How To Gain & Maintain a 5-Star Online Reputation (PART 1)

 

How To Gain & Maintain a 5-Star Online Reputation (PART 1)

TRANSCRIPT: Hi, this is Steve Stauning with another Short and Sweet video training session. Today’s lesson: How to Gain and Maintain a 5-Star Online Reputation. We’re going to teach you how to go from good to great in twelve short lessons. This was from our Undeniable Advantage series, and these are live broadcasts, so this was originally recorded live but we’ve broken it up into twelve Short and Sweet video lessons just for you. Now, if you want to join me for our next Undeniable Advantage live video webcast, go to UndeniableAdvantage.com right now to register. Now we’re going to cover in this session everything you and your team need to know about gaining and maintaining a legitimate 5-star reputation online.

So let’s not delay. Let’s dive into lesson one.

Alright, so let me take you through what we are going to cover today. We’re going to break it out over eight steps. We’re going to talk a lot about today’s connected consumer. We’re going to talk about how reviews affect your business today. We’re going to also talk about the difference between regular online reviews and social interactions. We’ll talk about how to manage good reviews, bad reviews, and even how to manage rolls and liars on the internet. We’re going to show you legally and ethically generate 5-star reviews that will last.

Now we’re going to take you from bad to great in eight steps. I’ll just go through the eight steps now, but we’ll show them again later. We’re going to talk about gauging the buzz. Determining the voracity. Whether those are true…the buzz is true. We’re going to talk about repairing and replacing the things that need to be repaired or replaced in your business. We’ll talk about how to devise a strategy to go after 5-star reviews. We’ll talk about identifying your raving fans. I’ll show you how to enlist those raving fans and have them leave 5-star reviews for you. I’ll show you how to assess your online reputation moving forward. How to do that faithfully and how to address any new negative or positive reviews that pop up while you’re assessing.

There really are 2 different approaches to online reputation management. The first approach, and I see this most often, is to keep doing what you’re doing and pay thousands of dollars to some “Reputation repair company,” right? Let them try to gain the internet for the short term, but this is a short term play. The second type of approach to online reputation management, the one that really works, is you have to understand that you cannot be a rat bastard offline and a saint online. See, consumers are too smart and they have too many places to vent about you and you cannot control them today, and so you have to take a more proactive approach that really repairs the issues, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

Why care about your online reputation at all? Why should you care? Let’s do this. Let’s agree on a couple of things. Everybody’s online. I think we can agree to that. Everyone is online. At least if they’re your customer, they’re online. That’s number 1. Number 2 is haters are going to hate. People are going to hate, that’s just how they are, so now that we agree on these things, let’s find out why your online reputation really matters. Now you’ve seen the headlines. You’ve seen the headlines. Dimensional Research found that 90% of people say that online reviews influence their buying decisions, and Bright Local says that 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as they trust personal recommendations, and in another Bright Local study, they found that only 8% of consumers don’t read online reviews.

We know everybody’s online, we know haters are going to hate and basically, everybody who is online is not only reading online reviews but they’re influenced by them, so what does all this mean? Let me tell you what it means to your business. A company called Go Fish Digital found that just 1 negative review, just 1, could equal a loss of 22% of potential customers for your business. One negative review and 22% of your potential customers are lost. 3 negative reviews and you can expect up to 59% of your business to be lost. With 4 negative reviews, up to 70% of your business could be lost. It’s important. Some of you are saying, “Well Steve, that doesn’t make sense to me. How can I lose that much of my business?” Think about this.

When you have great online reviews, when your reviews are great, you have people come up to you, don’t they? They come up to you if you’re a restaurant, if you’re a bar, if you’re a hotel, if you’re a car dealer. You have people come up to you and they say, “Listen, we read your reviews and we decided to give you a try,” right? Because you have great online reviews. When you have lousy reviews, what do you hear? That’s right, nothing. No one picks up the phone and calls you and says, “Hey, we were going to eat at your restaurant today but you know what? Your reviews stink and so we decided to eat somewhere else.” “Hey, we were going to buy a car from you but you know what? Your reviews were so bad, we went next door.” Nobody’s going to come and tell you that they didn’t do business with you because of a bad online review.