Main Reasons Every Small-business Should Perform Online Popularity Management

Among the biggest mistakes any small business owner can make is to think they do not need to take part in online reputation management, because they run a small business.Nothing could be further in the truth.In fact, the very fact that you run a small business helps it be even more imperative to control your online brand image for 2 reasons:1. Buyer referrals would be the center of all little businesses2. You do not have the luxury of a large advertising budget to control negative reviews or restore a broken reputation like a large business can.Let us look at the first three reasons why online reputation management matters to small business owners:* ONLINE SEARCHThe enormous growth in online media and the rapid decline in offline media has made it necessary for small and large businesses likewise to change direction and focus on their online image.More and more people the world over look for information on just about everything from the web and this applies to information about your local business.Your marketplace is more apt to look for your business online through a Google, Yahoo or Bing search rather than leafing through a Yellow Pages Directory book.* SPEEDThe pace at which online media works can make or break your business in a matter of minutes or hours.A viral twitter, movie, blog post or reputation upgrade can be viewed by hundreds if not thousands of people in a course of a morning producing a much more powerful effect in a shorter time than any traditional offline media.Even a small local news story can be broadcast across the country with a YouTube video.If the news story was positive, a small business can get a ton of positive PR and increased sales, but if it was negative, it can actually destroy the business.Plus we all know that bad news spreads quicker than great news.* EQUAL OPPORTUNITYOnline media is mostly an equal playing surface for both small and large businesses, so any business no matter its dimension can get exposure, complaint and awards on the internet.This means that even small businesses cannot afford to overlook online reputation management because the internet has made the world so much of a smaller place.The emphasis placed on local search by prominent web participants such as Google, Facebook, Yelp and others, has provided more power and possibility for small businesses to grow their reputation online.Yet this increased understanding has also made it important for any small business to know how to manage the big public exposure and examination that's part of the package.Here are three more reasons why small business owners should pay attention to their online reputation.* ECOMMERCEEcommerce has made it so much easier for small business to grow beyond their village or city area to nationwide or even international market.Online shopping carts and payment processors have made this all possible, meaning that as a small business involved in ecommerce, handling your online reputation is essential to protect your online sales.Negative reviews about your goods, companies and customer support can hurt your online sales, which can be certainly be negative if your small business makes more income from ecommerce than in-store sales.In inclusion, when you consider how particular cities, towns and states have had inadequate growth in the current economic downturn, ecommerce can be the center of a small business trying to survive.* SOCIAL PROOFOne of the biggest social phenomenons of ecommerce is social proof.Do you know that an overwhelming majority of users don't trust ads but rather trust recommendations and reviews from people within their social net-works or from normal people like themselves?This is what makes consumer review sites so common and how it's so easy to convince a new client to do business with you when they have read positive reviews about your company.Therefore in-order to protect your online reputation, it's important to know what people are expressing about your business because this is the single most important influencing power behind a prospects buying decision.* ONLINE SEOWhat many business owners fail to realize is how permanent an impact bad publicity leaves on the web.Once content has been released on a website, listed by the search engines and turns up in the search results, it's excessively difficult to have that content removed.It is not as easy as telling Google to remove the bad page because they have no power to do that how to turn a negative review into a positive.It often involves contacting the webmaster of the blog or website where the content was submitted and trying to convince them to erase the content, make the page unseen to search engines or to remove the page.This is often very difficult as they have control rights over the site.Even if you resort to legal measures and they eventually remove the content, it is nevertheless difficult for that content to get entirely off the internet radar particularly if the content was widely distributed or went viral.Online content is absolutely very difficult and something that happened many years ago can haunt your business reputation for many years to come.