Reputation management for contractors – One of the things I hear a lot from contractors when I bring up negative reviews that I find online is that they either never knew about them, or figured they couldn’t defend themselves.
This becomes especially hard for contractors who are either technophobes or don’t have the time to allocate to monitor what is being said about them (good or bad) online.
So, here are my questions to you, trying to defend yourself from homeowners everyday
- If you had a service that actively monitored what’s being said about you, your competition, your company and your industry across the web, would you use it?
- If you could be updated within minutes of someone either praising your company or ripping it to shreds on Facebook, in forums and on review sites, would you pay for it?
Google Alerts is reputation management for contractors 101
Google Alerts is pretty good, and should take care of most contractors. But it doesn’t get updates from Facebook (where more people spend their time online today more than any other website) as well as forums and other review sites. So what winds up happening is that you only “think” you’re covered.
If guarding your company’s image not only from homeowners but from your competitors is something you worry about, then maybe a one better program is what you need? But wouldn’t you also want to know when people were saying something good too?
Reputation management isn’t just about paying attention to Mrs. Jones when she crushes you because your dirty boots left stains on her carpet. Reputation management is about getting in front of Mrs. Jones and thanking her when she says something good about you too. That’s how you build brand loyalty, and this type of proactive approach to social media marketing should be a cornerstone to any marketing program.
But what about when it is bad?
So let’s say you did piss off Mrs. Jones, and now she is ripping you all over the web, and each person she turns away from your company is costing you thousands, wouldn’t you want a solution that could suppress this info? That would have to be a value added feature that you would be interested in right?
I ask because I don’t know. I don’t know how interested you are in protecting your name on the web. I don’t know how interested you are in trying to clear up any issues you have when they arise. I imagine you have a passing interest in the topic if you are still reading, but is it something you would invest in on a monthly basis, and if so how much?
So…If I get programmers involved and take the time to do this right, and I can:
- Provide you with a reputation management solution specifically for contractors, would you be interested?
- Secondly, if I developed a solution that would help you attack negative reviews, would you be interested in that?
- Understand would be a two-tiered solution that would involve reputation management and a negative review solution.
That’s why I need you…
If this sounds like a good idea, let me know. If it sounds like a crappy idea let me know that too. If you think you already have the bases covered then I will drop it and move on. But I think between the monitoring service and the adverse review service, there should be a market for one or the other or both. But you have to tell me. I am not going to just go get this thing done without a better understanding of what you need.
Tell me in the comments or in an email if you think this program is for you or not. And think about this, just one negative comment has the ability to not only ruin your reputation online, but to stop people in their tracks who were thinking about doing business with you.
