Reputation Management
How often do you Google your name, the name of your company, the names of your competitors? What better way is there to gain a competitive advantage than by finding out what your competitors are doing wrong and making sure you don’t make the same mistakes? Similarly, if your competitors are doing something right, wouldn’t you want to look into that?
One thing I’ve never understood about many companies in the domain industry is why they don’t take a more active role in domain name forums. If you’re a domain parking company, there’s no excuse for not having a discussion thread in the domain monetization section of domain forums about what domainers like and dislike about how things are going. Some companies in this industry spend 5 figures monthly on advertising in an effort to recruit new clients, but what are they doing for their existing clients? Word of mouth really is both the best and cheapest advertising there is — just look at social media websites such as Twitter as examples of satisfied customers doing free advertising for you.
Word of mouth advertising of course works both ways and there are no guarantees it’ll be positive things being written by your customers — especially if you don’t bother taking the time to read and consider what they’ve been saying.
When it comes to online reputation management, there are some shady ways to do damage control (eg. Google bombing, Google bowling), however if you screw up as bad as Sarah Palin has, I’m afraid I can’t offer any constructive advice. Oops.. Probably shouldn’t talk politics if I don’t want to piss off half my readers. :-)
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July 6th, 2009 at 6:21 am
If you were a parking company right now how would you explain to forum members that Google, Yahoo and MSN are screwing
everybody over and you can do little about it unless you break free from their stranglehold ? … its these kinds of questions that
they need to avoid hence their shyness imho.
July 7th, 2009 at 2:11 am
Anthony does have a very good point. One of the reasons why companies are reticent is because of the fear of retaliation for being honest. It’s easy for a private citizen to write about the various messed up practices (set aside parking — registration in of itself is a minefield). But if a company does it, it’s lawsuit-bait.
While good word of mouth is priceless, all it takes is one sour experience to mess up one’s reputation. Given that people inherently complain more often than praise, sitting back and saying nothing is less risky than engaging customers on a forum.
Actually, given what little you politics you reveal, I thought you’d actually be in Sarah Palin camp. It’s good to know some of those on the right think she’s a ninny as much as those on the left do. Maybe she quit because she invested all her money in anti-premium LLLL.coms. (j/k)
July 7th, 2009 at 2:53 am
I normally try to avoid saying anything much about politics because it seems no matter how lightly you think you said something, someone always gets offended but with Sarah Palin, I just can’t help myself. Even if her values lined up 100% with mine, I still wouldn’t vote for her. I just hope for the Republican’s sake that they don’t run her for president in 2012 thinking they’ll get the female vote… I guess that gives her 3 years to show the world she’s not as incompetent as she seems about everything other than Alaska and energy.