Negative Reviews Can Be Very Helpful

A bad review can help businesses in many ways when they manage appropriately and use the feedback to actually improve. 

After reading several reputation management articles and how to manage bad reviews suggestions I have summarize what I believe is very important to keep in mind to actually make a negative review and asset for your business.

It is very important to understand when and how to response to a negative review. 

When to respond: 

You genuinely need to make amends:  If you know there is the possibility something went wrong with the service or product and someone is legitimately upset about it, it’s typically in your best interest to engage them and to do your best to make it right. 

They’re misstating the facts: Speak up and politely let them know that they may have simply misunderstood something or perhaps they’re even getting you confused with another company. If it’s a matter of bad facts, you should step in to correct them.

When the review develops legs:  If a bad review is getting "me too" comments from other users, get in the conversation and help calm it down. Otherwise the issue might get bigger then what it really is. 

How to respond:

Once you decide a review is worth commenting on, you need to handle it with some finesse. 

Listen:  They’re commenting on the site because they want to be heard. Show them they have been, by making sure you fully understand what happened and how they feel about it. 

Be Honest:  Don’t make excuses. Don’t try to spin it to make yourself look like the victim. If you messed up, apologize and immediately diffuse the situation. If you didn’t mess up, then be honest about what happened. Without pointing fingers.

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Remain Calm: When you do respond to an online review  be civil and professional, and make sure to offer a solution when appropriate

Explain how will you be better: When ever possible explain what kind of corrective action will you be doing to ensure this is not happening again or at least get more control over unsatisfying situations. This way the reviewer and other readers (potential customers) will know you are really caring and you are truly working to give a better service or product. 

Say thank you: No matter how bad is the the review you should always thank the customer for his/her business and for taking the time to make a review. 

Keep track of good and bad 

My final suggestion is, keep track of all reviews,  good and bad, categorized them by departments so you can actually see which areas of your business are weak and you need to improve and which ones are  strong and you can use them to improve the other areas.

Email Marketing Is More Important Than Ever!

According to a professional  Email Statistics Report 2014-2018  by The Radicati Group, In 2015 the average number of consumer emails sent and received per user per day is more than 87, in addition more than 108 business emails per user per day and it is expected to remain at this high levels over the next years.

With so many emails users are looking for tools that help them sort their emails to make sure they are not lost between advertisement and emails they don't really care about and important emails, and be able to find things when they need to do so. A good example is Google Inbox that will help you to sort your emails between Promos, Updates, Finance, and different categories you can create, or simply the different filters and categories that email service providers, like the Gmail, have created so the users have a better email management experience. 

Email is a very powerful communication tool and will continue to be like this for many years, but it will only work if companies and marketers learn and adapt email marketing to users' needs and evolving users' behavior. What does this mean for all who try to communicate through email with customers or potential customers? It means users need us to pay more attention to email marketing and send smarter and more efficient emails. 

There are many different "5 tips for most efficient emails" lists and different strategies on how to better approach  email marketing, but I find the following 5 the most relevant things to keep in mind. 

1. Be mobile ready.

2. Remember that less is more.

3. Let consumers set their pace.

4. Personalize and add value.

5. Measure, measure, measure

Now, if you want to get more details here are some articles with more detailed email marketing strategies I also found very useful

Think Email is dying? Get Real, You Just Need a Better Strategy

Email Marketing Strategy

Email Marketing for Dummies

Ad Blocking Greatest Benefit is Not to Block but to Improve Ads

I'm the kind of user that is constantly annoyed with all the garbage that the internet has all over, I feel like trying to watch a movie that is being played on one of the screens of NY Times Square. I bet that it doesn't matter how cool those ads are, it all would feel like garbage. So as users we have two options, either focus and be ad blinded or get a filter that will allow us to block most of the other screens from our view.

First option is actually called Banner blindness, according to Wikipedia "Banner blindness is a phenomenon in web usability where visitors to a website consciously or subconsciously ignore banner-like information, which can also be called ad blindness or banner noise." There is a Study made by Infolinks that shows that 86% of consumers suffer from banner blindness.

Second option is called Ad Blocker, there are dozens of free software that will allow you to block a good amount of ads while you surf the internet. Here a list of 15 Best Free Ad Blocker Software. According to Mashable.com The number of people who use ad-blocking software worldwide has ballooned by 41% to nearly 200 million in the past year, based on report released by Adobe and PageFair.

Does this mean that Digital marketing is being affected by these two facts? The answer is, absolutely. Does this mean it will kill the digital marketing industry? the answer is, it might actually make it better.

Farhad Manjoo recently put it in the New York Times: “ Ad blockers could end up saving the ad industry from its worst excesses. If blocking becomes widespread, the ad industry will be pushed to produce ads that are simpler, less invasive and far more transparent about the way they’re handling our data — or risk getting blocked forever if they fail.”

So as more users send the message "take your garbage away from my visual way" more companies are going to be force to develop more conscious advertisement to avoid keep losing peoples attention or be blocked completely.  

I will make sure I send the message and I will install my Ad blocker.

Efficient communication requires much more than just sending messages

The use of internet has make humans interact in a much more dynamic environment, message can reach further, faster and to much more people, but the communication process, remains the same. 

Because it is so easy to send messages over internet many persons and companies have the believe that communicating trough internet is much easier than other channels, because now they can reach many times more people and if just a small percentage of people respond then they can call it a success, there fore they focus on sending the message to as many people as they can  and they forget about the importance of understating the complete communication environment

According to Scholars Academia  Effective communication in business is as important as the blood circulating in the human body and hence managers do their best to overcome all barriers to communication. 

Therefore it is vital for any internet marketer to learn how to listen to their audience, and understand their behavior. Yes, even when you can not see directly the people you can see how they behave to better understand what works and what does not work to engage with them even when they are not telling you directly. 

There are many different tools that help marketers to communicate with their audience and to record, organize and analyze their behavior Here is a simple guide that I found very useful to understand some of the most used tools, it it gives clear and simple explanation of what each tool does, and helps you to get an idea of the kind of tools that are available. 

16 Tools Every Social Media Manager Should Use

I hope you find this useful!

Anabel

Social Media a Strategy to Engage with your Audience

Social Media a Strategy to Engage with your Audience

This week I learned more than how important is for companies to be present in Social Media, I learned that there are many tools that help you build and manage a brand, that it is a way to communicate with your audience, to be heard and also learn about what people want. Social Media marketing is not just about advertising is about engaging with the community, and these are my main 3 take aways 

First of all, is really important to have a clear marketing strategy. A marketing strategy should have a clear target audience, clear measurable goals, brand personality and a brand story. Explained more in detail by Neil Patel and Ritika Puri on their paper The beginners guide to online marketing chapters 1 to 3. 

Then you have to identify the best social media platforms to reach your target audience, Specially for a small company it can be difficult to invest a large amount of resources to be active in a bunch of different platforms, therefore is important to select a few that can be maintained properly and constantly, Anna Fox, a blogger for getting things done and productivity, says It isn't Quantity is Quality, as she explain with more detail on this topic, a single well maintained profile is better than half a dozen mediocre ones. The trick is to find what social networks can provide the most benefits for your company. Then focus on crafting a well made, well maintained, active community through each one. Finding which networks will work best for you is really just a matter of taking a look at each one and integrating it into your campaign.

Finally, User-Generated content (UGC) is the holy grail of social media, it is all the information that users are posting, not necessarily to you or about your brand, but they are in fact telling what they want. Be able to catch useful information among the ocean of ideas generated by users is difficult but there are  Tools to Monitor Social Media Conversations. The other highly valuable aspect if UGC is to make users talk about your brand, it is like word of mouth but with a much greater impact.

Norondungo

Searching for Real Local Delicacies in Italy

Right now my husband and I are taking some days off in Italy, what we love about traveling other than enjoying the touristic sightseeing is to enjoy the local food, people and culture, but it is hard to plan a trip avoiding "touristic places" if you don't know any locals, specially when the local restaurants do not have best SEO (Search Engine Optimization) practices for their websites.

Learning about SEO helps not only to make sure people can find you but equally important is to learn to find what you are looking for.

So two things that I have learned while traveling and learning about SEO tips and tricks on my online Internet Marketing class.

• Is all about what the website has, so if the website is made for locals most likely it will be all in Italian, so I started to make my search using Italian words. 

• Be very specific, on specific dishes I was looking for, even ingredients I would like to have. 

When I started my research I started looking for: "best restaurants in Florence" , my results:

Most of those links contain a bunch of places located on the most touristic areas (nothing I could not find by walking the most touristic places)

But then I start researching for some of the local specialties, then translating to italian and finally my search in Google read: "lampredotto ristorante firenze" and my finding list was:

This was already giving me the feeling of local findings, we picked one of this places, we were the only non-locals and had the most amazing tripe and lingue paninis ever!

Anabel from Offline 2 Online

This is the 1st week of MKT595 (Internet and Interactive Marketing) this is where my 1st blog gets its name.

I always wanted to believe that I'm not so out of touch on Internet topics, even I visit my Facebook page every couple of weeks, I did not have a twitter account until 4 days ago, I have never created a blog in my life, and use Internet mainly for work related topics,  I wanted to believe that it was not because I was getting obsolete I just  didn't have the time for "this".

Well, over the last days I have realized is not about having time to procrastinate on the Internet, is actually about connecting with the world, and using it to learn more, be more, feel more, enjoy more, share more, reach more, than what I can do if I'm an offline person.

This does not mean that I will become a twitter-FB-blogger freak now, but I have realized that the reason I used to not get more "online" is actually the same reason I now realize it makes sense. Because I don't have time to learn all I want to, be informed about all I want to, be in touch with all I want to, If  I learn how to make a smart use of Internet tools I can make a better use of my time, my experiences my resources even when I'm offline

It is a fact that the world is coming more and more  from offline to online, and I don't mean just people but also everything that surrounds us, our cars, alarm clocks, doors, garages, coffee machines. etc. this is called Internet of Things  and this means more and more information being generated and shared around the globe, information that will be used by many but will just create an advantage for those who really understand how to effectively structure and use this data.

I'm really happy to have started this journey to get from offline to online and within the next weeks I will be sharing the highlights of my learning on this topic and my experience on trying to catch up with Internet concepts and tools.

Anabel GB