“Does anyone have tips for online reviews and reputation management?”
Question Originally Posted on ASA Central
In a digital world where 88 percent of people trust online reviews as much as they trust their best friends’ recommendations, your desire to gather positive reviews to outweigh the negatives is certainly worthwhile.
The truth behind online reviews is while you may gather hundreds of positive reviews, those negatives will always sting a little bit.
It’s human nature to want to provide world-class service time after time and, in the case you described, you are! It’s simply frustration or disappointment that leads to individuals reaching out and posting negative comments that may or may not be true.
I’d recommend the following to continue to improve the online presence of your specific staffing firm.
1. Follow the Mentality Proposed by Jay Baer in “Hug Your Haters“
In his book, Jay says, “If you answer complaints anywhere, it increases customer advocacy. Conversely, not answering complaints decreases customer advocacy, across all customer channels.”
For you specifically, this means to address all online reviews (both positive and negative) to show the individual leaving the comment and anyone else that may come across it that you are listening and doing your absolute best to provide world-class service.
When responding to negative reviews, make it a habit to drive their reply message offline. Instead of responding and asking for feedback, leave a number or email address where that individual can take the next step into communicating with you on a private channel instead of publically. This helps mitigate the risk of a negative follow-up.
2. Actively Seek Positive Reviews
A report by Search Engine Land in November 2016 showed, if asked, approximately 71 percent of consumers will leave a review for a business.
Actively seeking positive reviews and gathering them is the best way to drown out the negative left by a few.
To do this, I would recommend using a tool that lets you do the following:
- Listen to online review sites in one dashboard.
- What are people saying about you on Glassdoor, Google and Facebook? And how can you gather all of this feedback in 1 dashboard?
- Reply to positive and negative feedback.
- Actively email clients or individuals you’ve placed on assignment asking them for their feedback
3. Take Precautionary Measures to Block Negative Reviews
If you’re seeing negative reviews left on your company Facebook page, specifically with profanity, I encourage you to further expand the profanity filter within your page’s Facebook settings.
Navigate to your company page -> Settings -> General -> Profanity Filter Set to Strong
The second line of defense?
Navigate to your company page -> Settings -> General -> Page Moderation -> Block posts or comments containing the following words
While I won’t publish that list of words here, I did find a downloadable list of “723 Bad Words to Block” that you can add to this Page Moderation tab.
After setting this field in Facebook, when an individual leaves a comment, reply, or review that contains one of those words it is hidden from all users that see your page…except the person that left it!
To them, they spoke their mind and left the comment publically, but it’s hidden from all others!
About Reputation Management by Haley Marketing Group
Build More Positive Testimonials and Online Reviews
Our online reputation management platform will determine who is most happy with your services, and we’ll get them to share testimonials and leave online reviews on sites like Yelp, Google Reviews, Glassdoor, Facebook and more.
Catch Negative Feedback
For those people who had an average, or below average experience, we’ll give them a chance to speak their mind through a private feedback form (which will help keep complaints off social media).
Benchmark Your Service
Using a Net Promoter Score methodology, you’ll see how your service to both clients and candidates compares to staffing industry leaders.
