Guess what? Everyone’s a critic these days. Of course this has always been true but, these days, every one of these critics can probably go online and write their thoughts on facebook, twitter or even their own blog. Why should you care?
Suppose you own a nice little restaurant and one day, I have lunch there. I don’t like the food and/or service and so immediately after (or even during) lunch I write on my facebook “I hate Restaurant X, the food smells”. Suddenly all of my facebook friends know that you serve smelly food at your place. They’ll maybe tell their friends who will then tell their friends, and the whole thing could grow into quite a movement against your restaurant. And you probably don’t even sell smelly food.
Before the internet, it was very difficult for a single person to spread news to large groups of people but now one can do it in five minutes. As the internet grows in importance in our lives here in Kenya, business owners should be wary of the dangers that it brings. It could take just one blog post or status update to cost you hundreds of potential customers. This is why online reputation management is important.
Online reputation management is the deliberate act of making sure that what people find when they look for you or your business online is favorable to you. Wikipedia defines it as, “the practice of consistent research and analysis of one’s personal or professional, business or industry reputation as represented by the content across all types of online media.”
When you Google your name or that of your business. Do you like what you find on the first page of results? When you Google my name, the first page of Google displays articles that I’ve written, and links to other places that I hang out online. This is by no means an accident, I consistently try to influence what others find when they look for me. What about you, or your business?
Many companies in Kenya may get a big surprise at what people are saying about them online. For example, at Like Chapaa we’ve talked about quite a number of Kenyan companies but only a handful have even noticed that we talked about them. What else are they missing?
Do you mean to say that it is possible to sort out the mean things people say about you and the good and avail only the good to those who are looking for you, when there exists bad or negative things about you in the web?
Excellent article that gives much food for thought. The power of the Internet is becoming huge in our lives and our businesses. This is a fact many people are not aware of and should be.
Thanks for visiting, Mary.
It’s not that you can filter out – you cannot. Once someone says something bad about you, it will always be there and you cannot do much to erase it.
However, you can do a lot to make sure it is so much easier for people to find the good stuff about you than it is to find the bad.
You can also respond quickly to negativity – for example commenting on blog posts that talk ill of you.