The advent of social networking has provided a method for many businesses to advertise on the cheap. A social networking presence, however, is sometimes obtained unknowingly, and can be a dual-edged sword. Businesses or other organizations must identify a strategy to deal with their social networking presence.
The most popular Web-based review site for businesses today is yelp.com. Yelp has become so popular that it is commonly used as a verb, much like Google. "I Yelped it" is a common response to "How did you find this place?" Yelp is used to find any number of types of businesses, commonly restaurants, service organizations and even health care such as doctors or dentists.
While some folks actively seek a presence on Yelp, many find that they have been reviewed on Yelp purely by accident. As such, anyone with a business should check Yelp to see whether they have any reviews.
What do you do if you find yourself on Yelp and you have some not-so-nice reviews? You basically have two options. You can ignore Yelp and perhaps choose to respond in different methods. Or, you can use Yelp as your medium to respond to complaints or negative reviews.
We won’t provide a Yelp tutorial herein, but it’s really not difficult. This is, however, something that must be taken seriously. If you get lazy in the future, that has the potential of being a bad sign to the customer base. All negative comments should be addressed, and positive reviews should be acknowledged.
After all, this is a tried-and-true business practice, just with a technological twist. Back in the day, successful businesses listened when their customers complained and tried to improve their processes.
Of course, Yelp is not the be-all, end-all way to network with your customer base. In fact, Yelp is not without controversy, but that is a topic for another day.
Alternatively, many businesses have taken to Facebook to establish a social networking presence. Facebook provides better control over the content of the site and, of course, has a huge user base. Business owners can provide promotions via Facebook to increase traffic. And the better Facebook pages provide relatively unmoderated feedback from their customer base along, of course, with responses from the business itself.
In the nascent days of the Web, everyone needed a website. Today everyone needs a Facebook page.
Where else does feedback come from?
Message boards targeted at specific product sets are often popular places for organizations. Businesses should check relevant message boards to ensure that they are not getting a bad rap. Most every message board is indexed nowadays, so simple Internet searches for your business name will include message board results.
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John Agsalud is an IT expert with more than 20 years of information technology experience. Reach him at johnagsalud@yahoo.com.
