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DQ News: What’s Your Best Strategy For Managing Online Public Relations?

For many businesses even now, online PR and internet marketing strategies play second fiddle to their offline advertising and sales campaigns.

This is understandable since the first word people when they go online and open up their very first email account is ‘spam,’ this first experience of internet marketing is something that’s bound to put anyone off until they find out that spam is the least productive, ugly end of internet marketing and public relations, there are other options which have grace and style which can keep your target audience/market voluntarily coming back again and again.

If you have the funds, some genius developers and a product which lends itself to fun and excitement you might come up with an ad that looks like this:

Now, I’ve tried desperados, it’s ok but the add kept me watching, obeying the prompts up to a point, I wasn’t going to promote their product on my Facebook or Twitter but I did send the URL to work colleagues and friends, however, I avoided spamming them!

Even if you have a negligible budget for your digital marketing there are still many things you can do if you’re prepared to put in the time and energy that building an online reputation requires. Creating profiles for your business on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as well as any other social media resources you can find is a great way to improve your online presence and allow your business partners, clients and consumers to get in touch with you, ask you questions and advice about your products and even offer complaints.

Complaints from Friends are Constructive Criticism

No-one likes to receive complaints but using the social media platforms upon which you’ve produced a profile to resolve them is a great way to produce a positive image for you and your company. Most people make mistakes at some point and endeavour to solve them and cover them up with as little fuss as possible, why would you want to be different?

You can actually use problem resolution as part of your online PR strategy by turning a negative into a positive. When some-one posts a complaint onto your wall, don’t delete it and certainly never ignore it, as soon as you see it make a note that you’re looking into it and do just that. When you’ve a solution publish the process that you went through to discover what the issue was and how you went about fixing it. Even if you believe the complaint is frivolous it’s worth investigating and offering legitimate feedback. If the complaint is genuine, see how it could affect other customers and tell them about it before they experience it for themselves.

Performing this kind of problem solving under public scrutiny demonstrates that you are listening to your customers and that you value, and are concerned for them; here, problem solving becomes reputation management and the positives you give your reputation with this kind of transparency and dedication far exceeds the negative effect of publicising a user’s problem with your product online.

About the Author: Dan Cash is a social media and SEO feature writer. As well as following @Econsultancy for their regular informative tweets you can brows Econsultancy.com’s website for their online PR tutorials and social media training courses which offer strategies and recommendations for techniques to improve any company’s web presence.

Photo Credit: DoktorSpinn

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