Nowadays, customers have a much bigger platform to share their annoyances and disappointment: the Internet and its forums. Many people will read this criticism and your good name gets dragged through the mud. On the bright side, customers are also capable of sharing their enthusiasm about you to a potentially large audience.

What’s your role in all this? Do you have to participate in a forum discussion or should you stay out of it? And what to do with employees who join the conversation in their spare time and on their own initiative? Should you start your own forum to increase your company’s transparency? These are important questions and there is no generic answer. Each situation asks for a different solution, but it is important to have a policy on forums, because your customers are out there.

We have seen the impact of customer complaints and praise of brands first hand. Your reputation can be ruined in a single day, but it takes years to rebuild that reputation. We can help you determine the right strategy to deal with this.

Do you need advice about handling forums? Our consultants have years of first hand experience in dealing with online communities and we can help your company.

Key Takeaways

• Customers are talking about you on forums
• Some of your employees join them
• What should your position be on forums?

So, how can we help you?

Having problems with complaining customers online? Are you unsure on how to proceed? Call us now and use our expertise to tackle these issues.

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“The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.”

Cluetrain Manifesto

But first things first, what is an online community? It’s a place online where people get together to share, to create, to achieve a common goal. They are places on the internet which bring together groups of people who share a common interest. Or it can be an enhancement of an already existing (offline) community.

A blog is a type of community. There are more than 184 million blogs worldwide. Research has indicated that 34,1% of these bloggers write about their experiences with products and brands. Odds are they are writing about you too!

Last.fm lets people with a passion for music get together and share that passion, LinkedIn helps people utilise their professional network and Facebook helps you stay in touch with your friends.

So why is this important? Because, chances are, these people are talking about you! And there is nothing you can do about it.

Well, that’s not completely true. Understanding these communities and its inhabitants can set you on your way to achieve value from this phenomenon. Demanding a negative comment gets taken down will do nothing for your company. Listening to the feedback and getting involved with the conversation can do a lot of good for your brand, though.

Here are some of the reasons how you can benefit from working with online communities:

• Reputation Management – you can monitor the online conversation about your brand
• SEO – an involved company is more likely to get linked to, which will improve rankings
• Engagement – Active users of online communities are heavily engaged, by offering value to the community this engagement can be translated back to your company

Key Takeaways

• Online communities are becoming more and more important to the marketeer
• Why? Because they are important to your customer
• Chances are, these people are talking about you! And there is nothing you can do about it

So, what can we do for you?

Onetomarket has a great understanding of online communities and how to incorporate connecting with them into your online strategy. We have first hand experience in working with communities and can help you maximize your online presence.

Are you interested to find out more? Get in touch now!

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Search is great at what it does, but there are some major limitations. It’s main strength is also it’s main weakness…..the algorithm. Whilst Google’s algorithm is extremely complex and does a good job of making sense of the web, it’s not personal. Its recommendations are based on high level mathematics which most of us won’t be able to comprehend. But your taste is probably completely different from your neighbour’s, so when both of you search for ‘holiday in spain’ in Google, should you get the same results?

Social search tries to tackle this problem. The relevancy of social search results are determined by interactions and/or contributions by its users. By searching for things which like minded people have searched for, you should get results which are far more relevant to you than the results a regular search engine could come up with.

There are various ways of social search, such as tagging and bookmarking. Delicious is a social bookmarking site, where people can tag their bookmarks and make them public available. This means that not only do you get to see other people’s bookmarks, but you can also see the tags they have used. And this is where social search kicks in, you can search the tags others have used. Plus, it keeps track of how many people have bookmarked a site, which shows you the popularity of each bookmark – the more votes, the more popular that particular bookmark is!

Another example is Digg, a social news service. People submit articles to Digg and others can vote, the articles with most votes end up on the home page, getting a ton of traffic. But if you look further you’ll notice that people submit articles to certain categories and others can vote whether or not they like the article. Again, another way to make sense of the web.

Google has also noted the importance of social search and is doing more and more to integrate a more human based aspect into their algorithm.

Social search is important for various reasons. Social search is powered by humans, which means the relevancy increases. But the most important thing is that these social search sites have thousands, if not millions of users. These people could potentially see your website, so just think of the traffic you could get from these sites. Plus, plenty of these people have the power to link to your site too.

Key Takeaways

• Social search is another evolution of the search medium
• Social search is powered by humans
• Social search has the ability to drive traffic and gain links

So, how can we help you?

As these sites are powered by humans it’s important to understand the intricacies of the communities surrounding them. Humans interpret things differently from search engines and it’s important to keep this in mind. We have been part of these communities for years and understand how they work and what drives them. Through our experience we can help your company attract large numbers of traffic and backlinks through social search.

Get in touch now and one of our experts will help you determine the right strategy to dive into social search!

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Metaphorically, every new customer is like a new seed you planted. It might have taken some effort and investment, but you know that after time, you can harvest the fruit of your labor many times. This is where your company starts to see the benefit. So far, nice story. But guess what:

“Customers can walk away to the next click offer if they don’t feel part of your brand”

So, how to build brand engagement with customers?

Answer: Communication (less talking & more listening)

Don’t panic!

Onetomarket offers several Engagement Marketing services for you to improve Brand Loyalty!

So, how can we help you?

• Communities – Creating the space for them to be part of the Brand!
• Forums – Opening the dialog between your company and its customers!
• Blogging – Adding value in the preferred informal way!
• Permission Marketing – Taking relevant communications to the next level!

Our highly experienced and trained consultants are willing to study your case and assist you to develop an advocacy strategy for your brand.

Are you still not sure? See Testimonials of some of our current clients!

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The Internet gives power to the individual.

Everybody is able to say what he’s thinking. And every critic is a great gift. The voice of your customers is your most valuable asset. This might be a wonderful thing, but as we all know: bad news travels fast. If some of your clients are not satisfied or just don’t like your products or services, they have loads of opportunities to complain public. Many people have their own blogs nowadays and they are able to burn your brand in the public domain. Others are members of big forums and might use them to criticize you. If you recognize these situations, you definitely need online reputation management.

Many of these complaints won’t be read by a large audience. Others will. In every country, there are multiple large consumer networks with big communities. The customers on these websites spent a large part of the day criticizing brands that have either wronged them or their readers. It may seem like we exaggerating, but these are real concerns for many companies.

Because of the strength and authority of these consumer organizations, two problems occur. First of all, many other customers will read the complaints of others and they can ruin your (online) reputation. Another problem is that these topics generally rank well in search engines on your keywords and therefore your search engine reputation also gets hurt. It isn’t nice to see negative titles in the search engine result pages when searching for your brand name, is it?

Does any of this sound familiar? Please contact Onetomarket, because we have a long list of clients who we’ve helped manage their online reputation. We don’t need to tell you that you’re losing loads of money if people don’t trust you. Your corporate reputation is largely determined online. Onetomarket is experienced in improving your online reputation.

Key Takeaways

• Your customers are out there and they say things about you and your brand
• The Internet can build or break your brand in a short space of time
• Recognizable? Let Onetomarket help you with your online reputation management

So, how can we help you?

We can help you find out where, when and what people are saying about your brand online. We’ll work together in finding where the conversations about your brand take place and determine the right response strategy.

Get in touch now and our experts will help you protect and improve your brand online!

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