If your business provides a service to customers it is likely online reviews are impacting on the buying decisions of your potential customers.
Review sites like Qype and Yelp are an important source of information for people looking to go for a meal, book a hotel or even buy a car.
However, more often than not companies don’t have in place a system for managing what is an increasingly important factor for their busness.
Here are 6 easily implementable tips to help your company manage your online reviews.
1. Monitor Reviews
Set up searches in Google Alerts for mentions of your business name (using quotation marks) and check them every day (you can set the alerts to be sent to your email address). Reviews of your business will be picked up.
If someone has posted a positive review why not thank them? If there is a negative review maybe you can address the complaint and seek to resolve it.
2. Dealing with Negative Reviews
Negative reviews can be hurtful especially if the review is unfair. Don’t react emotionally. If there is an issue which you can address, try to resolve the situation with a view to getting the review removed on resolution.
If the negative comments are inaccurate, give your side of the story. Perhaps some of your customers might also come to your defence (this is where a strong online network can be important).
Don’t start an argument, there is nothing worse than washing dirty linen in public and it may attract undue attention.
3. Encourage Positive Reviews
There may be circumstances where you need to encourage some positive reviews. For example if a negative review has recently been posted you might want to ask a loyal customer to post an honest positive review. This will mean that potential customers will be met by a positive rather than a negative review on the review site listings.
4. Encourage More Reviews
There are a number of benefits to having many reviews being posted about your company. It shows you are busy, your company will feature more prominently in local search engine listings, people have more info to go off when deciding to buy from you and you have more feedback to improve!
So with this in mind its important to put a system in place to make this happen. Do you have a mailing list? Could you ask for reviews as part of your email marketing? Could you mention review sites in your premises eg. on menus?
5. Ask That Complaints Be Sent To You
When people used to complain they would tell a few friends, now they can tell thousands online. As a business you want to prevent this if possible.
One way is by having a complaints section on your website where you encourage unhappy customers to send their negative comments to you. This has the added advantage that if someone searches for complaints about your company the official complaints page will come near the top of the search engine listings, demonstrating your commitment to customer service.
6. Exceptional Customer Service
Without doubt the best way to generate positive reviews is to provide exceptional customer service. If you go out of your way to delight customers you can be sure some of them will let others know through a review.
What do your customers love? What are you the best at? Can you do more of it?
I hope this has helped with some ideas for managing your online reviews.

Joe White
Think Genial: Social Media Management http://www.thinkgenial.com/