Sunday, April 1, 2012

Precisely How Franchise Reputation Management Functions

By Justin Harper


It is crucial for brands, especially franchise brands, to have a franchise reputation management strategy. It has always been the role of the franchisor to advertise and protect the brand. In the Internet age there are new issues online that must be resolved properly. In the past, you put up an internet site and you directed customers to go there and learn about you. You most likely had a way for them to send you an email and maybe you had a coupon to print or detailed request form to fill out. Those days are gone. People no longer want to see what you are saying about yourself on your internet site.

Web 2.0 and social media have changed all that. The Internet is now all about individual content and peer-to-peer interaction. People are no longer reading your website; they are reading what other people are saying about you everywhere else. There are conversations about your brand taking place online, conversations you may or may not know about, and you need a strategy to deal with them. Clients are increasingly making their decisions according to what they see on Google and Yahoo. A company with a great search engine ranking will have far more visitors to its Web site and hence greater success.

Finding the conversations is relatively easy. You can contract that out, subscribe to services that will find them for you, or assign the task to someone in your organization who is web savvy and lives online. Inserting your brand in conversations is a little trickier. When you find a conversation about your brand, think of how you would react to it if you overhead the conversation next to you. That is how you need to act online when you are inserting yourself in a conversation about your brand. Whatever you do, be prepared to live with it forever. Diamonds are forever, and what is put up on the web is a real close second. Worry as much about how your words will read in the moment as they will a year or two from now. You can never start too early, and you can almost never say too much. Don't wait for the conversations to come to you, go start some. Facebook, Twitter, and Blogger make that pretty easy.

The franchise industry is extremely competitive. Bringing in prospective franchisees to invest and customers to consider eating or shopping at your franchise is enormously challenging today. The Internet has altered the balance of powers. Your online reputation is now important to your franchise's bottom line. Now, anyone with an email address could write false reviews that persuade real prospects to avoid your franchise. This trend can cause significant revenue declines.

Franchise Reputation Management is committed to providing comprehensive Online Reputation Management services for the worldwide franchise industry. It can monitor your brand and manage conversations brilliantly with one, easy-to-use tool. It publishes and schedules updates throughout social channels with a single click. It can manage teams, large social channels, tasks and assignments effortlessly and it can measure your efforts with comprehensive reporting as well as analytics.




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