Reasons Every Small Company Should Execute On-line Reputation Management

One of the greatest mistakes any small business manager will make is to feel they don't need to participate in online reputation management, because they run a small business.Nothing could be further in the truth.In fact, the fact that you run a small business makes it even more imperative to manage your online company image for two reasons:1. Consumer referrals will 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 damaged reputation like a large business can.Let us look at the first three reasons why online reputation management concerns to small business owners:* ONLINE SEARCHThe substantial growth in online media and the rapid decrease in offline media has made it necessary for small and large businesses alike to change direction and focus on their online image.More and more people the world over look for information on just about anything from the web and this applies to information about your local business.Your target market is more apt to look for your business online through a Google, Yahoo or Bing search rather than browsing through a Yellow Pages Directory book.* SPEEDThe speed at which online media works can make or break your business in a matter of minutes or hours.A viral twitter, movie, blog article or reputation upgrade can be considered by thousands if not thousands of people in a span of a day creating a much more powerful impact in a shorter time than any traditional offline media.Even a small local news story can be broadcast across the region 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 literally ruin the business.Plus we all know that bad news spreads faster than great news.* EQUAL OPPORTUNITYOnline media is generally an equal playing surface for both small and large businesses, so any business no matter its dimension can get exposure, complaint and accolades on the internet.This means that even small businesses can not afford to ignore online reputation management because the internet has made the world so much of a smaller place.The stress placed on local search by prominent web participants such as Google, Facebook, Yelp and others, has given more power and opportunity for small businesses to grow their presence online [jsainteractive.com/general-internet-marketing/how-to-turn-a-negative-review-into-a-positive-experience how to remove negative reviews on yelp].Yet this increased recognition has also made it critical for any small business to know how to handle the huge public exposure and critique that is part of the package.Here are three more reasons why small business owners should give consideration to their online reputation.* ECOMMERCEEcommerce has made it so much simpler for small business to grow beyond their village or city location to nationwide or even global market.Online shopping carts and fee processors have made this all possible, indicating that as a small business involved in ecommerce, managing your online reputation is vital to protect your online sales.Negative reviews about your goods, services and customer service can damage your online sales, which can be certainly be detrimental if your small business makes more income from ecommerce than in-store sales.In addition, when you consider how certain areas, towns and states have had inadequate growth in the current economic recession, ecommerce can be the lifeblood of a small business trying to survive.* SOCIAL PROOFOne of the largest social phenomenons of ecommerce is social proof.Do you know that an overwhelming majority of viewers do not trust advertisements but instead trust recommendations and reviews from people inside their social systems or from ordinary people like themselves?This is what makes customer review sites so common and how it's so easy to convince a new buyer to do business with you after they've 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 affecting power behind a clients purchasing decision.* ONLINE SEOWhat many business owners fail to realize is how permanent a footprint bad coverage leaves on the web.Once content has been printed on a site, listed by the search engines and shows up in the search results, it's exceedingly difficult to have that content removed.It isn't as easy as telling Google to remove the bad page because they have no power to do that.It often involves calling the webmaster of the blog or site where the content was placed and trying to convince them to eliminate the content, make the page invisible to search engines or to remove the page.This is often very difficult as they have ownership rights over the site.Even if you resort to legal procedures and they in the course of time remove the content, it is nevertheless difficult for that content to get entirely off the internet radar especially if the content was widely published or went viral.Online content is definitely very sweaty and anything that happened many years ago can bother your business reputation for many years to come.