Main Reasons Every Small Company Must Perform Online Reputation Management

Among the greatest mistakes any small business owner will make is to believe they do not need to take part in online reputation management, just because they run a small business.Nothing could possibly be more from the truth.In fact, the very fact that you run a small business helps it be even more imperative to manage your online brand image for two reasons:1. Customer recommendations will be the center of all small businesses2. You don't have the luxury of a large marketing budget to control negative reviews or restore a ruined reputation like a business can.Let us look at the first three reasons why online reputation management issues to small business owners:* ONLINE SEARCHThe huge growth in online media and the rapid fall in offline media has made it essential for small and large businesses likewise to change direction and focus on their online image.More and more people the world over look for information on just about everything from the web and this applies to information about your local business.Your target audience is more apt to look for your business online through a, Yahoo or Bing search rather than leafing through a Pages Directory book.* SPEEDThe speed at which online media functions can make or break your business in a matter of minutes or hours.A viral twitter, video, blog article or status upgrade can be viewed by hundreds if not millions of people in an amount of a morning making a much more powerful influence in a time than any traditional offline media.Even a local news story can be broadcast across the nation with a video.If the news story was positive, a business can get a of positive PR and increased sales, but if it was negative, it can literally ruin the business.Plus we all know that bad news spreads quicker than great news.* EQUAL OPPORTUNITYOnline media is typically an equal playing ground for both small and large businesses, so any business no matter its size can get exposure, criticism and honors on the internet.This means that even small businesses can't afford to overlook online reputation management because the internet has made the world so much of a smaller place.The stress placed on local search by dominant web participants such as Google, Facebook, Yelp and the others, has provided more power and opportunity for small businesses to grow their reputation online.Yet this increased awareness has also made it essential for any small business to know how to manage the big public exposure and scrutiny that's part of the package.Here are three more reasons why small business owners must give consideration to their online reputation.* ECOMMERCEEcommerce has made it so much easier for small business to grow beyond their village or city place to nationwide or even international market.Online shopping carts and payment processors have made this all possible, indicating that as a small business engaged in ecommerce, controlling your online reputation is essential to protect your online sales.Negative reviews about your products, companies and customer care can harm your online sales, which can be definitely be damaging if your small business makes more income from ecommerce than in-store sales.In improvement, when you consider how particular neighborhoods, towns and states have had weak growth in the recent economic decline, ecommerce can be the center of a business trying to survive yelp negative reviews.* SOCIAL PROOFOne of the biggest social phenomenons of ecommerce is social proof.Do you know that an overwhelming majority of viewers do not trust advertisements but rather trust endorsements and reviews from people in their social systems or from normal people like themselves?This is what makes consumer review sites so common and how it's so easy to convince a new buyer to do business with you once they've read positive reviews about your company.Therefore in order to protect your online reputation, it's important to know what people are saying about your business because this is the single most important affecting power behind a clients purchasing decision.* ONLINE SEOWhat many business owners fail to understand is how permanent a footprint bad promotion leaves on the web.Once content has been released on a site, indexed by the search engines and shows up in the search results, it is extremely difficult to have that content removed.It is not as easy as telling Google to remove the bad page because they have no power to do that.It often involves calling the webmaster of the blog or site where the content was submitted and trying to convince them to remove the content, make the page unseen to search engines or to remove the page.This is often very difficult as they've property rights over the site.Even if you resort to legal methods and they in the course of time remove the content, it is nevertheless difficult for that content to get entirely off the internet radar specially if the content was widely distributed or went viral.Online content is certainly very difficult and anything that occurred many years ago can many years to come.