Today, I have decided to change the subject and talk about online reputations of a business, or Business Reviews, Ratings, and reports. So what is online reputation?
In my definition, online reputation is the online record of trace of a business, a person, or a product’s online mentions by the general public including both the customers, non-customers. On a high level, online reputation is either Positive, Neutral, or Negative.
In real life, the reputation of a business or a person is usually travel through word of mouths, very scattered. For example, I know of a mechanic at a local auto body shop in my “hood” that does a “good” job. And when a friend of mine asks me a referral to a mechanic, I would probably tell him right away about this “good” mechanic that I have. My friend asks me because probably he knows me a bit more than a random guy he runs into on the street, and he has more trust in me in a personal level.
In an Online internet environment, the reputation of a company is mostly represented by the Public relationship (PR) image of the company, news coverage on positive and negative news of the company, or by online reviews that are done by suppliers, consumers, and whoever the business deals with.
Public relationships are more applicable and effective for medium to large companies where people are interested in their developments and products. And the companies are famous and popular enough that news reporters or columnists would pick up the news as stories. These companies usually have a team of lawyers, and marketing team which handles the branding and image of the company full time. I will try to write a few posts about marketing later.
However, for a smaller company, like the plumber who helped you stop the leaks in your basement, the stylist to did your hair for your birthday party. These small business neither have the time, or money to do enough advertising, or marketing, not to mention PR. The reputation, both online and offline, exists in a form of word of mouths among prior customers. and unlike offline reputation, online reputation are online forever and therefore they can be measured.
From my experience as a consumer, I notice that most of these online reputation of a business exists in a form of Business Reviews or Business Rating from consumer in business reviewing sites like Yellow Page, InsiderPages, Angie’s List, Service Magics, Yelp, and the well known BBB.
Therefore, it means that if you own a small business, your and your business’s reputation is likely to be in the hands of these companies. and probably in the hands of a bunch of your previous customer, or non-customers! At times, these could be issues.
These business review and rating sites allow customer to post a review of their consumer experience about the company online for free (some like angie’s list charges a customer to post a review, which I think ridiculous for Angie’s List). And these companies would aggregate all the review ratings and “average” them so that is your business rating for the business.
I have used, and experienced most, if not all of the above sites, I find goods and bads, problems in each of them. I am going to write a series of posts to look at each of these sites in details and do a comparison at the end. I will try to do it fair, and objective.
The first one I will do probably is Angie’s list.
Like this:
Like Loading...
