situation where their prospects and customers develop a negative feeling about the business based on the brand’s poor online presence.

Did you know that 25% of an organization’s market value is directly associated with its online reputation? More so because everyone has a voice of their own and the internet is a great platform to express one’s opinions.

If you’re not conscious about your online reputation, it is only a matter of time that you may end up creating a negative brand image.
Here are a few steps to manage your Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM):
1. Keep Tracking your SERM

Before you protect your search engine reputation, you need to learn how to monitor it. Here monitoring is all about knowing what people think of your business or what they’re saying about your business. There’re several tools like If This Then That (IFTTT), Me on the Web, etc. to track your SERM.

This tool can help you with the following:

Scan all your internet mentions and generate a detailed report on the same

Track if your company name was mentioned in any email

Search all the social media platforms to find out what people are posting about your business

2. Make the most of Social Media

Keeping a track of your social media footprint is very essential. Social media is the most important element of your SERM. Many organizations make the mistake of not utilizing their social media accounts to interact with their audiences.

Make sure you actually use your social media accounts to build relationships and engage with your audiences. If you can successfully build trust with your audiences, they are least likely to post poor reviews about you. Also, the higher your social media engagement, the better are your chances of improving SERP rankings.

3. Listen to your Customers’ Response

If you ignore the negative comments, that’s a terrible mistake. Negative comments are an opportunity to fix your relationship with the customers and improve your SERM. So, if customers are complaining, you need to listen and address the challenges they’re facing.

Sometimes customers shed light on valuable aspects that you’re probably missing out on. If you listen to their feedback and take appropriate actions, that can be a great way to build a reputation.

4. Check First Page of Google Search Results and Make Sure Everything is Okay

Most of your prospects and customers will make decisions by referring to the first page of Google. So, you need to make sure that whenever somebody searches your brand’s name, only good things appear on the first page of Google.

Below are some tricks to ensure this:

Make sure all your active social media accounts are displayed on the first page

Link all these social accounts to your official website

Ensure that the third-party websites that are coming on the first page are associated with your official website
5. Try to Stay as much Transparent as Possible

Finally, stay as much transparent as possible. Practice honest communications to build the trust of your audiences. Admit your mistakes and show your audiences that you’re taking proactive actions to resolve them. Don’t forget that millions of people are watching your every step. One wrong move online could cost you big time.

Final Words

Hopefully, these 5 steps will help you manage your Search Engine Reputation Management. Is your company looking for an ORM company that can do all the above and more? Please drop us a line,
June 7, 2021