I would like to ask a question before you read the following content because I believe that it can help you to reflect to be a visitor who left comment would like the company to do. What would you like a company to response when you post a negative comment?
As a professional digital marketer, you have a responsibility to monitor the activities about your company, including positive comments, negative comments, and defamation. There are many tools to monitor, such as Google Alert and Moz.com, but I will discuss Google Alert only.
First of all, you need to search Google Alert and you will find the first result on the SERP which is the tool we will use to monitor the online activities. Secondly, please set a brand that you are interested in to practice or you can set your company directly. Third, once you set your brand/company, you could also set up other setting, such as language, region, frequency, and sources. These setting can help you to filter unnecessary information preliminary. For example, if your company is located in the United State, you might want to choose the language with English and Spanish because these two language have high percentage in the population in the United State. Furthermore, if your company is a local business, there is no doubt that you should set a specific geographic information. Fourth, you should start to think about what keywords have the high relevant with your business, such as XXX (your company’s name), XXX comments, and XXX services. You might have question about why we choose these keywords. We choose these keywords because these keywords are general to include a wide range activities, but if you want negative comments, you can also set your keywords with the keywords, like scandal.
Here, I will provide some tips for managing your reputation after you have set up your Google Alert. First of all, you must realize what you should do once you have receive the activities about your company. For example, a visitor leaves a comment about your bad service, you should either response the comment immediately or contact with the visitor offline. Personally, I believe a marketer should do both. I would like to post a comment to make apology of our service, and contact with the visitor offline because it can avoid the back-and-forth situation.
On the other hand, there is no reason to communicate with the visitor directly on platform because you might make many mistakes during the communication. The best way to establish an efficient system of monitoring which is to create a contact names list after you receive the activities, and you should do whatever it takes to solve the problems offline through email or phone call.
Reference: Digital Marketing Essentials May 2019 Larson & Draper Chapter 11
