Shama Hyder:
Here’s what most small business owners don’t realize about reviews: A bad review can actually help your business, because it humanizes it.
Speaker 2:
All right. Let’s get to the next question; it’s about negative reviews.
Wes Schaeffer:
I have a question around poor reviews on social media, like Yelp, and on Amazon. I’ve had one person give a tremendously horrible review on a book that’s really unjust. How do we handle that?
Speaker 2:
All right. He’s talking about books, but this applies across the board. You’re a restaurant, you’re a service, you have a product, someone gives you a bad review. I also think, if you get a couple bad reviews and it is not truly reflective… If it’s reflective of your service, you’ve got to fix it internally. But if it’s not, you better bolster up that review site with some good ones.
Shama Hyder:
Absolutely. Here’s what most small business owners don’t realize about reviews: A bad review can actually help your business, because it humanizes it. The problem is when you only have one review, and it’s a bad review. Like with your sister, if you’ve got hundreds of really great, positive reviews, that one negative review actually makes you seem more human. It makes people believe the positive reviews more, just by contrast, so it can actually work in your favor. I think the key, though, is to not focus on necessarily the negative review, but make sure you’re constantly cultivating the positive ones, which most businesses don’t do. They’re so hung up on the negative ones.
Shama Hyder:
The importance of building your reputation online before you need it. If you think about the corner office, JJ, it used to be the corner office. It’d be the glass doors, the assistant when you walked in, and today, that really has shifted online. What that first impression is, when I type your company’s name into Google, or Yahoo, or Bing, what do I find? That’s my first impression; that’s your corner office. So how are you proactively building that reputation, so when people seek you out, and that really should be the goal of good business branding and marketing, is that people are now seeking you out, what’s that impression? And what are you doing to proactively cultivate a positive digital footprint?
Speaker 2:
I love the idea, too, before you need it. You may just be starting out your company, or you may not have anything big to announce yet, but you need an audience for when you do announce it.
Shama Hyder:
Right. And also, the other way to look at it, is people get scared when they have something negative online, whether it’s a negative review or just one bad piece of press. It’s because they have nothing good to counteract that; they haven’t really proactively built something. So obviously, when things like that happen, it’s the only thing out there that they let define them.
