No matter how hard you try to keep your brand in a positive light online, there will still be negative reviews; how you manage these comments could make or mar your business. It takes years to build up a brand reputation and only a moment to bring everything down to earth.
Online Reputation Management (ORM) is the process of measuring and altering a brand’s perceptions for the company’s benefit. Social media has made interactions easy among a diverse group of people, so much information is being shared daily across all social media platforms, and these interactions could include a positive or negative comment about your brand, which could damage your reputation.
For you to know whenever a negative comment or review is made concerning your brand online means you are always alert and tracking everything concerning your brand. You’ve done good by that, but how do you manage negative reviews?
How to Manage Negative Reviews
This critical process requires a high level of professionalism to get through this successfully.
Quick Response
This is very important, and you have to be able to respond quickly as possible to negative comments as things like this spread quickly. Let’s take Twitter, for example, billions of tweets are being sent daily, and it takes only some minutes for a tweet to go viral. Thousands of people can retweet a tweet tweeted by someone on Twitter, and before you know it, the damage is done already. Whoever is in charge of managing your brand online should be able to respond to comments as quickly as possible.
Do Not Delete Comments
One of the greatest mistakes a social media manager can make is deleting a negative comment. Deleting negative comments sends out a wrong signal that you do not care about whatever happens to your customers or consumers concerning your brand. When a customer comes to your page and drops a negative comment, he/she hopes you will address the issue. What if you delete the comment, the consumer goes to another platform to finish you, and the comment goes viral without you knowing in time? The damage would have been done.
Be Professional
When replying to negative comments, stay professional as much as possible, and address all issues with utmost maturity no matter how hurtful or damaging the comment is. Let me cite an example; I work as a digital marketing professional with one of the OEMs in Nigeria, a big brand. One day I checked my Google alerts, and I saw a review article on one of the products we recently launched. The article, which was published by one of the top blogs in the country, looked damaging; we sensed sabotage. My boss and I looked through it and decided the best course of action was to send an e-mail to these guys telling them to tone down or delete the article entirely and write another without any prejudice. The writer was bitter about something that had happened before, but he eventually edited the article to one that wouldn’t cause damage to the recently launched product.
Move Offline
Sometimes you have to take matters offline, like personally calling the aggrieved customer to apologize and providing a solution. The customer would be happy.
