The Secrets of Online Reputation Management

Jul 26, 2010 by mandeewidrick

People talk, whether it be good or bad. What are they saying about you and your brand?

That’s what online reputation management is all about. You want to do your best to keep your audience happy so your reputation won’t be damaged. Sure, there some people who are going to talk smack no matter what. Bad attitudes sometimes won’t go away even with the best possible solution presented, but it’s always the right thing to address all problems immediately, with hopes to solve the issue.

Here’s an example:

You go through the drive thru at McDonalds. The person at the window takes your money and says your meal is going to take a few minutes. They ask you to pull ahead and wait. 5 minutes go by. 10 minutes. Where is your food? It finally comes and you haul your car out of the parking lot, burying your hand in the bag to grab your chicken nuggets. But wait, where’s that apple pie you ordered? Not…in…THE…BAG?!

About that time, I’d probably tweet about it in 140 characters:

“McDonalds screwed up my order. I wonder if one of the employees is eating the apple pie they forgot to put in my bag.”

So what should McDonalds be doing at this point? Well, if they’re doing things right, they would go to Twitter and type the term McDonalds into Twitter’s search tool. They’d get a complete list from the past several days of people who have mentioned McDonalds in their tweets. They can then address each problem that other folks are tweeting about, by sending an @ reply or direct message to everyone who felt they didn’t receive great service. (They can also thank those who are sharing positive experiences.)

Disclaimer: I’m just using McDonalds as an example. While they actually have left something out of an order of mine in the past, the above scenario is completely made up for the sake of teaching my blog readers how to manage their online reputation. And I actually do eat McDonalds food…especially their ranch snack wraps.

Disclaimer #2: McDonalds actually does have a Twitter account. Are they using it the way they should as stated above? I can’t really tell. Looks like they reply to their mentions – a good start – but I’d definitely recommend they start searching for their brand and doing damage control. (I was going to post a screenshot of the search results for the phrase “I hate McDonalds” on Twitter, but people were using some pretty nasty language…not exactly blog friendly, folks!) They might think it doesn’t matter because they have 80k+ followers…yet I know that no matter how many followers you have it’s always good to manage your reputation.