When working on reputation management for your brand, it is important to take advantage of the tools you have at your disposal.  For example, review
websites such as Yelp are terrific for collecting feedback from your customers. You can learn both what you have done well, and what you may have not
done well with your business. Whenever your company receives a compliment, you should post a timely response thanking them for their kind words and
supporting your business. This serves to both reward the customer for taking the time to share good news about you and it allows others reading the
site to see that you are engaged with your customers and care about their feedback.

Negative comments may be more difficult to handle. Many companies will just ignore them, but if a disgruntled customer was standing in front of you complaining,
would you ignore them? Never! The same is true online. And ignoring someone’s negative comment simply confirms their feelings both to the poster and
to others viewing the comment. In many cases, responding to negative comments may allow you to flip a disgruntled customer into a loyal one.

The best way to go about responding to an unhappy customer is to be real, offer an apology, and offer a solution. Even if you believe a customer is wrong,
you can apologize that they came away feeling the way they do. Sometimes the solution might simply be to offer to speak to them in person or over the
phone in order to sort it out. No business is perfect so if your business made an error apologize and offer up what you are doing to ensure the same
error is not repeated for others. When doing this, always remember to make sure you do it in a fashion that is as genuine as possible. Don’t give a
hollow apology, or worse yet argue they are wrong, as people can see when someone is not being sincere, even online.

If you follow appropriate protocol, customers and prospects will be impressed with you for fixing their problem, instead of just ignoring it. Lastly the
most important part of this is making sure you respond in a timely manner. If someone left a negative post on your company’s Facebook page six months
ago, trying to fix it now will make no difference.