No matter how wonderful your product is, negative press will hit potential clients harder than all of the positive responses your customers have to offer. Negative media is always stronger than positive, and testimonials are always more influential than what you personally have to say about your company or product. So, what happens when you have a lot of negative testimonials out on the web with no way of keeping it from going even more viral? As significant as these seemingly uncontrollable influences are, it’s up to you to begin keeping a close eye on your online reputation.
Directly Seek Bad Press
As hard as it is to willingly seek out the negative comments people have about your company, it is necessary. Knowing what your customers don’t like will help you innovate and evolve your product into something that acts as a solution to all of the issues your former customers may have been complaining about on an online forum or discussion group. Blog posts, blog post comments, customer reviews, and many more online sources are potential catchalls for customer venting. All in all, figure out where your bad reviews are coming from and address them. This lets the online community know that you care and are actively seeking to better their customer experience.
Create Good Press
Creating good press doesn’t always mean writing about how good your company is. Remember when I stated before that customer testimonials are always higher up on the totem pole than comments made by obviously biased employees or owners of the company? Press releases are always good, as long as they are from a subjective party view. However, the best way to gain respect from web surfers, online communities, or disgruntled former clients is to play up positive customer testimonials. Nothing shows quality quite like an unbiased stranger’s honest opinion about a recent customer experience.
Rank Yourself Using SEO
Use your web content to your advantage to boost your ranking on search engines results. If a company is really that bad, customers will assume that it will not show up on their first page of their Google search engine results. Essentially, building up your SEO content will raise your ranking, thus allowing more potential clients to see you (even the ones that heard about all of the negative comments about your company) among the top spots of what they are looking for. This will raise some curiosity, and hopefully, your ranking will lead to a click that shows these skeptics all of the great testimonials you have from creating good press!