Customer Satisfaction and Reputation Management

Companies and individuals alike should be monitoring what is being said about them on the internet and social media. One of the tools that is available for personal use and that can be adapted for small business use is from Google and it is called ‘Me on the Web’. Google provides guidance on how to manage your identity including how to remove personal data from the web and how to remove a page from Google’s search results.

I am currently reading Engage, Revised and Updated: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web
by Brian Solis. In is book, Brian pointed out the threat posed by customer complaints that appear in Social Media, particularly Twitter. This brings up the whole issue of dealing with unscrupulous or aggressive competitors who use Social Media tools as a lever against you.

Why should you care about social media influencers? Influential social media users can spread bad press about your product, service or organization at frightening speeds using social media. The more influential they are, the wider the reach they have. And with the presence of mobile phones, they need not wait until they get in front of a home computer to get the word out. If there is a complaint about a product or service or a crisis, these influencers can be a help or a real headache. Learn how to find them and some tips on how to work with them.

Word of mouth has always been known to be the most effective mode of promotion for your product or service (positive or negative). We know that web techniques have changed the equation of how fast word of mouth can travel, from friends and family to going viral on the internet. Here’s an interesting video from American Businessman, Gary Vaynerchuk, author of Crush It, Why Now is the Time to Cash in on your Passion and The Thank You Economy, that talks about the changes in marketing, customer satisfaction and advertising.

Customer Testimonials or References are one of the key measurements of customer satisfaction and loyalty. Word of mouth marketing is probably the most effective means of marketing. A personal endorsement from someone will help close a sale. Social Proof is the theory behind customer testimonials Eleven techniques being used today for social proof are discussed in this article.

In an earlier article, the Dell Listening Command Center’s opening was highlighted along with a video of Michael Dell launching the new center. The command center is a hub tracking over 22,000 Dell related topics at a company wide level using Social Media. At that time they were monitoring social media in 9 languages. In just a few months, the number of languages has grown to 11. The early results of this center are very impressive (30% reduction in negative comments) and a social media influencer program. See the slide deck in the blog post.

Reputation Management firms are often SEO (Search Engine Optimization) specialists who move negative comments off the front page of search engines. Some of the techniques include, raising the rank of the sites below the negative entry by adding favorable comments, using social bookmarking such as Digg, Delicious and others. Creating new subdomain sites on your site also may add more positive entries to the front page of Google. It is far better to over deliver and under promise to prevent the need to use reputation management SEO techniques.

If you want to monitor what is happening on the web with your brand, your organization, your executives or your name, the challenge is enormous. Some excellent data exists in a blog post called Internet 2009 in Numbers on a site called Pingdom. These numbers are staggering and surprising and highlights the need for monitoring.

1. 126 Million Blogs
2. More internet users in China and in Europe than in North America
3. 350 Million people on Facebook
4. 27.3 Million Tweets per Day in Nov 2009

Since my last post on Social Media Monitoring tools, I have come across tools and service offerings from a wide variety of companies. This article covers the ‘services’ that provide social media monitoring as well as the kinds of social media data an organization might want to monitor.

Toyota has suffered several black eyes in the news, a massive recall in the US and subsequently in Canada of Toyota and Lexus cars and light trucks to fix an accelerator pedal problem, a recall of Tundrea Pickup trucks in the US because of excessive rust on the frames and 6 Highlanders with ‘immobilizer technology’ stolen in a single night in one neighborhood in Toronto.