One of the things every smart company, no matter what its size, must do is to monitor their online reputation.
This involves searching periodically for mentions of the company name in blog posts, tweets and other public forums.
When customers and prospects mention you to their circle of friends, it opens up an opportunity to start a public dialogue.
Avoiding the need to do damage control It perhaps goes without saying that your customer service should be top-notch.
If a customer comes to you with a complaint, you should promptly take care of it to the customer's satisfaction.
Of course we all know that some people will simply never be satisfied with anything but it takes surprisingly little to make most customers happy.
If you have staff, they should have the authority to do whatever is necessary to resolve complaints to a customer's satisfaction.
Of course this also mandates that they know how to also keep the interests of the company in mind while doing so.
Everyone has a loudspeaker Some customers may not even come to you with their complaint.
They may simply take it directly to the court of public opinion.
Even those who do come to you first may appeal to the court of public opinion if they feel that their concerns are not being addressed properly.
Just what does that mean? It means that customers may post a complaint on their Facebook page, or tweet a complaint to their followers on Twitter.
They could also give a negative review on feedback sites.
There are hundreds of these.
Some of the better known are Yelp, RipOffReport, TheSqueakyWheel and PissedConsumer.
Many major ecommerce sites also have built-in customer feedback mechanisms.
On top of that, unhappy customers may write a blog post or even comment on someone else's blog post.
Some consumers may even post video complaints on YouTube.
How to find them Once something is out there on the internet, it's basically permanent.
There is no way to "erase" it.
Your best hope is to find the comments quickly and address them publicly.
There are so many places and ways for customers to make their opinions of you known that you can't possibly monitor them all.
Find the comments by searching for yourself and/or your company.
Naturally start with major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo but don't stop there.
Specialized search engines such as Twitter search, Technorati and Google Blog Search may turn up mentions that the mainstream search engines miss.
What you can do about it Whether you find a compliment or a complaint online, address it publicly.
You may also address it privately - for compliments contact the customer and try to get more detail and permission to use the comments as a testimonial, for complaints try to find a way to make the customer happy - but the public part is important.
Anyone can see the original comment so it's important that they also see your response to it.
They don't need to know every gory detail, and you certainly shouldn't defame your unhappy customers, but you can't give the impression that complaints are simply ignored.
(Or that compliments go unacknowledged.
) Handled well, this could prove to be one of your best forms of public relations.
Fans will become rabidly loyal and even jump to your defense.
Detractors will likely never come around but those on the fence will choose sides and some of them will become customers and fans.