Is Online Reputation Management Turning into Your Second Job?

Business owners, particularly restaurant owners, report that they are “obsessed” with checking their online reviews. A recent article called Yelp Effect Reshapes How Businesses Interact With Customers reports restaurant owners who are spending hours and hours of time on checking all of the review sites, trying to decide whether to respond or how to respond.

While it’s certainly important to monitor your reputation online it is equally important to be sure that your efforts aren’t taking over your business. And usually, it’s not a good idea to respond on the site—though reaching out to the customer with a quick phone call or e-mail can certainly bear some fruit.

Some customers even take advantage of this obsession, leveraging it to try to get free, or heavily discounted, products. This goes beyond excellent service. It becomes a form of extortion, something that can have a true impact on your bottom line. Everyone’s heard the story of the 1-star review that tanked a business. That one bad review seems like such a huge threat.

But it doesn’t have to be.

Cleaning up your reputation after a bad review is about more than posting the correct response. You need to be ready to choke that review out of visibility with a flood of positive content. Creating that content is a full-time job, and if you try to do it all yourself you might just find that you are unable to bury those reviews on your own.

This is why most companies should think about writing reputation management services into their budget. It’s turning into a necessity, much like adding an alarm system to a retail store or opening up a merchant account that will allow you to take credit cards. This is because businesses live or die by the way that they are perceived online.

Online reputation management services will free you from the third-party review site obsession and put more time back into your day. They’ll help you take control of your presence online so that most potential customers don’t even see third-party reviews.

What about encouraging people to leave a positive review if they tell you that they like something in person?

You might just want to ask them for permission to reprint the testimonial on your own website. That way you maintain control over the review. That positive bit of web collateral won’t get flushed behind someone’s review filter.