Do you know what your patients are saying about your dental practice online? How about ex-employees or your competitors? Are they singing your praises or running your name through the mud? Either way, you probably want to know, right?
Thankfully, there are a number of quick and simple ways to monitor what people are saying about your practice online. I’ll get to those a little later in the post. Let’s first talk about why it’s important to manage your reputation online.
Why Online Reputation Management Matters
Good reputations are not built overnight. Chances are it took you a number of years and a lot of money to establish your dental practice’s good name. The frightening reality is that it’s comparatively simple for someone to destroy your reputation permanently online. Just one comment or bad review on a blog or website by a disgruntled former employee, ex-patient, or competitor can be enough to drive your reputation into a ditch.
So, if your online reputation matters to you(and it should), then you need to actively engage in the marketing practice commonly referred to as, Online Reputation Management (ORM).
What is Online Reputation Management (ORM)
The relatively new marketing construct know as Online Reputation Management (ORM) is, in simple terms, monitoring the status of your brand (or name), evaluating the online conversation about your brand, and taking deliberate steps to mitigate potential damage to your brand. You can think of ORM as a three-step process:
1. Monitor – Maintain an ongoing system for researching and keeping track of public perception.
2. Analyze – Consider individual feedback, as well as the source, outlet, reach and timing, to come to a decision about the risk.
3. Influence – Comment, rebut, draft a formal response or simply ignore what has been said, based on your evaluation (Alyssa Gregory, Sitepoint.com)
5 Tips for Effective Online Reputation Management
1. Assume that everything will find its way online – Don’t assume that anything you say or do will be kept private. Simply assume that it will be published somewhere online and potentially available to billions of people. ORM expert, Andy Beal, says that “the message you share behind closed doors should match the one you share with employees, customers, and investors.”
2. Set up Automatic Alerts – Set up automatic alerts to notify you when your practice is mentioned on a review site, social network, blog, etc. Google Alerts is my favorite FREE tool for this purpose. Google Alerts will e-mail you (at a frequency determined by you) anytime your practice is mentioned online. I personally use Google Alerts and highly recommend it. Sign up for Google Alerts FREE. Duct Tape Marketing has a nice list of 34 monitoring tools that you may find useful as well.
3. Maximize positive references to your practice online – The idea here is simple. The more positive references to your practice online, the more insignificant the negative references will become. A few examples of how you might increase your positive references online include: Engaging with patients and potential patients on social networks, submitting press releases, running contests, working with charities, etc. Doing any of these things will naturally create new positive references to you online.
4. Respond to positive & negative feedback – Whenever possible, and wherever it makes sense, make it a point to respond to both negative and positive feedback online. The goal in doing this is to show your commitment to patient satisfaction. However, be particularly careful when responding to negative feedback. Do evaluate the situation before responding, but be prompt when the situation warrants it. Remain calm, be honest and always take the high ground in all interactions with the offender. This should help you to diffuse the situation before it gets out of hand. Check out Yelp! for more tips on responding to positive and negative feedback online.
5. Don’t Mix Business and Personal profiles – Avoid mixing personal and practice profiles on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Social networking sites like these are great for building relationships with people. However, relationships can sour, and you don’t want to run the risk that someone will maliciously attack your practice’s reputation, when their beef is really just with you.
Set Up an ORM Plan
Establishing an ORM plan is critically important. Like anything else, not having a plan is a plan for disaster. So, where should you start? Elixir Interactive provides a number of helpful hints for crafting your own ORM plan:
A well-planned brand reputation management program requires the identification of communities that have the largest and most vocal membership, ongoing monitoring, and active participation in these communities in order to promote a positive brand image and suppress negative sentiment. The following questions should be addressed during the planning session:
1. What is the purpose of the program? Are you looking to gather feedback? Promote a new service? Educate customers about a product’s functionality? Address customer questions and concerns?
2. Where are we going to focus our efforts? You need to identify the blogs, forums, newsgroups and websites that are most relevant to the brand, have the largest and most engaged audience and are seen as “authorities” by the search engines.
3. How often will we be monitoring? Depending on the purpose of the program, the amount of time spent monitoring, posting comments, creating content, answering questions and linking could require multiple resources.
4. Who is going to manage the program? Brand reputation management is not something to be assigned to the “intern that knows how to Google.” Depending on the objective of the program (i.e. feedback solicitation, customer service, awareness) the intensity of the effort will vary and require resources that are qualified to respond in an appropriate manner (Elixir Interactive).
Further Reading
1. Ten Tactics That Could Save Your Online Reputation
2. Fighting a Bad Online Reputation and Keeping a Good One
3. The 18 Immutable Laws of Corporate Reputation… (Paperback)
4. Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online (Paperback)
Your Thoughts
Does your practice have an established Online Reputation Management Plan? If not, are you considering it? Why, or why not?
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Reader Comments
Edward December 11th
Yes, I agree that every professional has to take care of his or her online reputation. The more successful you are in your field, the more at risk your online reputation is. It seems that those who have not turned out as successful are bitter and start spreading rumors about you. No online gossip can hold me back anymore. Thanks to you, CLEANmy.NAME!
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