A bad review from a customer, a critical voice on social media or a negative message about your company in the Google search results. These can seriously damage your online reputation. Therefore, proper reputation management is also important for your event, festival, congress or event company.
Nowadays, all it takes is a couple of mouse-clicks to topple your carefully constructed reputation. And the consequences can be dramatic: a bad reputation can damage your event or event company in no time. So keep a close eye on your online reputation and take timely action. But not everything is negative. It may surprise you how many positive reports you will encounter which you can highlight. That is also reputation management.
If the negative reports become too frequent and seriously damage your company, or if you yourself don't have the time to deal with this issue, you had best engage a professional. However, that is not an absolute must. With just a little effort and a little common sense, you can get a lot done. We give you a few tips:
Be aware what is being said about your event or event company
Keep a close eye on what is being said about your event company or your events on the internet. This becomes a piece of cake when you use Google Alerts. You input various search words and combinations and Google will screen the entire web for mentions of your company. The tool mention.com works in the same fashion as Google Alerts and will predominantly look for reviews and social media posts which are being published about your company or event.
Prevent negative reports in the top 10 search engine results
Prospects and customers will use search engines such as Google and Bing information to search information about your event. Most of the time, they look no further than the first 10 search results. Make sure that this mainly contains positive reports about yo. These will put the minds of your customers and prospects at ease. Therefore, you had best invest in proper online content, optimised for search engines.
Engage your employees
Employees have a lot of influence on your (online) reputation. Teach them how they can help spread online content about your company. And tell them what's the best way to deal with negative reports about your company.
Constructively deal with negative reports
Simply removing negative messages is not a good strategy. A negative report or a bad review is not necessarily a problem. On the contrary: it is an opportunity to show how good your customer service is. If you adequately respond to the message of a dissatisfied customer and show how you solve the problem in consultation, then this will increase your reliability. That way, a negative review can contribute to your credibility. Because be fair: who truly never makes an error?
You should also critically regard the review system and the published reviews. Are these really reliably? Do the reviews really come from customers? Or do they come from competitors, dissatisfied employees or from the companies themselves? And why not ask a satisfied customer or attendee to write a review?
