Speaker 1: Hey, Miles here, milesbecker.com this video is all about reputation management. You're going to learn a three step process to manage and maintain your reputation online, whether you're a small business, a local business, or if you're doing the creator thing and you've got a personal brand and you're putting out content, your reputation online is in jeopardy more today than it ever has been before. People are armed with the web 2.0 user feedback revolution and we've all got supercomputers in our pocket with our phones. So people are armed and ready and oftentimes they pull out their sniper rifle of negative reviews when they've had a bad experience and kind of counter to that. It usually takes a lot of encouragement in order to get the positive reviews out. So what we're going to talk about is what you can do at the various phases from that lens of content creator and personal brand and or also the local business. So part one is to monitor what's going on. So if you're a content creator, you, as you get larger, there's a couple of things. Well, number one, there's slander, right? People can just flat out talk smack, but also there's trend jacking. When you start to get more of an audience and you start to get searched and your brand starts to get searched, people will start to make up things that maybe aren't true to stuff them in a headline of a video just to start to hopefully show up when they, when other people search your name. That's called trend jacking. That's really common. And then on the other side for local businesses, reviews are driving everything. Now Yelp is on a major decline right now. They've had some big time problems. They've had some kind of pay to remove the negative reviews and it's kind of a really difficult closed system, but the Google review system is on the come up and it's getting more and more important to every single day. So the number one thing you need to do is be monitoring what's going on around your brand, around your business name, et cetera. I personally use and love Google alerts. If you go to google.com forward slash alerts, you can put in your brand name, you can put in your name, whatever it is that you're monitoring and Google will notify you via email every single time a new mention hits the search engine. So anything that gets indexed on Google that has your brand or your name in it, it'll fire you off an email so you can then go take appropriate action, which we'll talk about here in the future. So there's some other tools that you can leverage. If you're a YouTuber, two buddy does have a feature to where you can monitor your brand. They will also send you emails. But if you're someone who wants a more on demand solution that you can sit down and go search, um, I've got a list of them right down here. I'm gonna go through a few of them. Social mentioned.com is a free one where you can just search and it's a, it's a very raw list. It's not very clean and organized, but it's free, which is great. So that's social mentioned.com also mentioned.com and brand mentions.com. Those are getting into the paid ones. And if you're running a business, a medium size or a larger business, you might want to consider getting one of those because you probably don't have time to go back to the tool over and over and over. You need to set it up to monitor everywhere and notify you. For a small business, you have employees and these employees are essentially the name and the face of your brand in that moment that the consumer, that the customer is interacting with them. You can't always be there. You can't always control all of the situations. And oftentimes as business owners, we know that our employees don't take that same level of love and attention and care for our product line, for our business, for our brand, et cetera. And that can reflect upon your brand negatively, which is why you must be monitoring the situations. And since you can't be there for every conversation, this is one of the ways to get that feedback loop open is monitoring. And then finally search your brand, search your company, search your business exactly how a user would go to Google. If it's a Google search, right? Do take the time to go look, look at Yelp. If you're in a tourist area, go search on TripAdvisor. See what comes up for your brand name. You need to put yourself in the shoes of your best prospects to see what is going on. And I think you need to go back to that regularly, whether you're using a social monitoring or even a Google alerts style tool or not, because you just always got to pay attention to what's going on. So that's the monitor phase, right? You want to set up systems and you just need to flat out, go back to it time and time again to see what's going on. Number two is prevention, right? So first is monitoring. Then there is the prevention phase. Now for me with my brand, the miles Becker brand, I have been curating the first page of Google for my name for many years and this has been conscious and the whole adage of an ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure is 100% true here in the world of reputation management. A lot of people who will be looking for this video or find this video, I'd be curious if right now, let me know in the comments, do you currently have kind of a reputation crisis that you're trying to avert? If so, let me know in the comments. I can do more videos on that. We'll get into that a little bit here, but it's, it's one of those things. If you're thinking about this before you actually need it, you have a better likelihood of preventing any of this from really becoming a, an issue. So one situation I know arose with a friend of mine in New Mexico, they got some negative press. They're a business owner and it went out on the PR newswire. It got picked up by some local news agencies and some local news websites and that was all bad, right? Those hit really high up on the search engines and they, this individual didn't have a lot of assets on that first page that have been kind of aged, right? They didn't have the basics of their domain name.com, their Facebook fan page, their Facebook account, their Twitter account, their medium account, and all those other social accounts essentially stuffing them up plus doing search engine optimization, building a little bit of links to those and optimizing each one of those for that phrase. So when the negative press came out, it went straight to page one for their name. They had nothing really. They had very little recourse they could do in that moment yet had they spent time beforehand creating the assets needed to prevent this, that would have gone a long way. So what can you do to prevent? Well, number one is you need to go get every single social account and social profile you possibly can for your brand name. The ones that you use and the ones that you don't use on a medium.com go put up one medium post on your medium.com. I've got one on Quora, right? I've got an a Quora account, which is a question and answer website. I've answered many questions. I put up one blog post on Quora. That's what you need to do. You need to put enough content on each of these to make sure that you're seeding the actual platforms with enough kind of data around you that Google picks it up, right? So my Quora page will rank in Google. My Facebook account ranks in Google. My Twitter account ranks in Google. My medium account ranks in Google and what I've been doing, my YouTube account and on and on and on, including my milesbeckler.com blog. So what I've been doing is literally if you go look at the first two pages for my name, I've really curated and crafted what shows up there consciously and I've got other social accounts that are even built that don't show up and don't rank well. I'm willing to go put all of those social accounts together and then I link them all together in order to really increase the authority of each one of those social profiles. They rank well and that's what you want to do to really get these things going. If you're a local business owner, you want to go claim your page, claim your account on Yelp, on Google reviews, on TripAdvisor, anywhere that local people will be reviewing your restaurant or local business, whatever it is that you're doing. You need to make sure you go claim each and every one of those listings. They're called a really good habit to do when you do this. Make sure that your phone number is correct. Make sure your address is correct and then also make sure the link to your website is correct. That's a good citation for your business and if you have not yet gone through the full process of google.com forward slash business, do so. Go verify your account through google.com forward slash business. That's the process when you go find your Google reviews. So how do you do that? If you're a small business, well go search for your business name. See what review sites come up, click on them and they all have a claim. This listing link might be a little bit different wording, but they all say somewhere on their claim this listing and you essentially go verify yourself. You verify yourself as the business owner. Google will go as far as mailing you a postcard in the mail to your physical address to make sure you really actually are at that location. So this helps you rank better on the map, which is great, but it also puts you in more control so you can leave owner feedback, which we're going to get to in the next phase. That's part three, but you need to go claim everything first and foremost and then fill out your profile. Right? Talk about, write about who you are and what you do. Fill all that information out when you own these and when you've claimed them, they have a higher likelihood of ranking higher, which again can have a higher likelihood of pushing down that negative press there. Any opportunities you have for, for solid PR in your community, if you're doing good work in your community, make sure that the local journalists know about it. If you're running a fundraiser, if you have something going on in your local community, your news, your local news outlets always need things to talk about. And when you reach out and say, Hey, I work with this local business, we're doing this over here. We're going to be at the soup kitchen from this time to that time. If you guys are interested in featuring it, we'd love to get a mention in your news. I love your news broadcast. Those types of mentions when you push them forward first can also help add that positive press onto the first pages of Google. So when people search for you, you're kind of curating what is showing up on that first page of Google. So there's lots of different social accounts that you can get today. It's going to change what is popular in the months, weeks and years to come. Always stay on top of it. Always when you see or hear of a new social network or a new app that people are using, get in, make sure you claim your business's name, your brand name. We want to protect that in every way, shape or form that you can. And an ounce of prevention is definitely worth more than a pound of cure. Number three is controlling the situation. Uh, unfortunately a lot of people, as I mentioned earlier, get to this point where they're, they're kind of in crisis management mode with this. So what can you do? The first thing, the first thing you need to realize is that it's impossible. It's not technically impossible, but it's so difficult to potentially remove anything from the search engines, like actually have it removed. That is not even worth trying. Same with social. People are allowed their voice in this world that we live in today. And again, we've all been armed with supercomputers, with, with all these review apps that, that people are more willing to leave those negative reviews and you're not going to get a review taken down very often. So what can you do in this situation? Well, number one is be transparent and respond. I believe that, and I've seen this time and time again, when I go search for a business or I go search for something and I'm looking at the reviews and it's like three and a half star review. I'm like, Ooh, I don't know about that. And I see that that owner has responded personally to every single review. They're saying thank you to the positive reviews. And then they're also going into the negative reviews and they're actually stepping up, they're apologizing and they're putting forth a solution. That's what I want to see as a consumer. So if you have been plagued by some negative reviews, some negative comments, make sure you are engaging. And when you engage, engage respectfully, especially if you are a content creator, um, the trolls will come out of the woodwork and they will talk smack about you. They will make up things, they will put words in your mouth and we often want to let them know how big of a POS we think they are. But if you feed the trolls, it's just going to get worse. That's exactly what they want. So be respectful, be transparent, but engage, engage in a way that moves your case forward. Engage in a way that's transparent. Recently I had a video come out that's doing a bit of trend jacking. They're trying to take advantage of my name and they, they made it sound like I said something I didn't in their title. Well, what did I do? I can't get the video removed, I can't get any of this removed. So I went through and I responded to every single comment in their threat, right? So I have the ability, just like all of the users in the world have the ability to leave comments as well. So every time somebody had a question about it or was like, wow, I didn't know they thought that way about you. I was able to go clarify and say, actually, if you watch my original source, I never said that, right? And it gave me the opportunity to kind of at least refute there where that conversation is taking place. And again, I did so in as respectful of a manner as possible because if I come at them aggressively, the odds are that my comments are going to get deleted and that does not serve a purpose that does not solve a problem. And if you're a local business owner and potential prospects and potential customers see that you're engaging combatively with past customers who had a challenging situation, that's a gigantic turnoff and they will not do business with you. But when they see that you've taken time to respond intelligently, coherently, and you've put forth a solution, a potential solution like, Hey, my name is Miles. I'm the manager down here. If you come in and references, I will take care of you. I'm so sorry to hear about that situation that occurred. I want to learn more because I want to fix this because I'm always engaged in making my business better. Please give me a call, email me or come by the shop so I can make this situation right. When I, as a consumer, see that kind of response from a business owner on a review, I'm much more willing to ignore that one star and two star review because I know that that owner stands behind what they do. This is so powerful. I think it's a very small thing, but I think it means more and more every single day. You know, people are more willing to leave negative reviews and this kind of goes over on the control of, we need to incentivize people and we need to ask people to leave positive reviews. As a business owner, there's ways you can incentivize this. Number one is you can run contests, you can run local contests where the, they will potentially, they can enter their email for an attempt or an opportunity to win a $50 gift card to whatever it is that you do. If you're a restaurant, you know you got about 25% food costs, so there's actually a pretty good deal and odds are 20% or so people won't even claim or use that actual gift card. So you have them give you your, their email address in exchange for the actual opportunity to get to win that thing. Then you email them and let them know once you've added them to the monthly contest, the monthly drawing, you let them know in an email, Hey, I've got you added the monthly drawing. We announce who wins on March 1st or whatever it is, right? Then how was your experience? Did you have a great experience? If so, leave us a quick review and make that a link to your Google review listing, to your trip advisor listing, to whatever listing is most valuable to you. These are ways that you can obtain the email address. You're starting to grow a little bit of an email list and then you're able to prompt people if they had a great op, if they had a great experience to leave that review. If anything went wrong, you can add this below in your email. If anything went wrong or you need help rectifying any situation, just reply. I'm here to help. This way you might be able to get them to reply to you instead of going and burning you on the review site and you might be just giving them that nudge to go add that five star review, uh, helping you collect more reviews. People really do need to be prompted to leave the positive reviews. We'll walk out of a store, we'll walk out of a restaurant, think, man, that was the best. That was awesome. But we don't necessarily always think I'm going to go leave them a positive review unless it was over the top, a little bit of coaxing. Even if the server, as they drop off the credit card and the bill says, you know, we really, really value your opinion and if you had a good experience, I'd love for you to go leave us a quick review on Google. It takes 60 seconds. That'd be awesome. You can even print out your Google review. You can make a short link, a bitly link to your Google review page, uh, and you can put that on the receipt as well. There's a lot of little hacks. You just got to start to think a little bit more consciously of how can you within the way your business works, right? That printed out receipt is something that you receive. Can you go in and customize a couple of lines on that through your POS so every receipt you hand out actually prompts people to go leave a positive review and it gives them instructions on how to handle negative issues, right? If you have any questions or need support, email us here. If you had a great experience, go to google.com forward slash us in order to leave us a positive review. We appreciate your business. Those little notes done consistently over long periods of time can create very, very, very positive results. Um, all in all, you can't stop the reviews. Web 2.0, the web 2.0 revolution that happened many years ago was essentially the technology that allowed you and me to go leave comments on demand, show them up on third party websites. Before that it was all static. Everyone who sold something, they were able to tell you the story they wanted to tell you and that's it. We consumers did not have the ability to go engage and share our thoughts without creating an entire website around it today. The comments, the reviews, all of these kind of technologies are in place mixed with the cell phone revolution. Now we have the ability to go engage in a massive way and that for some businesses is causing all kinds of problems and if you ignore it, those problems are going to compound and more and more every single day. The businesses that have the four and a half, 4.8 five star reviews are getting more customers walking in their doors than the businesses that have the two and three star reviews. I believe it was PT Barnum who has that kind of old quote of all presses, good press. I'm not buying it. I'm not buying it, but you can't control everything. If you've written a book as an author on Amazon reviews on your Kindle reviews, some people are just going to trash your book. If you go look at the best selling books of all time, go look at the Harry Potter CD or series of books. There's just people who hate it. There's one star reviews even for great books, so it's going to happen, but see where can you engage? How can you engage in a way that's transparent, that's authentic, that's honest, and helps move things forward? And if anyone's had a problem and they're, they're flaming you in the reviews because of an issue, then you really need to make sure that you're presenting an opportunity and a path to rectify their solution inside of those review sites because that's going to help you recover from that negative kind of issue. If you've got a bunch of negative press showing up on the first page of Google or if people are just talking smack about you on YouTube and you search for your name or your brand and there's more bad phrases than good ones, you need to begin creating the content and optimizing the content in a way that's going to outrank them. So you might need to go claim a medium account and write a bunch of medium posts about who is Myles Beckler if I wanted to really take over farther on my name. So I've got the Myles Beckler medium account and then I do a Myles Beckler post on medium that has a much higher likelihood of ranking above some random third party person who just starts one account one day to put out some, some spammy posts there. It's these kinds of things. You actually need to create more positive, higher ranking content in order to push down off the first page. Any negative press that's on the first page. So that's ultimately what you do. So if in the number four and number five spot there's negative press about you, you need to go create six or seven new posts and new kind of, they could be platforms, they could be accounts on social platforms. You need to create the pieces of content and the web properties that are going to outrank those two negative press items. So you push them down onto the second page and you keep pushing them down until they're on the third page and the fourth page. And by the time they hit the third page, they're pretty much in, in internet oblivion because very few people go beyond page two of Google. Most people don't even hit page two of Google. So you physically have to push them down by doing more SEO on more properties that you own and control, whether it's on your blog, your YouTube channel, or you're going out to medium to Quora to these other platforms, you're getting Twitter accounts and you're actually actively creating more properties that will rank above those. That's really the game. I hope all is well. If you have questions about the process, let me know in the comments below. I thank you very much for your time. It's really key to think about this before, but if you're at a point where you're having a crisis, if you need some help, let me know. I can possibly help a little bit, but kind of laid out the whole plan here for you. So just move forward. Remember, transparency is the power in this age. Be available to communicate with those people who are talking about you. Use the tools like a social mention.com and Google alerts so you get notified and so you can keep a tabs on what's going on and then be a real person. Engage. Always be there to help. Having great customer service is something we need to do in the store, but it's something we need to do on the review sites as well. And if you have low reviews, encourage people to leave you positive reviews and going in and replying to those low reviews can actually help you kind of at least save your brand. Even though those review numbers are low. When I see that you've responded, you've engaged, you put a path to rectify the situation there. You make me more confident as a potential consumer to show up to your store because I know you stand behind what you do. That's it. Thanks again for your time. I'll see you next video. Cheers.