Dealing with negative feedback

STOP! Don’t delete those negative comments!

A week-or-so ago, I was perusing my Twitter feed when I saw a tweet accusing someone of deleting negative comments from a blogpost. I’m not going to name names because that argument is totally irrelevant here. What I want to talk about is how deleting negative comments from your blog, however instinctive that reaction might be, is actually a waste of a great branding opportunity.

Most people speedily delete negative comments because they think that if someone sees them, word will be all over the place about how bad their product/service/blog is. Truth is, had the person who triggered this blog post not deleted that comment, chances are only a handful of people would have even noticed. As it turns out, his action went viral because a few people tweeted about it. Not what was intended, and in the event, probably did huge damage to his brand–and quite the opposite of what I call ‘Mindful branding’.

Dare to think differently

First, everyone has negative reactions to their service or products at least some of the time. That’s life. So for most people, seeing a little negativity merely alerts them to the fact that this product or service is pretty normal. And if this is all there is, then chances are what’s being sold isn’t so bad.

More importantly though, if you take the time to address someone’s negative comments you can even turn a bad situation around. You may be able to explain convincingly why a certain event/situation happened, along with what you’re doing to make sure it never happens again. Or you may be able to recommend a different product that would meet the customer’s needs more specifically.

Turning negativity around

Mindful Reputation Management

It is a huge reputation management mis-step to behave as if negative feedback doesn’t exist. There is no way it can be considered effective damage control. It makes a lot more sense to face criticism squarely and do your best to win over the dissatisfied customer. You come across in a much more credible way by confronting the person who is criticizing you (in the nicest way possible of course). When the person who wrote a negative comment sees that you’ve deleted it, your sort of confirming what they felt: telling them they were right all along.

I know that some will disagree with me over this–and that’s alright. Healthy debate can help us all understand more about the complex subject of branding, don’t you think?

Edelman survey: Trust in all media plunges!

You can read more here.

Quite simply it makes me so sad: sick to my stomach in fact.The results of this survey indicate that the vast majority of people operating online have encountered liars. Damned liars in fact.

Why can’t more of us be truthful? Why don’t we care about our own personal reputation and that of our clients? When working online (or anywhere else for that matter) the most important thing to me is that I am dealing with others honestly, and that they do the same in return.

Is this what it’s come down to?

The following findings (along with a lot more) are sad testimonials to the number of people who look upon their friends and associates as just someone else to make a quick buck off.

- Trust in information from friends and peers, “people like me,” dropped by 20 points, from 47 to 27 percent.

- Trust in information from digital media–blogs, social networks, and free content sources like Wikipedia or Google news, remains low: only between 11 percent and 22 percent of respondents express trust in information about companies from these sources.

Are you just another person who’s building a brand on a lie? It can’t last and it won’t. We should all do our bit right now to stop the lies. Stop misleading people and learn to think long and hard before we print anything online. Our livelihoods may depend on it.

You can fool some of the people all the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all of the time. My apologies to Abraham Lincoln but that’s almost a universal formula.

Building Your Brand in an Environment of Trust

Building trust is (or should be) a very serious business. Here are a few rules to make sure your trust-meter remains intact:

• Never lie or misrepresent yourself or a product or service.
• Never back up someone you know is lying, either in words or by endorsing them via social media.
• Don’t be afraid to call someone out if you know for sure they’re lying.

If you don’t do it, perhaps no one will. And it’s an interesting thing that if you show some courage and stand up to someone who’s doing something you disagree with, very often others will support you: they agree with you but they don’t have the personal courage to do what you’ve just done! You don’t need to do it publicly either. You’ve still done the job if you contact someone privately if you know that they’re contributing to the growing environment of mutual mistrust because they’re not operating ethically in whatever way.

Consider also that creating a fake Twitter account to air your views might just be another part of our problem. Too many people are hiding behind fake social media personas where they feel it’s OK to do and say things that they’d probably never consider doing in real life. But then again, maybe they would if they knew no one would find them out and that’s the root of the problem we have here.

It’s a well known cliche that in war truth is always the first casualty. Let’s work to make sure that in years to come our grandchildren don’t say ‘when the Internet was born truth laid down and died.’

That was my periodic Rant. Consider it over.

So let’s get to it.

1. I predict that the beginning of Google’s downfall has, in fact, already started, and will begin to be detectable around the middle of 2009. It will take a few months for word of this to get around, and another few months for most people to grasp the fairly astounding implications.
2. Expect to spend a lot more time considering your niche because this will be of increased importance. Even more so than it has been in recent years. The Internet is huge and the only way that search engines can serve their visitors well is to break it all down into bite-sized chunks.
3. To this end, expect to see fewer and fewer webpages optimized for single-word search terms. Could it be that the time has come when long-tail search is actually more important than even two-word search terms? We shall see…
4. I feel that we will see more and more niches that actually are an ‘intersection’ between two niches: If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, then Karl Long might clarify it for you. But in any case, you should definitely read The Medici Effect (free download alert) because this concept is going to come into its own in 2009.
5. The time has gone where a marketer could just throw up a site and scare up some traffic. Social media is the way of the future. Online marketers will rely more and more on social media marketing for

Online branding
advertising
traffic
and even market research/product creation

6. We won’t see much evidence of the so-called economic slump online. Here’s just one survey that shows that only 25 percent of online marketers plan to cut their advertising budget in 2009:
7. Branding is going to be a lot more about who you network with and how they see you, than how many advertising bucks you’ve invested. This has already started to manifest: a famous case was the Motrin ad that was pulled because of the response from moms on Twitter. Here’s another site that talks about how important it is to network in order to grow your business.

It will be interesting to look back at the end of 2009 to see how close this list was, and to also take a look at some other marketing predictions for 2009. Do hope you’ll join me in December for that.

Blogging is a new industry, and while it is already huge, it seems the surface hasn’t really been scratched yet. Learning how to use blogging to enhance business might be something you’ll want to do in order to establish your online brand. One of the latest forms of blogging is micro-blogging, as in Twitter or Plurk.

There are lots of reasons why opening an account with Twitter is a great thing to do for your business:

1. Joining Twitter is free, easy and takes only seconds (OK you’re right, that’s two reasons right there).
2. You can create a Twitter network that links you up with some really impressive people in your niche. We even have celebrities like Britney Tweeting now. You can find best selling authors like Scott Allen and towering business personalities like Guy Kawasaki.
3. Twitter is one of the best ways there is to keep abreast of trends in your niche. Communication is essential for anyone wanting to succeed in this information age, and if that information can be had in real-time on a breaking news basis, just imagine what an edge that would give you compared to your competitors who have not yet discovered Twitter. Many times we hear important news before it breaks in print and broadcast media. There have even been instances where they’ve taken queues from us–not always successfully. Jill Whalen calls it the ‘water cooler aspect,’ and that about sums it up.
4. Even if you don’t feel like it now, grab your Twitter ID (especially your name) now in case you really regret it later when you see that everyone’s using Twitter, (chances are you will).
5. Twitter is a fantastic way of getting inspiration for your blog or website, or any other project you’re working on. Users often use it for feedback, canvassing the market and a lot more. Here’s just one example of how bloggers get material for posts as well as business development ideas.
6. Have questions about business? Give them up to the Twitter universe. Chances are you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the results.
7. Used correctly Twitter can be a superb reputation management tool both for getting the good word out and suppressing the bad. But that will only work if your Twitter network is already well established when you have a reputation crisis to contend with.
8. Some really interesting writers/artists are easy to link up with.
9. Itinerary coordination: Obama‘s presidential campaign made extensive use of social media channels including Twitter for announcements and coordination.
10. Twitter makes a very effective mode of communication and coordination if there’s a crisis, or heaven forbid, a disaster. But if you’re not already established on Twitter with an effective network, when a crisis erupts it’ll be too late.
11. If you choose to you can keep an eye on your market/network anonymously by signing up for Twitter in another name. You can have as many accounts as you want, and if you use an Twitter client like Twhirl, Spaz or Tweetr for Mac you can tweet in more than one profile at once.
12. You can Tweet from your PC, laptop, handheld or smartphone.
13. Twitter takes far less effort to keep up with than some other social media platforms, such as FaceBook, for example. You are in complete control of how much interaction you choose to take on.
14. All the coolest bloggers like Tech Crunch, Problogger, Copyblogger and lots more, are on Twitter. And before all my blogger-friends raise a howl of protest, I cannot list all you cool and notorious bloggers on here I want to finish some time today.
15. You can post your Twitterfeed to your blog or website to increase your network and provide enhanced interactivity for your clients/customers.
16. Join a multitude of entrepreneurs who are actively promoting their goods or services via Twitter in the form of special offers and so on.
17. There are a multitude of Twitter applications such as Twitter Grader, or Mr Tweet that will help you gauge your popularity, market reach and even shortcomings. All vital for social media marketing in any form.

Where to find your title tags

All I can say is, whatever floats your boat.

This post is loosely in response to Jamie Harrop’s comment on my guest post over at his blog. Jamie disagrees with me, so no offense at what follows Jamie.

There’s always more than one way to do anything. When you get advice, the person giving it can only tell you what they think is best from their perspective.

The <title></title> tags for your web pages are of supreme importance to your ranking and which searches you come up for. You need well-thought-out tags that are different for every page in order to get the best results–which is more traffic to your website. If you get it wrong you might even be penalized (like having the same title tag for every page of your website).

From an SEO point of view it makes a lot more sense to put the phrase or search term that your potential visitors are going to type into a search box when they’re looking for whatever it is that you’re selling. Quite simply, names, or your ‘brand,’ while they are important, will not figure into the equation at the search stage. Of course, once a visitor lands on your website you want to do everything you can to get them to remember your name or your brand. But that’s once they’ve arrived. Would you lure a fish onto your line by tying a frying pan onto your rod? Using your name to get new visitors is about as effective.

So, if you’re still determined to put your name in your title tags, without a search term before it, go ahead, Your competitor who listens to their SEO will most likely get more visitors than you do.