Protecting the online reputation of your Detroit Small Business does not need to be difficult or expensive.

Here is one way to get started for no cost.

Do you know what your customers and competitors are saying about you online?

As business owners, we are concerned when a customer or client has a bad experience with our brand. If the customer lets us know, we do our best to correct it and turn them into a loyal supporter. But often, the customer goes away disappointed or worse, they write about their bad experience online. Bad press can be extremely difficult to deal with if you know about it. It’s even harder to deal with if you don’t know about it. So, knowing what people are saying and where is the fist step to protecting your reputation. Fortunately, getting started is easy with this one suggestion.

Mention.com is an online service that monitors online media for any mentions of your product or business. A starter account is free and will let you set up a few basic searches and see what people are saying. Of course, there are a number of online reputation management companies and that may be a more practical solution, as your business grows. But here at SixFootLever.com we are about teaching small to mid-sized businesses how they can get measurable improvements, using technology tools and their own employees.

You can also use Mention’s services to reply to online mentions, through your social accounts. After you’ve got the basics down, try putting in your competitor’s information and see what others are saying about them. If you see a question about their product that is going unanswered, jump in and try to answer. It’s a great way to show off your superior customer service! Be polite and never speak ill of your competitors, just do a better job of answering their customer’s questions.

So give Mention.com a try and see if you don’t learn something about how your customers perceive your product or business. We have no affiliation with Mention.com, we just think that they have a great service that can be learned in about 10 min. It’s one of the first tools we show our clients, at SixFootLever!

Note: you may discover that some of your “mentions” are random clips of text, from your own web page. You can ignore those, as they are likely due to first generation internet marketers “spinning articles” or creating link farms. If the postings mention you but do not appear to make any sense, don’t worry about it. At least for now. Maybe we’ll talk about that in an upcoming post.

Check out our LinkedIn post about using Mention.com to protect your online reputation.  You can learn it in 10 min and it’s FREE to get started!

This article originally appeared on Darren Dawes’ LinkedIn page:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/1-thing-you-can-do-right-now-protect-your-online-reputation-dawes

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