How does your service provider score online?

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Pat Kitano from Transparent Real Estate penned a post the other day that I’ve been meaning to address, but alas, I have been buried over the past couple of days to get to it. No longer. Pat writes about a concept called online reputation management which is defined loosely as defending your reputation against online attacks, criticism and negative reviews. In our Googlebiquitous (like that?) world it is easier than ever for people to find information on you and your company. A quick search can turn up the company information and will also return any and all reviews of the company’s service or performance. Further, because of the way that blogs and social networking mediums work the search engines place a higher importance on those results and can catapult a negative review right to the top of Google.

This has massive implications for professionals and companies. Imagine doing a search for a real estate or mortgage company that you are thinking of working with and the first result is "How I was ripped off by XyZ company [person]." What goes through your head?

You are DEFINITELY clicking on the link to learn more
You will strongly consider finding someone else to work with
You will do more research attempting to VALIDATE that negative comment
You will weigh it as more important than positive coverage found
It will take a lot of positive coverage to erase the doubt of that one post
You will assign the comment exceptional credibility from its high search engine rank

This is very powerful stuff. For a business or individual it could easily threaten their career. One bad review could turn thousands of customers off from working with them. Considering that 80% of people start a home search online; it is feasible that these reviews could put a few real estate agents out of business. The same goes for mortgage folks.

This keeps me up at night. I can imagine getting a link to a post complaining about my company that alleges that my company acted in a manner completely contradictory to the practices I preach here. I can see it happening and actually predict it will happen at some point. It is inevitable. I can imagine the comments coming in saying "Phony!" or much, much worse.

I have even posted open letters acknowledging the fact that some of our customers are not happy, or have filed complaints against us. I want to be up front and let everyone know that my company is not perfect. It turns my stomach to know that people out there hate my company. I’ve worked hard to fix problems and eliminate people without ideals inline with my own. It’s a long process.

So what can real estate and mortgage professionals do? To think that you can avoid it is naive. I think the best solutions for dealing with a negative review are:

If you are in the wrong:

Clearly, quickly and fairly addressing the issue
Fixing the customer complaint to the best of your ability
Articulating the steps you’ve taken to help or repair damage
Communicate the steps you’ve taken to ensure this type of event will not occur again
Issue a sincere apology (publicly and privately)

If you are being wronged:

Lay out the actual facts of the situation (as much as possible)
Articulate the steps you took and the agreements you reached
Show compassion for the complainer’s situation
Communicate your position on the piece
Work to have the review removed (if practical)

There are a few companies that Pat highlights in his post that work on this type of online reputation protection. My thoughts are summed up nicely as:

"Honesty is the best policy"
"The best defense is a good offense"