Use Social Media Marketing to Enhance Your Company’s Reputation

By Heather Lutze, CEO, Findability Group Search Marketing and CWCC Member

One of the things that always surprises me with new Findability internet marketing clients is how little they know about what people actually think of their company. Of course, in the days before social media, you would never know unless your customer service department received a lot of complaints. But today, it’s a different world.

Do you know if people are talking about your business or your products online? Do you know what they are saying, and how what they are saying is influencing your success?

If you don’t, you could be in for a rude awakening at some point down the road. It might have been okay for Marvin Gaye to wait until he “heard it through the grapevine” but that sort of passive approach does not fly in today’s high speed internet marketing world. By the time you might learn of any negative comments or complaints about your business—the damage has been done.

Instead, why don’t you use social media to stay on top of your public image, and know right away what you need to respond to? My advice is never to stick your head in the sand and ignore problems. Instead, use social media to jump in and address them—pro-actively, sensitively, and openly. Social media provides any company with a golden opportunity, one that should not be trivialized, to engage with your customers and make them happy!

In my new book Thumbonomics: The Essential Business Roadmap for Social Media & Mobile Marketing, I address the importance of knowing what people are saying about your company online, and how social media can be used to repair and even enhance your brand’s reputation.

An excerpt from Chapter 13:

A Message to CEOs:
“Please don’t be a Chief Ignoring Officer … Be a Chief Listening Officer. Be willing to really listen to what people are saying about your products and services. Be prepared to give meaningful feedback. Be willing to monitor and listen to sentiment about your company.

No, it won’t all be good. You’ll have to be willing to accept the good with the bad. It can be very difficult to keep a finger on the pulse of what people are saying about your company–but you must do exactly that.”

Bill Gerth, of the communications giant Comcast, has this to say about using social media to make customers happier: “Providing customer service via social media is just one of the ways we’re working to improve the customer experience, and it’s really a win-win for our customers and for us.”

This is an excerpt from an interview with “Comcast Bill,” in which he discusses exactly how Comcast has used different forms of social media to build their brand and address any customer dissatisfaction. The entire interview, along with various other interviews with industry leaders, can be found in the Appendix of Thumbonomics.

Welcome to the Findability Group, an Internet Marketing Firm in Denver. 

If you market a business on the internet, or want to start marketing one, you have come to the right place. We know that nothing is more frustrating to a business owner than spending a lot of money on a fabulous, state of the art website (or any website!) and not having it generate any business—or even turn up in a search.