Whatever services you provide, whether it be pizzas or hosting services, you should learn how to communicate with your audience, build up a positive image and react to negative reviews and comments of unsatisfied customers (or probably evil competitors!). This post focuses on some recent online reputation management tactics that can be useful for any website.

Rand(om) Questions and Answers – Talking to the Whole SEO World

Every now and then, Rand spends time answering the questions of the SEO community in social media, which is a no-risk, win-win practice.

Why this is good for SEOmoz:

• When people have their questions answered by an authority of this level, they feel they are treated first-class. That’s what every company desires so badly.
• I’ve seen a lot of online companies where CEOs never interact with people. The communication is often handled by marketing and support teams. When the company’s chief is not afraid of being asked questions by hundreds of people simultaneously, that gives me an impression I can TRUST this company and brand.
• The Q&A can allow collection of some insights for marketing materials (posts, guides, whiteboard Fridays).
• There can be an establishment of very good relationship with users.
• Communications can be done on a regular basis through multiple social media channels (which in its turn attracts more followers, likes, retweets, etc.).

What are the cons:

It’s a pretty time-consuming process and considering how busy Rand is, it’s simply an awesome decision of his company to support their users this way.

When Things Go Wrong, Act Like a Pro – The SEO SpyGlass Case

Personally, I am not a big fan of software comparisons based on a limited number of factors and figures (as they are not truly useful), but I couldn’t miss the link building software rating by Matthew Woodward, who compared such profound link management tools as OSE, Ahrefs, Majestic SEO, SEO SpyGlass, Raven Tools, and Google Webmaster tools. I’m not going to comment on the rating because I believe any personal rating is subjective to a great extent. In short, SEO SpyGlass happened to be the worst tool in all nominations, which a really sad finding for their developers.

So what did they do? Instead of starting a commenting war, Viktor, the CEO of Link-Assistant.com, reached out with his own blog post, where he analyzed the methodology of the experiment and explained why Matthew was wrong with several findings.

Finally, Matthew posted an update to his post telling that his software rating was only an initial review, not a very clean experiment and more tests were to come soon. He also gave Viktor compliments regarding his quick personal response:

What’s good about joining in a discussion about the product you own and responding to negative feedback?

• Experiments are not always based on a good methodology and if you are able to find the discrepancies and share them with your community – go for it.
• Responding in a polite and argumentative way is always better than shouting out sheer accusations.
• The sooner you react the better. This also shows you current users how they will be treated in case they leave negative feedback.

What are the drawbacks?

• Depending on the product or niche, your response can back fire and dissatisfied customers will blow up your blog and social media pages telling you how bad you are. So, at least be sure about the quality of your products and services before you respond.
• If you contribute a lot to the negative topic someone started (by posting lots of replies, comments, etc.), the page can eventually move up in the search engine results. And, the bad thing is that not all users will be willing to read the full post with all your reactions and explanations, they’ll just see a snippet with some critical points mentioning your company/product:

When Your Product Goes Down Ask Bufferapp Founders How to React

Last spring, the already popular social media management tool Bufferapp was down for several hours. Taking into account, the app is mostly used by active Twitter users, you can imagine the flow of questions running to the Bufferapp account. Despite the lack of resources the team showed what quality user support is.

What they did:

1. They notified users.
2. They responded to all worried tweeters.
3. They were looking for possible recovery solutions even on Twitter! Joel Gascoigne, one of the founders, reached to MongoDB (their current database solution) for emergency support:

Although many users complained they couldn’t manage their planned activities, they felt special when Leo addressed them personally in friendly and supportive tweets. Here’s what one of the users published after the app was down:

The advantages of this strategy are obvious. Your users will simply fall in love with the service and most likely you’ll see dozens of blog posts written by your happy customers with backlinks and citations, which could give you a search engine boost as well.

The difficult thing is that you will have to keep up with your users’ expectations, whatever it takes. People quickly get used to good service and rely on your social media support, not only in emergency cases, but anytime they need any kind of information. This means that you need to analyze and improve some key online support metrics:

• Response time – a good thing to do is to define your average response time, so that users won’t have to recheck the status every 10 minutes. And even better, to work on this response time to make it shorter!
• Problem resolution time – ideally, this will equal the first response time, but sometimes things get too complicated and you cannot provide the solution at once. In this case, make sure you notify the user that “someone’s working on the problem” and provide the approximate time it will take to resolve the issue.
• Communication channel diversity – if you provide support via a single communication channel (e-mail, or Twitter, or Facebook), your users will most likely appreciate when you extend the “support area,” but in this case you should be ready to provide the same level of support across all channels.

The Takeaway Points:

1. Convince your company’s executives to get active in social media and dedicate time to users on a regular basis. This builds up loyalty and makes every customer feel like a VIP user.
2. Do not hide from critical discussions. Instead, identify problems, find solutions and post timely replies.
3. Thank people for showing/discussing the existing bugs, problems, etc. User feedback is one of the best things ever; imagine how disappointing it could be if everyone who doesn’t like anything about your product, would silently turn to your competitor!
4. Work out the “emergency support” strategy. Discuss who on your team can be in charge of such cases and can jump into social media to notify users and provide necessary solutions.
5. Keep up to users’ expectations: control the response time and extend your communication channels.

Providing professional support is obviously one of the best online reputation management techniques I’ve heard of. However, there’s an opinion that bad PR is better than no PR at all…

Which steps do you take to improve your online reputation? And how do you manage negative reviews and emergency cases? I'll be excited to see your tips and ideas in the comments!