I know you have all had a rush of sales people and vendors out of the wood work that are all singing the song of, brand reputation management. In fact I just had a dealer friend tell that in the past two days he’s had 6 phone calls from different companies about this new buzz word.

Well in reality reputation should have always been important to you as soon as you opened your doors for business. The only difference between back then and today is that they just won’t scream at you and curse everyone of your people to hell and then just disappear. Now the internet has given that person the ability to be heard by millions and that can truly ruin you reputation. So if you don’t have any reviews online, you think it’s ok right? No one is saying anything bad about you so it’s cool?
Not if your the dealer that keeps saying you want to dominate your internet market and you want better SEO and blah blah blah.

Thinks about it, whatever content you post or disseminate across the Internet has the potential to be rated and commented. Major search engines notice when your blog posts, news, videos and articles. All of these can be rated or “liked” and will help with organic ranking.
Plain and Simple
Reveiws Get you Noticed
They are important because they appear in places such as CitySearch, Google places (formerly Google Maps) and Yelp, and they are noticed and read. The more people access them, the more beneficial they are to your rankings. Now that’s massive social proof!
Now it doesn’t just stop there, those companies pounding on your doors just talking about Reputation Management is just giving you another vendor biill to add on to the other 10 vendors you’re most likely using to complete your online strategy. That’s like a doctor giving you a fat loss pill that 100% works and you decide to take half! Well the other half is social networking sites.They can also share tons of this information, that will not only get you more attention but also give you permanent realestate on Google and build a voluminous amount of “social proof” that will get you noticed in your local area. You’ll be building a community that will see you as an important resource and will trust you.
So as we begin to wind down the year, stop thinking of peices of your internet strategy, think about the whole pill and swallow it!
Cheers!
Your Diva