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A guest post by Damian Rollison, Moon Valley Software.

Introduction

Though online reputation management for small businesses is a relatively new idea, reputation management as a service has a longer history. The space has been around for several years, focusing primarily on individuals and corporations. Promoting good publicity and managing bad publicity have been the goals, as illustrated by the title of Ronald Alsop’s 2004 book, The 18 Immutable Laws of Corporate Reputation: Creating, Protecting, and Repairing Your Most Valuable Asset.

In the field of online reputation management, companies such as Reputation Defender and Bullsai specialize in helping individuals and corporations remove unwanted information from the web. They claim to push sites down in search rankings when they contain negative comments about you or your brand, and promote positive results such as press releases and profiles of company leaders. For these providers, reputation management could be considered a form of public relations consulting.

Companies like Trackur and BrandsEye, on the other hand, focus on gathering mentions of your company, your name, and other keywords on blogs, social networks, and news sites. Monitoring applications like Monitter do the same thing for Twitter. These approaches view reputation management as a kind of modern clipping service.

Reputation Management for the Small Business
Both perspectives — the public relations consultant and the clipping service — are valid to some extent for the small business. Other elements, such as management of business listings, are clearly important for SMBs where they would not be relevant for corporations. Despite these differences, our key insight has been that public perception is just as important for small businesses as for corporations, even if it happens on a smaller scale.

Overall, small businesses are turning to online marketing in droves. With 91% of consumers reporting that they do online research before making a purchase decision, small businesses can’t afford to be invisible in local search results.

Perhaps even more importantly, online communication is fundamentally different from traditional media, because access to publication is now so widely distributed. In other words, anyone can post anything anywhere at any time, and the business owner, rather than purchasing space in the newspaper or yellow pages, must compete for attention with all of these voices.

Moreover, some of those voices are your customers. What are they saying about you? What impression of your business is being created among potential customers who want to learn more about you online? What can you do about it?

Of course, it isn’t just other people’s comments that contribute to online reputation. The business itself has the ability to create a positive impression by pushing out a consistent and compelling message to multiple contact points. The business website is, of course, a primary contact point for communicating a message that customers will respond to. It isn’t the only place, however, where people are finding out about you.

Many small business owners are slowly becoming aware of the prevalence of online directories with strong search rankings. See for yourself: search Google for sushi in San Francisco — or, since Google now detects your IP address, just type “sushi” and you’ll see local results for your area. Sites such as Google Maps (featuring the so-called “Seven Pack”), Gayot, Yelp, Citysearch, and Yahoo! Local are among the most prominent results in this type of search. Many of these sites already contain listings for your business — are you aware of them? Is the information correct and up to date? Have you missed an opportunity to tell customers more about your business or add a link to your website?

Common features of reputation management
At Moon Valley, we’ve been gathering business data online for a long time and we think we have a pretty good perspective on the local search landscape. At the same time, we recognize that many of the ideas we’ll cover in this section are simply in the air these days. We’re at a stage in the development of reputation management where standard practices are beginning to emerge. Fundamentally, it comes down to the two areas we’ve been discussing: reputation and visibility.

Here’s a detailed breakdown of the five most important features a reputation management service for the small business should offer.

1. Listings management
Business owners need to know where their listings are appearing online. Rather than being subjected to the laborious process of tracking down listings manually, the business owner should have access to a service or tool that collects and assesses listing information. A reputation management service should find listings for your business in local search sites, internet yellow pages, social networking sites, regional sites, directory assistance sites, mobile apps, category-specific sites (like Gayot for restaurants and travel), and regional sites (the websites of local newspapers, TV stations, and the like). All of these sites are likely to publish marketplace pages, directories, or business profile pages, and all of them may be publicizing information about your business with or without your knowledge.

The ideal reputation management service won’t just report on your listings, but will actually help you take control of them, preferably working to submit your listings where they don’t yet exist, fix them when they are incorrect, and augment them when they’re incomplete. These activities should be focused on the sites that are most prominent for your business.

2. Tracking mentions and reviews
Many of the directory listings described above could include ratings, reviews, or both. If consumers have rated your business online, these ratings can be very useful in providing a snapshot of consumer sentiment about your business. Reviews, of course, have become one of the most trusted sources of online information about a business, with 57% of consumers in a recent survey reporting that they trust customer reviews and use them as a form of research before making a purchase decision. Awareness of reviews on prominent sites is an essential component of reputation management.

Outside the world of business listings, there may be mentions of your business in any number of locations, such as Twitter, blogs, news sites, forums, and the like. An effective reputation management service will track ratings, reviews, and mentions, offering statistics as well as content from multiple sources, and providing opportunities to respond to negative reviews and to repurpose positive mentions and reviews as testimonials.

3. Analyzing search engine results
Sushi in San Francisco is not the same as barbecue in Biloxi or attorneys in Anchorage. Searching for sushi in San Francisco pointed us to Gayot, Yelp, Citysearch, and Yahoo! Local. For barbecue in Biloxi, Google offers sites like Yellowbook, Urban Spoon, American Towns, and Chowbaby, none of which were prominent for sushi in San Francisco. For attorneys in Anchorage, the sites that matter most are Superpages, Findlaw, Yellowpages.com, and AttorneyLocate — again, a completely different list. Recognizing this variability, an effective reputation management service shouldn’t provide a cookie cutter solution. Rather, it should take into account the relevance of findings by business category and location. Additionally, other search engines like Bing will have results that differ from Google’s, so multiple search engines should be factored in as well.

4. Business profiles and syndication
The opportunity to push listing data out to directory sites is something many business owners are probably not aware of. In most cases, sites offer businesses the opportunity to claim or create a listing at no cost. Often these listings can include rich information, such as a link to the business website, a list of products and services, or a descriptive paragraph about the business. When a reputation management service opts to take action to improve the visibility of a business, it should not miss the opportunity to collect as much profile information as possible and distribute that information as widely as possible. Doing so not only improves visibility, but also boosts reputation — taking charge of your business listings means crafting a compelling message and pushing that message to multiple contact points, thereby controlling the impression you’ll make when people search for your business online.

By contrast, some reputation management companies such as CloudProfile actually host the business profile rather than distributing it, effectively meaning that such companies are entering into competition with directory sites for search traffic. Whether connecting to or competing with directories, the main point is to be as visible as possible with your message.

5. Scoring your reputation
The touch points of importance for reputation management — search results, listings, ratings, reviews, and mentions — are all at play today whether or not we are tracking them. Tracking those elements is valuable, in part, because we can produce metrics that tell us where we are, where we’re headed, and how we measure up. As a tool or service pulls together all prominent data points into a report, it’s important to assess those elements on a common scale, and offer a system of scoring or grading that helps to quantify depth and breadth of presence and strength of reputation.

Why are such metrics important? Three reasons. First, a score tells you how your business is doing today. Second, scoring gives you meaningful points of reference for tracking improvement over time. Third, your score and the results that contribute to it can be measured against another business, whether it be one of your competitors or an online marketing success you would hope to model yourself after. The means and method of scoring may differ from one service to another, but the importance of useful metrics is a constant.

Summary
For a reputation management service to be successful, it must not be perfunctory in its approach to any of these elements. Results must be detailed and accurate, and they must be presented in a clear and useful manner. Actions taken to improve online reputation must be ethical as well as thorough. Finally, as Meyer Feldberg, Dean Emeritus of the Columbia Business School, has said, “Building and sustaining a reputation is a marathon and not a sprint.” Firms offering reputation management services must be committed to a long-term relationship with the small business owner, must adapt to changes in public perception of the business as well as changes in the local search landscape, and must be persistent in their efforts to represent each business in a positive light.

Damian Rollison is a member of Dream Local’s advisory board and Director of  Research & Development for Moon Valley Software. You can read this post and his many other views on reputation management at myrepman.blogspot.com