happy customers and encourage them to write reviews (not using any
incentives or providing any specific guidance on what to say of course).
Set a goal of 24 hour response time or less. Ideally, a ‘dialed’ CSR team
focusing on online opportunities should be responding within the hour,
which maximizes impact. Remember that positive reviews are excellent
marketing opportunities; ask permission to utilize them as testimonials in
your marketing.
3. Monitor Keywords
Even if you are unable to create a world-class social media customer support
team it is still worthwhile to spend time monitoring social media, review
sites and brand search results to identify unhappy customers, employees,
partners and peers. Acknowledging complaints is often the most important
and effective step in resolving issues and repairing relationships. It all starts
with the keywords. The most common keywords relating to ORM include
company name + reviews, customer reviews, ratings and feedback. Consider
negative modifiers like “sucks”, “poor service”, “issues”. Also evaluate
situational modifiers such as accident, union, protest, recall, spill, dispute, etc.
Search for these terms regularly in search engines and on review sites and
manually review results for issues and opportunities.
4. Leverage Tools
To ensure you are identifying potential issues in a timely manner, utilize
monitoring tools. A good place to start is free or low-cost tools like Google
Alerts, SocialMention and Mention.net. More robust organizations may
want to leverage industry-specific platforms like Revinate (for hospitality)
to monitor and manage reviews and responses. Set up keyword alerts
(mentioned earlier) for your company name, key executives and branded
services or products. Aggregate and analyze the data to look for trends in
terms of particular service or product issues to address directly or publicly.
Consider creating a monthly report that tracks results for branded searches
over time to gauge sentiment and progress in mitigating less-desirable results.
5. Set up Social Profiles
Claim and optimize social media profiles so they rank for branded searches
and push down other less desirable results (bad reviews, blog posts or
articles). Create, optimize and syndicate compelling content for your website,
blog and social media platforms to ensure they rank well for branded search
terms. Utilize the platforms for customer service and support, as a subset
of your customers will prefer to communicate via platforms like Facebook,
Twitter and Google+. Remember to link to your social profiles from your
website (and vice versa) and make sure all important pages of your website
are shareable in social media using one of the many plugins available.
6. Syndicate Content
While you have control over your website and social profiles, they have
limited credibility and visibility in search rankings. Identify top-ranking
websites, publications and blogs on which to post your own content. Third
party sites offer critical validation and often perform better in search results.
Offer relevant high-profile websites quality content including interviews,
articles, images, videos and infographics in exchange for a link back to your
website. The links will not only boost the ranking of your website and fill
branded search results with favorable content, but the new content will drive
direct traffic to your website that could turn into customers.
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NATDA Magazine www.natda.org