BoycottKentucky.com is asking domain owners to call the office of Kentucky governor Steve Beshear en masse today to express their displeasure with his attempt to take over 141 gambling related domain names through a highly controversial claim that the state has jurisdiction over those names.
Have you Googled yourself lately? Go on, be honest. I Google myself pretty often. Apart from boosting my ego to see all those blog posts and articles and forums that make up my online persona, I can find mentions of me and my blogs that I may otherwise have missed.
Personal vanity aside, everyone should regularly Google their business name. Putting your company name into the search field and hitting enter can reveal many things of which you may not have been aware. I recently advised a company on their web presence after discovering that the first Google result after their own website was a highly critical article with a controversial headline telling anyone who saw it not to buy their products.
Imagine a potential customer doing their online research. She’s narrowed down a decision to two providers and decides to check for reviews or feedback. A negative result like that may just send a sale to your competition instead.
One thing businesses are learning is that you cannot control what people say about you online. Remember the old maxim of a satisfied customer telling three people while an unhappy customer tells seven? On the internet, those figures go wild. Annoy a blogger and he posts a critical post that can be seen by hundreds, if not tens of thousands of readers. And sits there for the rest of time attracting Google traffic. Way more than seven people then. Irritate someone on Twitter and they may start tweeting short messages of hate that all Twitter users can see. Some particularly irate customers have been known to set up complete websites to vent their spleen at a particular business target.
Online reputation management is becoming a real issue for businesses. Problem is, many decide the best strategy is to go on the attack. Threats are made. Cease and desist letters are sent. Blog wars get started with company blogs arguing with customer blogs.
But all of the posturing and attempts to force the online community to play nice only exacerbates the problem. Litigious and forceful behavior can only increase the negative blogs and feedback, as Metallica discovered recently. When some fans who had been privy to a preview listen of the new album decided to blog about the experience with sound clips, Metallica threatened legal action. This resulted in a wave of negative posts and an online community resisting the bullying tactics.
What businesses should do is reduce reasons for complaint or provide solutions when they arise. Rather than fight with the complaining blogger, offer some answers and constructive help in the blog comments so that everyone who reads the post can see how well you responded. Social media is about relationships. You can’t force online influencers to be your friend, but by being friendly and courteous with them, they will most likely reciprocate.
Build relationships with prominent social media uses and bloggers by interacting with them in their social media areas. Twitter is fantastic for this and blogging is fast becoming a must-have for any online business. Provide excellent service to everyone in the hope that some will write about the experience.
There will always be those malicious complaints that seem to stick in the Google results – especially if you are a bigger business. The only advice I can give here is to encourage reasons for other bloggers and online forms to discuss your business favourably. If these begin to rank higher than the complaining post, eventually it will get pushed down onto the next page and thereby be less visible.
What I don’t recommend is falsifying these friendly posts. Never, never, NEVER try to produce positive reviews and comment by creating fake customer accounts. Always be yourself and be open about who you work for. Transparency is crucial. Many of these bloggers and social media experts know more than any of us and can track ISP addresses, spot clues and determine who is real and who is fake. Online users are very cynical about marketing manipulation and can smell a rat in a sponsored blog post very quickly indeed.
Online marketing gives the power to the people far more than any previous form of marketing. Therefore, it is more important than ever to focus on relationships and interactivity instead of tricks and one-way thinking.
Googling yourself may seem an odd way to assess how well you are doing online, but it is essential. Without it, you don’t know what your potential customers are seeing.
The U.S. presidential election won’t be held until Tuesday but thousands of web surfers have been casting their votes in online polls for weeks now. We’ll tell you about a couple you can participate in and a little about our experiences voting for real this morning (our state is one of 31 that allows early voting).
Lizzy Grant, the daughter of veteran domainer Rob Grant, is making a splash in the music business. Lizzy has just released her first record (available on iTunes) and also has a new video out that is creating quite a buzz in the music blogosphere.
The new weekly DNJournal.com domain sales report is out with four six-figure sales and a flood of completed live auction sales leading the aftermarket hit parade.
Ari Bayme, is taking over as CEO at Movie Times, Inc., a company that owns a portfolio of several thousand movie related domain names and operates the popular entertainment portal MovieTimes.com. Chairman Dan Pulcrano (a giant in the geodomain space) stepped out of the CEO role to make way for Bayme.
We’re on the first leg of a one-week vacation trip but before heading out we added an exclusive new Photo Gallery to our T.R.A.F.F.I.C. New York coverage. We also posted a preview article that let’s you know what to expect from next month’s T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Down Under conference in Australia.
The T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conference heads overseas for the first time November 18-20 when Fabulous.com hosts the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Down Under conference on Australia’s famed Gold Coast. To get the inside scoop on this event, we talked with Fab execs Dan Warner and Michael Robertson.
Internet Real Estate Group President Andrew Miller and CEO Mike “Zappy” Zappolin were among the Harvard Business School graduates who got to meet luminaries like Bill Gates and Meg Whitman at last weekend’s Global Business Summit marking the 100th Anniversary of the HBS.
Bulletin from DNJournal.com