Everyone has heard horror stories of contractors gone bad – or at least heard of shows like Holmes on Homes, where Mike Holmes helps homeowners who have been taken by a contractor. Many of these homeowners are embracing the power of the Internet and uploading videos, blogs, Tweets and Facebook status updates, to share their horror stories with the world.
For contractors, they can no longer run and hide when they’ve done shoddy work. Once its gets around town (at Internet speed) that they’re a danger to work with, they will quickly lose business, and potentially they’re entire business. How can contractors manage their online reputation?
Well, lets start with the obvious – don’t do shoddy work!
Then, if you want to know what people say about you, start up an online monitoring system. There are a number of ways to do this, and many tools are free.
1) Twitter – go to www.monitter.com, and type in your business name. Does anything popup? If it does, get to it and start a conversation with the person who is mentioning you. What a great opportunity to engage in conversation with your customers. And if they’re not happy with your service, here is your opportunity to discuss it with them!
2) Facebook – did you know that status updates from Facebook are now showing up in Google Search (and Bing, Yahoo! Etc.) ? Type in your business name in to Google Search, and then scroll all the way to the bottom of the page where the ‘results from your social connections’ are shown. What’s being said there? Is it all good?
3) Google Search – Google is your number one FRIEND and sometimes FOE online. Use it to your advantage. Type in your business name in the search field, and check out the results. Did you know you can narrow down the search criteria in Google Search? Just click on the left navigation links (images, blogs, recency, etc.) Make sure you check on the ‘images’ and ‘videos’ as well as blogs.
4) YouTube – are you aware of a particular client who may be upset with you? See if they’re on YouTube, and see if you are featured — good, bad or ugly — in any of their posts. While you are at it, search on YouTube for your business and personal name.
These are just a few of the tools available to you, but these are, in my opinion, the best tools. You can setup a page on Monitter, so you can just go back in to the website every now and again to see if there is anything being said about you.
Finally, perhaps THE most important tool in your arsenal should be Google Alerts. Go to www.google.com/alerts and type in any keywords you want to monitor. You will then receive frequent alerts (timing determined by you) via email with links to anything being said online about the keywords you’ve selected. Good stuff, huh? So get to it – start monitoring your online reputation today!
