Some things never change. And one of them is the importance of good worth of mouth advertising. A good reputation amongst your pool of consumers can make the difference in profitability or the poorhouse.

In a pre-internet world, a bad review or experience could take a while to make the rounds before it had any real effect. However these days, we are blessed with the ability to share our views and complaints instantly, and that’s why you need to be extremely proactive when it comes to managing your online reputation. One bad review mishandled can have a magnified effect that can a long time to reverse, if it can be at all.

A look at the numbers…

Don’t think it’s all that important? Let’s take a quick look at the numbers.

Here are some sobering statistics:

72 percent of consumers report that they regularly investigate companies through social channels before making purchases (Cone Communications)
59 percent will use social media sites to air their frustrations about your customer service (Cone Communications)
89 percent of consumers are of the belief that these online channels are trustworthy sources (Society for Communications Research)
80 percent changed their minds about purchasing after reading a negative comment or review (Society for Communications Research)

Now that we have your attention as to how bad online reviews can hurt your business, let’s look at 3 ways to head them off at the pass!

Make stellar customer service a priority

Probably the most important thing you can do to make a difference is to take customer service very seriously. You may think you do that, but in a world where a negative review can be shared thousands of times in a few hours, taking a week or so to try and rectify the problem could be the death knell you hear ringing. Contact the customer, privately if possible, (most review channels like Yelp have this facility) and subjugate your ego. The customer is always right, especially when they can do so much harm.

Encourage and reward positive reviews

You can’t please all the people all the time, and one of the best ways to help negate the effect of the occasional poor review is by encouraging and rewarding good reviews from your happy customers. This has several benefits, among them creating a positive culture surrounding your online persona, as well as by pushing the negative reviews further down the search results, where they most likely won’t be seen. You might even go so far as to social bookmark positive reviews, giving them links that the negative reviews won’t have.

Respond publicly

If you’ve done all you can do and the customer still won’t amend their review, you can make a public entry to state your side. Use this wisely, and only to present the facts. Don’t flame, and don’t use this as a way to appear as anything but humble. Just the facts, Ma’am. Getting defensive and unprofessional will only make the situation far worse.

Make it your business to deal with your online reputation just as diligently as you would any other aspect of your business. It’s that important!

Thought about Using Vine for Short, Sharable Videos?

If you haven’t thought of employing Vine videos in your small business, you may want to seriously consider it. You probably have what you need to get this done in your pocket. Using the Vine app on your smartphone, you are able to create and upload these short, sharable videos to Twitter as fast as you create them.

So what is Vine?

Well, in case you missed the video, Vine is an innovative video sharing platform on Twitter that enables you to create and upload 6-second videos to Twitter. So you may be thinking, how exactly can a 6-second video help my business? Well, look at some of the ways these companies RedVines, Urban Outfitters and Nintendo made it work for them!

These companies found a way for videos to help further their brand, promote their products and services, and promote their businesses in different ways. They know that this service, that is trending very hot right now, can do for them. One of the major attractions of a service like Vine is that getting your content in front of people is getting more and more difficult as people are less willing to take the time to read. People are less willing to read, so a 6-second video is exactly what the doctor ordered, and you’d be surprised at a few of the ways people are using Vine. As reported by Biznology.com, businesses are making use of them to introduce new employees, announce events, give an insider’s look into the business, and even creating short commercials to display their latest product or service.

Publiseek.com offers even more innovative ways to use Vine. Some of these include:

• Recording live customer reactions and testimonials
• Recording short introductions from your company principals
• Real estate professionals have found Vine useful to present virtual tours of new listings
• Restaurants are broadcasting daily specials. Picture a scrumptious plate overlaid with the link, “Click to Smell”, that takes them to the reservation desk. Lots of possibilities here!
• Decorators and designers are employing Vine to display before and after pics

The possibilities are just about endless, and this is something that can be done very quickly and make a difference in as little as a day. Look into Vine today!

Need an Email Marketing Application? – Here’s How to Choose

Identifying which email marketing application to get is a significant part of your business foundation. You need to use a service that will not just deliver your emails promptly and dependably, but will also contain the tools needed for you to analyze, track and properly market to your lists. You’ll want to make sure your service covers the basics like, sending and scheduling emails, allow you to use both plain text and html, tracking, analytics, form building and more. That said, whom to choose? There are many fine services, each a bit different to pick from. Listed below are five of the most popular ones used by online marketers, and why that is.

5 Top email marketing applications

• AWeber – AWeber has gained a reputation as one of the best, due in large part to best deliverability in the business. They also have quite explicit policies regarding the makeup of your lists. No adding lists you’ve purchased or otherwise bumped into into their system; they have to be very clean. They stress double-optin, and even though you can do single optin, you have to jump through some hoops to make it happen. They also have a user friendly interface, good reporting, and their forms builder is easy to use. Prices start at $19 a month.
• GetResponse – This service is the favorite among quite a few affiliate marketers, being that they are very friendly towards them. Supplying a good form builder, GetResponse is a terrific option to start. They offer a 30-day free trial, and prices start at $17 after that. (Good deals are available!)
• MailChimp – An awesome spot for beginning email marketers, they have a free option (albeit with no autoresponders) and are quite simple to use. They also have good analytics, including tweet trends, goal tracking, revenue charts and social analytics, good deliverability, and easily integrate with your social media accounts. Their builder is sub-standard, but all things considered, MailChimp may be the best value for your money.
• iContact – For people who are into easy to use interfaces, iContact might be your best choice. In addition they are also attractively priced, starting at around $10 a month. iContact integrates with a lot of other services as well, such as SalesForce, Analytics and more. One bad thing is they offer no customer service on the weekends.
• Constant Contact – ConstantContact is more than an email service provider. They offer a number of other services, such as app and integrations to enable you to sync up other services, a deal application (think Groupon) and will offer you a free trial. The one thing we don’t like is they are not that great in deliverability, and the site is difficult to navigate.

Your email marketing service can be one of your most lethal weapons in your marketing arsenal. Choose wisely!

As business moves more and more in your local direction, you will want to make sure that you’re doing all that you can to ensure that not only is your business being found locally, but that you’re winning the space!

Here are 5 great tips to help get your location based marketing on track!

Optimize and complete your listings – According to Yext, businesses are losing out to the tune of some $10.3 billion dollars a year as a result of missing or sketchy listings. This one should be a no brainer. Take the small amount of time it takes to get your business listed correctly on sites like Google+ Local, Foursquare, Yelp, Facebook, MapQuest and others you are using. Not only does this ensure you’ll show up in local search, but the correct images, addresses, phone numbers and additional information can result in actual money coming in. Small price to pay!

Ask for and reward reviews – Anyone that loves your products or services and is willing to express that to you should be asked to do a review. Certainly regular customers will have no problem with this, but even first-timers can be persuaded to do so, particularly if you grease the wheels a bit with a reward of some sort. Sometimes this can be as simple as a link back, a shoutout, or a coupon.

Incentivize your local business – Incentives have become expected when it comes to location based marketing. The competition is stiff, and it is incumbent upon you to provide a reason for customers to come back again and again, and to refer others to do the same.

Coupons and geo-based local apps – According to Entrepreneur, “location-based marketing works in two directions. One, you can PUSH ads out to people based on their location. Are they in the same vicinity as your retail stores? That can help you avoid wasting money. Two, you can PULL people in who are in discovery mode. The Blue Fog Market is a new deli around the corner from my office. When I looked for a place to eat nearby, Yelp showed me they had a deal for a free cup of Blue Bottle Coffee with purchase when I “check in.”

Coupon apps are still viable, and people will use them to find deals in your local area! There are many such apps and companies out there, and you’re not limited to Groupon and Living Social.

Being responsive – Understanding that engaging and being responsive to customer and prospects needs and concerns via social media or through email or a website review is key to your success with location based marketing. This sword cuts both ways, so not only should you be mindful of how you reply, but how fast. Concerns left stewing for days or weeks can become infected, and that will not be good for the health of your business!

Location-based marketing is a great way to add value to people and money to your bottom line. Start winning your local area today!

Better for Marketers? Facebook or Twitter?

Twitter recently announced that its paid ad platform is now open to any who would like to use it. In testing for over a year, Twitter has been evaluating user feedback and refining Twitter ads. The most noticeable difference in this ad platform vs. Facebook’s is that you are only charged when anyone follows your promoted account from your ad, or someone retweets, replies, favorites or clicks on your promoted tweets. So now that Twitter has ads, does it qualify as a valid alternative to Facebook? Who wins this battle?

The Ultimate Social Media Smackdown: Facebook vs. Twitter!

Back in the day, (a couple of years ago) this would have been no contest. Now – not so sure who wins. To be sure, there are many variables that will factor into who takes home the crown. I suspect that the answer in fact is probably, it depends. Facebook has long been the undisputed King of social media, considering the practical advantages it had. The first huge network to make use of personal and business pages, along with an ad platform that for people who understand how to use it, that rivals anything Google aspires to.

The Case for Facebook

Besides the obvious business pages that are getting more and more useful, the reach of its network is definitely astounding. With more than a billion users, Facebook has evolved into a lot more than a place where one can get together with old school chums. Now, with well-oiled Facebook Pages, relevant groups and an extremely robust ad platform, you have most everything you could desire in a social media outlet.

Twitter’s Up

Twitter has the advantage of immediacy, and has a number of extremely useful applications, such as advanced search for leads, the ability to use embedded Tweets as testimonials, and it’s a wonderful platform for customer service. Inspite of the obvious differences in the length of the information you can share, Twitter’s speed and agility have definitely brought it onto the playing field with Facebook.

Now it’s just a matter of finding where your market is, (socially) and deciding which (if not both) are the best fit for your business!