9 Tips For Managing Your Business’ Online Reputation

Internet usage is at an all-time high: the average American spends 30 hours online every week. (For Millennials, the average is 40 hours!) Another key data point? More than half of mobile-web users interact with companies on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Do you know what people are saying about your brand on the web?

Because the internet offers so many chances for brand interaction, reputation management is more important than ever before. Here are nine best practices for monitoring and managing your business’ online reputation:

1. Optimize your website for Google search
You want Google to treat your website as the ultimate authority on your product (and, ideally, on the market segment in which you compete). Why? If Google ranks your site favorably, it will appear at or near the top of a search for your company name and terms specific to your industry.

KissMetrics provides a great guide on getting your website indexed by Google.

2. Establish a strong social media presence
By creating a Facebook page, Twitter profile and blog – and posting relevant content to those channels – you will both improve your search-engine rankings and improve how you interact with customers and prospects.

The RingCentral Social Team has written about social-media tips and tricks in the past, so for reference, check out the RingCentral Connect archive.

3. Set up Google alerts
There are a bevy of expensive tools available to monitor your online presence, but you don’t need to spend a lot to see what people are saying about you across the web. We use Google alerts to let us know when the term “RingCentral” is mentioned – they show up every day in a short email.

Here’s what the notification looks like:

4. Monitor social networks and reply promptly
The simple fact is, people want companies to be available on social networks. According to Arnold Worldwide, close to 60 percent of consumers expect brands to respond to their social-media comments and queries.

It’s generally good to aim for a social response of no more than an hour or two. (Most businesses aren’t nearly this vigilant, so you can really stand out by striving to be responsive!)

5. Respond to reviews and comments
The last time you bought something online, did you read any reviews before clicking “Confirm Purchase”? You probably did! Product reviews are invaluable when you’re shopping online, and they can be hugely valuable to companies, too.

Not only can reviews help a business learn what people do and don’t like about its offerings – they offer an opportunity for the business to turn unsatisfied customers into raving fans.

6. Turn frowns upside down
Segueing from tip number five: the holy grail of customer support is satisfying an unhappy customer. If you can make this happen on the web, so much the better: successfully turning a negative experience around will leave evidence for customers and prospects to see. That, in turn, will help you demonstrate that you care about doing right by your customers.

7. Blog communications
Social networks are great for pushing out short communiques and providing customer support. For “long-form” communications, though – things like new-product announcements or market forecasts – a blog is ideal.

You shouldn’t expect your business blog to succeed beyond measure, or yourself to become the next Tim Ferriss. Rather, look at blogging as a way to share inside information on your company and engage with your most enthusiastic fans. It’s well worth the effort.

8. Ask happy customers to post reviews
It’s bad form to incent positive reviews with gifts or in-kind compensation. But there’s nothing wrong with simply suggesting that your happy customers say something nice about you on sites like Yelp, LinkedIn or Google Places. The worst that can happen is that they’ll refuse.

9. Feature positive reviews on your website/blog
If you have some positive reviews in hand, great work. They’re a marketing asset as strong (or stronger!) than anything else (whitepapers, datasheets, etc.) you may have put together. Why? Two words: social proof. We’re wired to look favorably on things other people view favorably – restaurants, cars, clothes or just about anything else.

Plus, third-party reviews’ objectivity is inherently valuable. When we say we have a great phone system, you may think, “Of course they’re going to say that.” But when an outlet like PC Magazine awards RingCentral Office an Editors’ Choice award – well, it means a little more coming from them.

Hope these tips are helpful. Let us know if you have any more to share!

Featured photo courtesy of: SalFalko via photopin cc.

How To Add Instagram Images to WordPress

We live in a visual era where people are driven by photos. Majority of marketers understand that photos can make or break a marketing campaign. Case in point, two of the fastest growing social networks today are Pinterest and Instagram, both of which thrive off of the concept of sharing images. Instagram’s growing popularity has made it one of the must-have apps for iOS and Android phones. However, until recently users were not able to embed their Instagram photos into blog posts. Well fret no more savvy social picture enthusiasts because WordPress recently announced that you can now embed your carefully filtered and curated images directly into your blog! Talk about great timing too because just yesterday Entrepreneur magazine announced the top five ways in which Instagram can boost your marketing plan.

Now for the how-to, first what you need to know is that this works best with images you have tweeted out because you need to access the image URL. For anyone familiar with Instagram, you know that it is a strictly phone based app, with very little web presence. So even if you go to intagram.com, and log in to your account, you can not access your photo stream. So, from your Twitter profile page you can see your most recent images, including the ones you shared via Instagram.

Most recent images in Twitter feed.

Next, select the image you wish to embed into your blog post. Your view will now look like the one below.

Image preview in Twitter browser.

Please note you do not want to use the Twitter URL that appears at the top of your web browser — this URL will direct you to Twitter, and not Instagram. Instead you want to click on the photo, and your picture will open in a new window or tab. See the below image;, this URL will now link back to Instagram.

This is the Instagram URL needed to embed the image into WordPress blog post.

Take this URL and copy it into your blog post where you want the Instagram image to appear. Remember to make sure that the URL is on its own line within the post.

Instagram URL inserted into blog post.

I would now highly advise that you click to “Save Draft”. Then hit “Preview”, the image will now appear in you blog post as shown below.

Instagram image embedded into published blog post (on “preview” mode).

If for any reason the image is NOT showing in your “Preview mode” view, and you only see the Instagram URL there (like in the below image), don’t fret because not all hope is lost!

Only URL showing in “Preview mode”, NOT the Instagram image.

You will simply then need to go back to your draft blog post. First, delete the URL from the “Visual” view. Then (while still in draft mode) change your WordPress screen view from “Visual” to “Text” (reference image below).

Switching draft view of your blog post.

Once you are in “Text” view mode, then add the Instagram URL where you wan the image to appear in your blog post. Remember the URL must still be on its own line (as shown above). Again, you will need to “Save Draft” and then press “Preview”. Your image will now appear directly embedded into your blog post “Preview mode” view (as you can clearly see below).

Oh, and that’s me and Mona (most talented little show dog there ever was)!

Any questions? Or need more clarification? Comment below, and I will get back to you.