Have a Tech New Year

Your website remains the source of all the important information about your business: details about your products and services, your online store, press kit and so forth. But you’d be hard pressed to add the community features that Facebook enables so easily for your business. So, your website should use the “Find Us on Facebook” graphic to direct people to your business Facebook Page. You can find a very tasteful example on the Iron Horse home page. Make sure the Info tab on your Facebook Page is as complete as possible, and be sure to include your website address there.

A great example of the power that Facebook offers is its new “Deals” feature. Once you establish the physical location your business as a “Place” on Facebook, mobile users can check in when they visit, both to let their friends know where they are and to take advantage of any deals you may provide. Deals can be individual (“Get $1.00 off your next coffee drink”), group (“Get a free appetizer when your group of four or more checks in”), loyalty (“Check in 10 times, get a free soft drink”) or charity (“We’ll donate $0.25 to the food bank for each check-in.”). Imagine the time and cost to add a check-in/deal feature for mobile users to your existing website.

The takeaway is that once someone knows about your business, you should endeavor to get them to “Like” your Facebook Page, and relate to them there on a regular basis. When posting on your Wall, link back to your website as necessary to provide more details. Rely on your permanent website to provide information, and use Facebook to promote contact with your potential and actual customers.

Reputation defender

If, like me, you listen to KCBS news radio while driving around the North Bay, you’ve probably heard advertisements for Redwood City-based Reputation Defender, which claims to control “how you look when someone Googles you or your business.” Its radio commercial relates the story of a dentist who sees his appointments fall off and discovers that the reason is a (unwarranted) negative patient review at the top of Google’s search results. I think it’s done a good job of figuring out what strikes terror into the heart of many techno-phobic small business owners and professionals: The Terrible Google will ruin my business by spreading lies from wackos!

Certainly, your online reputation is important. But it’s easy to have Google email you the results of searching for “Acme Industries” (or whatever your business name happens to be) on a daily or weekly basis. And it’s free. Just go to www.google.com/alerts, enter the name of your business (in quotes, so you get an exact match on your name), choose “How Often,” and choose “all results” under the Volume option. Provide your email address, and let ’er rip.

OK, but what if the top Google result for your business isn’t so flattering? That’s really what Reputation Defender is selling, for anywhere from $4.95 a month for an individual to a $10,000 package of services for businesses. It takes two approaches. First, just as you can, it contacts the owners of websites with unflattering information and politely asks them to take it down. Second, it creates new, positive content about your business and optimizes it to rank more highly in search results than other, possibly less-complimentary, web pages.

Let me start by saying that neither of these approaches is guaranteed to work. A site posting a bad review of your company is under no obligation to remove it, short of a court order. And search engine rankings aren’t directly under the control of Reputation Defender. Witness: If you Google “Reputation Defender scam,” one of the top results is a post on Mahalo.com from someone who says the company took $2,500 from them and did nothing.

And that’s my second point. Someone who’s really interested in seeing what people have to say about you will add the word “scam” or “quack” or “bad” to the name of your business. Google will oblige by returning web pages with the name of your business and those words, if they exist. Alternatively, they will go to Yelp.com and look for reviews of your business. I know a number of earnest small business owners who’ve been devastated when a bad review appeared on Yelp. Yelp was accused of pushing bad reviews down in return for advertising in early 2010, but has made efforts to clean up its act.

Rather than dealing with a dissatisfied, vocal customer after the fact with Reputation Defender, you’re probably better off spending time making sure you offer people better ways to resolve their issues than ranting online. The “United Breaks Guitars” video (now with more than 9 millions views on YouTube) could have been avoided entirely if the airline had simply dealt fairly and promptly with the guy whose musical instrument was damaged. Instead, it had a PR fiasco of Internet proportions.

For libelous content, a cease-and-desist letter from your lawyer is probably more effective than a letter from Reputation Defender anyway, and, in some cases, cheaper.

In other words, caveat emptor when it comes to companies that offer to make you look better in the Google mirror. The simple truth is, if you do business with the public, there will almost certainly be someone who—sometimes for reasons unfathomable—will have a bad experience with your company. It’s unavoidable. There are people out there who refuse to be satisfied. Some people are just plain crazy. Breathe deeply and move on.

And if there are a lot of bad reviews at the top of Google results? Well, perhaps something is rotten in Denmark.