Mobile Reputation Management

Mobile marketing discussions often center around the best techniques to get your message to the widest possible audience, with less attention paid to the diverse methods to pull in customers. If you’re always pushing out your message or aggressively self-marketing without paying attention to the needs or wants of your customers or target population, your reputation will show it. Just like a friend who always turns the conversation around to her, the behavior gets old quickly. If you suspect your marketing strategy needs some help opening up to your customers’ perspective, you may be able to learn some lessons from reputation management.

What is reputation management?

Reputation management began as a PR term for helping turn around a lukewarm or outright negative public perception of a company or brand by soliciting good reviews. While some companies may practice this after-the-fact type of management, it’s more effective to monitor your brand on a regular basis and respond to complaints or questions as they arise. Measures used to do this may include:

• Hiring and training caring customer service representatives who can respond to customer needs as they arise
• Monitoring review sites, blogs, Twitter and other social platforms to see what customers are saying and then interacting with customers
• Alerting customers to certain situations, such as a sale, shipping notification or new product, via text message, email or other method of their choosing
• Offer small perks to customers who tweet with your brand hashtag, check in on Foursquare or perform other social functions that get the word out about your product or service
• Use SEO to make website materials more transparent and easier to find so customers can locate the information they need when they need it
• Use fleet tracking software to monitor the specific location of goods or services and update clients so they know when and where their orders are

Reputation management in the digital age

Try these examples to get started with reputation management for the mobile age:

• Show off your brand: Corinthia Hotels is curating guest-produced tweets about and photos of their properties and showing them off on Pinterest, Facebook and other social networking sites. Not only is this rewarding for guests who get to see their photos shared and enjoyed, but the hotels get to show off their amenities and proactively address any negative concerns shared via photo.
• Stay in touch: Tracking vehicles during transit can help management identify cheap gas and vehicles in need of maintenance, shaving dollars off shipping costs. These savings can be passed on to customers by lowering the cost of goods. Doing so may improve your reputation for reliability and transparency.

Benefits of reputation management

Clients benefit from knowing you’re concerned about their needs and that you value their business; in fact, they’re more likely to be repeat customers if they’ve been treated well. Having a positive public perception of your goods and services is important. If you spend more marketing time and dollars trying to effectively manage your reputation, you’ll have less spin work to do to combat negative press you may receive. It’s worth your effort to spend the time and energy creating good buzz than trying to counter bad feedback about your products or services.

At the end of the day, who doesn’t like to have a little more positivity in their world? Give reputation management a try and you may be surprised at just how far a good word travels.