Our business has used reputation management consultants for a couple of years now and we took this step after a friend and fellow business owner of mine had his company’s reputation absolutely destroyed in a single moment. That served as a cautionary tale for me and the very next week I got in touch with a rep management team to not only help us improve our online reputation, but also to ensure that nothing like that could ever happen to us, or that if it did we would be able to take swift action.
Online reputations are everything for businesses these days, no matter what kind of business you run, and here is just how easy it could be for you to lose it all.
Poorly Timed Tweet
I won’t go into the details of what was said or done but my friend went out for a meal one night and enjoyed a couple of glasses of vino, upon returning home he like and shared what he thought was a humorous meme, which admittedly was pretty close to the bone. The issue that my buddy had however, was that he thought he was on his personal social media account, when he was actually on the business page, he went to sleep expecting everything to be fine, and woke up to a firestorm. One mistake and bang, reputation destroyed.
Disgruntled
I heard another story about how a restaurant close to where I live fired a waiter after he was repeatedly late, and the waiter really took umbrage to what happened and began an online campaign to smear the name of the restaurant. This kid was leaving scathing reviews, he was badmouthing them on social media and he continuously wrote content across the internet with the sole purpose of bring their reputation down. This is a scary prospect and yet another reason why I am more than happy to have rep management teams working on our online reputation.
Bad Night
I can remember around 8 years ago, pre-internet that we had 2 waiters call in sick, a chef who had a family emergency and to say that we were thin on the ground is an understatement. In truth we shouldn’t have opened the restaurant that night but we did anyway and it was a horror show. I faced an almighty backlash and eventually, through 100 free meals and apologies, we managed to get our customers back on side. Now if that same thing had happened today, we would have been placed over the coals on the review sites and on social media and our online reputation would have been completely and utterly destroyed. This is how easy this can happen in the modern world, one bad day or night and that could be it.
If you run a business then I would urge you to consider using a rep management firm to help you stay protected.