Managing an Online Reputation

Your customers are talking about you — and the whole world is listening.Local review sites are reshaping the world of small business by becoming the new Yellow Pages, one-stop platforms where customers can find a business — and also see independent critiques of its performance.
How do you manage your reputation when everybody is a critic?

For some business owners, this is a terrifying prospect that seems more like mob rule than the wisdom of crowds. Negative reviews can hang an albatross around your neck if they appear prominently in search results. Happily, there is a big upside: referrals from happy clients are traditionally the best source of new business — and online forums are powerful word-of-mouth. The review process has been democratized.

But managing your online reputation requires a whole new skill set, including monitoring the online conversation and engaging with customers and the tech-savvy to promote yourself in the best channels. These skills are becoming essential for mainstream businesses. According to a survey by the Opinion Research Corporation, 84 percent of Americans say online reviews influence their purchasing decisions.

Read more By KERMIT PATTISON, New York Times

Quick Tips:

• Set up automatic alerts to notify you when your business is mentioned in a review or blog.
• Local search sites are the new Yellow Pages -- make sure your business is listed. The more complete your listing, the more likely you are to get good search results.
• Respond to reviews to show readers that you are listening and that you care about customer service.
• Online reviews are a gold mine of business intelligence. Analyze metrics to get a better sense of your customer demographics.
• Don’t write false reviews to puff your business or trash a competitor. You can severely damage your reputation...and look really silly.

Suggested Reading:

• Tips from Yelp on responding to positive or negative reviews.
• A guide to Web tools to track your online reputation.

Most Facebook Fan Pages are Underperforming

SHOCKER: 3% To 7.5% Of Fans See Your Page’s Posts

Posted by Brian Carter

The chart above shows that fan page owners are grossly overestimating how many people they’re reaching through posts.
(Note: That chart based on pages that together represent more than 400 million fans; it was complied by PageLever, which is in beta and growing its data set. The PageLever charts rock (they’re much cooler than my lame MS Powerpoint table above), and if you want better Facebook Page insights, you should sign up for their beta. The “approximate % of fans seeing posts daily” and “total daily impressions per fan” columns are daily, so these numbers are affected by pages that are not posting daily.)
It’s more of a shocker than you thought, isn’t it? Among Facebook pages with a million likers or more, less than three percent of their fans are seeing their posts daily.

Most Fan Pages Are Under-Performing

I’ve been told that HubSpot recommends a 0.5 percent feedback rate as a goal. But I have seen pages up to several hundred thousand fans achieve feedback rates above one percent regularly when they post purposely to get likes and comments. It may be possible for multi-million fan pages as well.
If you aren’t thinking about how to get more likes and comments, you probably don’t understand how EdgeRank is reducing your visibility to your fans.
Keeping your fans engaged daily and arousing their desire for your offering must be part of your fan page strategy, or you’re wasting the opportunity to stay visible and get sales.
There may be cases where a one percent feedback rate is not possible, especially if your fans don’t have much in common that they’re passionate about. This is more likely the case for fan pages that prioritize high fan counts ahead of targeting good potential customers. But you can see from the numbers above that high fan counts are deceiving.

Many Are Under-Posting

A lot of experts recommend posting to your Facebook fan page daily. But many are not achieving that. This is a missed opportunity. It’s similar to how so many companies have email lists but no email marketing strategy beyond a monthly newsletter than no one cares about. You need a fan page posting plan.
Afraid to post daily? To give you a contrary example, one e-commerce website I know of has found their 90,000 fan Facebook page to be quite profitable, and they post five times per day and have done so for more than six months.
Four daily posts are engagement-oriented and one is sales-oriented. Not all the Facebook e-commerce efforts I’m aware of are making profits, so it’s interesting that this profitable one is posting so often. Perhaps by being so aggressive, they cultivate the most passionate fans and weed out the ones who are never going to buy.
Facebook fan quantity is overrated. You do need a lot of fans, but you need a lot of quality fans, and you need to keep them engaged. The best Facebook marketers are engaging their fans with a purpose while growing their fan base.

But Can Big Pages Stop Growing Fans?

An underestimated factor in EdgeRank is time decay. One of the reasons so many fans of the biggest pages are not engaged is because they became fans so long ago. Some huge fan pages were not started by the company, and the early fans may never have been engaged. If a fan hasn’t clicked on one of your posts for a year, there may be almost no chance they’ll ever see your posts again.
And if you continue to do a poor job with your post feedback rate, over time, your fans will continue decay. You’ll have to keep getting new fans, as they get more and more expensive (because of ad burnout, they always become more expensive).
Once the cost is prohibitive, you’ll have no choice but to pay for sponsored post story ads to your existing fan base to try to re-awaken them. If you have more than 100,000 fans, you should already be running sponsored post stories and other ads to your existing fan base to keep them engaged, especially if your feedback rate is below 0.5 percent.

Solutions: Here’s The Good News

I was very reluctant to put this post out — it’s cool that it has an attention-grabbing title and it’s based on real data, but it could be discouraging to many involved in Facebook marketing. There are many naysayers about this business, so why add fuel to the fire?
In my experience, the people who say Facebook doesn’t work for business have little experience and no training. I agree with them that not enough businesses are succeeding, but I see it as a function of companies not doing it well, not as a function of the social network itself.
Consider this a tough-love post. I want you to face the facts and change your tactics so you can get better results.
Here’s what you need to change:

• Have a plan for engaging your fans: Who’s going to do the posting? Do they have any experience in this? How often will they post?  Have you planned out 30 to 90 daily posts yet?
• Go for likes and comments: Without them, you don’t get visibility. If you’re not getting a one percent feedback rate, have you been trained how to get more likes and comments from posts?
• Grow targeted fans that are realistically good potential buyers for your company: Don’t just go for numbers. The businesses I’ve seen make money from Facebook grew all or most of their fans from Facebook advertising, which gives you powerful targeting options.

Brian Carter is the chief executive officer of the FanReach Facebook marketing training company, a social media trainer, and a Facebook and AdWords consultant.

Google+: The Complete Guide

Google+: It’s the hot social network on the block. In just three weeks, Google’s competitor to Facebook and Twitter has amassed more than 10 million users, and its users are sharing more than 1 billion pieces of content daily. It’s become a hotbed for early adopters, tech luminaries, marketers and businesses around the world.

Google+ isn’t the easiest thing to understand, though. It has a lot of features that can confuse beginners. Even advanced users can miss a lot of the little gems and nuances that define Google+.

Read more from Mashable: Google+: The Complete Guide:

5 Steps to Establishing Yourself as an Expert Online and Off

There’s a lot of talk in the marketing blogosphere about the importance of setting yourself apart from your competition–about how to be taken seriously, you must establish yourself as an expert in your field. And while that’s all well and good, no one ever really tells you how you’re supposed to establish yourself as an expert. What goes into becoming an “expert” and how do you know if you’re doing it right or you’re just spinning your wheels and getting no brand karma?

What should small business owners do to help brand themselves as authorities that users will trust? Below are five tips:

1. Start Small: I’m sure there are a number of things you want to brand yourself and your company as being an expert on. However, start by picking one and building your empire from there. What is the one thing that your company does better than anyone else? Or what would you like to be known for doing better than anyone else even if you don’t right now? Become the go-to person for that. Once you get that under your belt, you can expand upon it and add a lot of related services.

2. Learn Everything You Can: Once you know what your area of expertise is, dedicate yourself to becoming the master of it. Read blogs and forums to stay up to date on the latest news, read discussions to understand the different pain points, read print magazines and offline materials to hear from even more sources. In order to be an expert on something, you need to be able to speak intelligently on it, and that means understanding it as thoroughly as you can.

3. Create a Plan for Sharing Your Knowledge: Through blogs and social media, small business owners are able to easily share their knowledge with others and display their expertise for everyone to see. But have a plan for how you’ll do that and use multiple formats. Maybe you’ll blog, offer webinars or speak at local events. Or perhaps you’ll host a meet up in your area and write articles for popular industry sites. Ideally, you should be doing a number of these things and sharing information in all the satellite communities where your audience hangs out. It’s not enough to simply share the content; you have to share it where people are going to notice and consume it.

4. Share Opinions, Even Difficult Ones: To really develop your standing as an industry expert, you need to be comfortable sharing your opinion on what’s going on in your niche. Use your unique point of view and your way of seeing things to share your passion with the people you’re trying to reach. It can be hard to put yourself out there and show your vulnerabilities, but you need to if you want people to able to relate to what you’re telling them. Share opinions on your blog, through social media, at local networking events, and anywhere else you can!

5. Live What You Preach: People want to see that you’re not only preaching best practices, that you’re also living them. Make sure you’re implementing the same things you’re telling everyone else to implement and that you’re not doing what you’ve told them not to do. If you’re trying to sell yourself as an authentic social media marketer, people are going to get upset pretty quick if you start sending out automated DMs or spamming them on Facebook.

Above are five tips I’d recommend to put yourself on the path to becoming an expert in your field. What did I miss? What traits or actions make someone stand out as an expert in your eyes?

Read More By Lisa Barone : 5 Steps to Establishing Yourself as an Expert Online and Off:

How to Pick Up the Blogging Habit

How to Pick Up the Blogging Habit,: "As people, we’re creatures of habit. Whether you’re trying to lose weight, start a blog or train for your first marathon, to be successful in that goal, you must develop the habit of actually doing it. The habit of running, of eating, of finding that time to write and publish blog posts. And that takes practice.

I write a lot – for multiple blogs, multiple times a week. And in order for me to get that blogging done and still be able to run a business and take care of everything else that needs to get done, I’ve had to adopt the blogging habit. If you’re having trouble committing to blogging, here are some tips and tricks that have worked for me. I’d love it if you’d share what works (or even what doesn’t work) for you.

1. Schedule time: One of the most common sources of pushback when I encourage small business owners to start blogging is that they don’t have the time. I understand that. But you have to schedule in the time, the same way you schedule in time to pay your vendors, to manage your online reviews or even to restock your inventory. Without scheduling those things, they probably wouldn’t get done either. But you do them because they’re important to your business.

Do the same with your blogging. Find an hour or two a week that you can dedicate to writing content. Maybe it’s in the morning before things get into full swing, maybe it’s on Sunday while you grab a coffee and catch up on the world. Schedule the time.

2. Keep an idea log: Get in the habit of recording ideas for blog posts, and you won’t believe how easily they come to you. Keep track of bloggable questions (as I discuss in my post on Outspoken Media), the conversations you have with customers, the issue that got you really worked up, the new use for that old medium you’re considering, etc. When you’re immersed in your business, your brain is constantly thinking, evaluating and trying things out. Jot down those ideas and write about them later. It’s when you don’t catch these thoughts in the moment that they’re lost forever when you sit down to face a blank screen.

3. Put a blogging structure in place:: Whether you think you are a professional writer or a complete hack, you probably have a writing system. You think of your topic, you do your research, you store the links you want to mention, you craft your headline, etc. Use this system to help keep you on track with what you’re supposed to be doing. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel each time you sit down to write. Know what you need to do and how you need to do it; then, just get it done. Streamline the process as much as possible.

4. Write in batches: If you’re feeling inspired and the juices are flowing, don’t just write one post, write an entire week’s worth or two week’s worth. Not only does this help you to plan out your content and schedule posts ahead of time, but it also lets you take advantage of those natural moments when you have something to say. Don’t stop writing until you’ve gotten it all out.

5. Use one piece of content many ways: Before you write a piece of content, think of all the different ways you can recycle that content. Maybe you can expand on that blog post and turn it into an article series. Maybe you can turn it into a presentation to give at your local chamber of commerce event. Maybe you can build an interview series off it. If time is sacred (and when isn’t it?), make sure you’re getting as much mileage out of each piece as you can.

6. Keep doing it: To build a habit, you need to live the habit. Keep following the rules above until you don’t even realize you’re following them anymore. Once blogging begins to feel like a natural part of your business, you’ve adopted the blogging habit. Congrats.

Above are a few tips to help you pick up the blogging habit and get yourself on a path to creating authoritative content for both users and the engines. What’s worked for you?

by Lisa Barone

5 Services For Building Websites on a Budget

There’s little doubt that a custom-designed and developed website is ideal for business. A trained professional can help you optimize your site for good search engine rankings, custom-tailor the look and feel to appeal to your target audience, reinforce your company’s image and ensure that your content is easily accessible and the user experience enjoyable. However, large web-development budgets often just aren’t possible, particularly for small businesses or entrepreneurs who are just getting started. In these cases, a number of web services exist to allow you to grow your company’s presence online, often in just minutes. We’ll take a look at five of them in this article:.5 Services For Building Websites on a Budget

LinkedIn Quickly Overtaking Twitter.com as a Traffic Driver

By MG Siegler

If I asked you which of the major social sites you thought sent us the most traffic, you might think it was Twitter. After all, the TechCrunch Twitter account has over 1.7 million followers. When you compare this to the (just under) 250,000 fans our Facebook TechCrunch page has, it should be no contest, right? Wrong.

The truth is that if this were October of last year, you would have been right in thinking that Twitter was our top referrer in terms of social websites. But since that time, Facebook has far surpassed Twitter in terms of traffic coming our way each month. In fact, Facebook.com is now sends nearly double the traffic that Twitter.com does. This is probably due to the fact that last November, we added Elin, our excellent community manager, who curates and engages with people from our feed on Facebook. I also suspect it has to do with the rise of the Like button. Ever since it was released last year, Facebook has been steadily referring more readers our way.

But this info, while interesting, isn’t all that surprising. After all, Facebook is by far the largest social network in the world. With over 750 million active users, it still dwarfs Twitter. The really surprising thing is that Twitter isn’t even our number two social referrer in terms of websites anymore. As of this month, that distinction goes to LinkedIn (LNKD). And it’s not even close.

Yes, LinkedIn, the professional social network which just went public is now by far our second biggest referrer of social traffic. That’s crazy when you consider that just last month, it was around half the size of Twitter (in terms of referrals), and trailed sites like Hacker News. And two months ago, it was roughly 1/8th the size of Twitter, trailing Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and others in terms of referral traffic to TechCrunch. But the biggest stat of all is that a year ago, traffic coming from LinkedIn was 1/50th what it is today on a monthly basis.

So what changed? As far as we can tell, this is all about LinkedIn Today, the social news product the service launched back in March. It was around that time that was saw the first big bump in terms of traffic coming from LinkedIn. In March, it roughly doubled from February. Then April was pretty flat — it was still much higher than previously, but not growing. Then in May, traffic went up 5x. And in June, it more than doubled from that. The growth has been astounding.

Of course what’s perhaps most interesting about that is that LinkedIn Today is powered by Twitter. Twitter shared links determine what shows up on LinkedIn Today, but the traffic does not go back through Twitter.

Again, this is just traffic from LinkedIn to TechCrunch. And the truth is that with its cross between technology and business, LinkedIn may be the most perfect social network for regular TechCrunch readers. But talking with some other bloggers, they’ve been noticing the exact same thing. All of this is undoubtedly buoyed by the LinkedIn social buttons that have been appearing all over the web as well. recently (and on TechCrunch recently).

The bigger question in my mind is what this means for the future of Twitter’s website as a disseminator of news? While Twitter has attempted to help journalists and bloggers a bit with things like the recently-launched Twitter for Newsrooms tutorials, they haven’t had much in the way of new features to better surface information. Referral traffic from Twitter had been steadily rising over the years, but it was only as we gained more Twitter followers incrementally. And in the last year, that traffic has flattened completely. And now in just a couple of months, LinkedIn has shot by it when a hot new product.

Part of the explanations on Twitter’s side may be the increased use of HTTPS, which likely scrubs referrer information in traffic sent. But Facebook and LinkedIn both have HTTPS options as well, and again, those numbers are rising fast, Twitter is not. Also a part of this is the use of Twitter mobile clients. But again, Facebook has hugely popular mobile clients too (though, admittedly, LinkedIn’s mobile clients don’t appear to be as popular, so most of their traffic will likely be from linkedin.com).

If that trend is true on a larger scale, that’s not good news for Twitter. It’s substantial traffic that can’t be ignored, obviously, but the numbers point to it stalling out as others come along. In the same year timespan that Twitter referral traffic has flattened, Facebook referral traffic has gone up six-fold. Again, that doesn’t look good for Twitter. Digg was once the undisputed king of referrals as well. Last month, they were in 17th place in terms of referrals to TechCrunch.

Update: Twitter says the lack of growth on twitter.com is due to the soaring of Twitter mobile usage and says they will share some stats soon which I’ll post here. Though that would also suggest that people are turning away from the website in order to use mobile, which would be interesting. Either way, I altered the title to better reflect that Twitter.com is mainly what’s being discussed here.

Update 2: Twitter has pointed to these previously stated numbers to share in terms of mobile growth.

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