 The four big reputation control realities that all brands battle. Hey, if you've got a company, heck, if you're an individual, you've got a reputation, and this video will show you how to protect it. If you don't do this nowadays, if you don't try to protect your reputation brand nowadays, you can get destroyed and you didn't even do anything wrong. So you're gonna wanna watch this video to the very end to find out what you can do, what you should do, and more importantly, what you should not do when you're trying to protect your reputation. Hey, JR Fisher here. Do me a favor and hit that subscribe button down there before we get started. If it's red, click it, turn it gray. Don't forget, turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time we go live or if I upload a video. Now, reputations. What is a reputation? A reputation is nothing more than what other people think of you. I remember being in high school and everybody had a reputation, you know? You had group reputations, you had the bad kids and you had the good kids and I was unfortunately in the bad kid group, which I thought was pretty cool at the time. But the point is after you get separated from these groups here, you have individual reputations and your business has individual reputations. You've gotta learn how to protect it guys. It can get destroyed nowadays with social media. So I wanna walk you through all the steps of what this really means to your business and what you can do to protect yourself. Now, here's a question for you. What does Kim Kardashian, Beyonce, Kate Middleton and Lady Gaga have in common? Well, they have a huge following, but the important thing is they understand social media and since they understand social media, they can control it with their messaging. Now, if you notice, all those people I listed rarely give interviews and they don't give interviews because they wanna control their reputation. They wanna decide what gets put out there in the public, not some other third party. So they've understood how this messaging works and how it can help their brand and also how it can hurt their brand. Now, although none of them can control what millions of fans are gonna post on social media, what they're gonna put on YouTube or Instagram or Facebook or any of those things, what they can do is control their own personal messaging. Now, the question you've gotta ask yourself is what does this mean to you as an individual and of course, your business? Now, just like celebrities, the huge rise of social media has impacted businesses, has impacted individuals and if you don't get a handle on this, if you don't understand this, it can hurt you as a person and it can hurt your business also and we don't want that to happen, so we're gonna fix it in this video. Now, as a business, we are now able to build our brand. We're able to use all these social media areas to get our messaging out and to build a big fan base. That fan base can support our business, they can help us grow our business. They can also destroy our business too if you don't know how to handle those people that follow you, those people that comment on your posts, those people that actually contact your business, there's a certain way to handle it. Now, as silly as this may sound, one of the most trusted reviews that people trust when they get online is a four star rating. That's the most trusted, not a five star, a four star. Closely behind that is a four and a half star and just behind that is a five star. So, you don't have to be perfect and I think the public generally when they see a five star rating, they think it could be a little bit suspect. Now, years ago, I worked in the automotive industry and we tried to get reviews from buyers of the cars that we sold and we had 16 different franchises and we never really went for do you like this car because we didn't make the cars. All we did was buy the cars and resell them to the public. But what we did do is we asked the individuals to rate how we dealt with them as an individual. And funny thing is that when we would get some reviews that weren't perfect, that actually helped our overall reputation. It made us seem more realistic. It made it seem more reliable if everybody didn't think we were a five star car dealership. Now, here's the important thing. What you need to do as an individual, as a brand, is you need to encourage people to give realistic reviews of your company. And you also need to point potential customers, current customers, to your reviews and mention, hey, we've got these reviews, you can go here, you can read all about us and send them in the direction of those reviews. And don't be worried if you don't have all perfect reviews. Nobody is perfect, okay? Nobody is perfect. You have to realize that if you have all perfect reviews, and I disbelieve all perfect reviews, I can't count how many times I've been to a restaurant and they had all five star reviews and when I got there, I'm like, no, these people have missed some things. But if I went to a restaurant and they had four stars overall reviews, they had a bunch of five stars, they had some threes, they had a couple ones, I would know that those reviews are probably more accurate and they represented that business better. So don't worry if you don't get all five star reviews. Now, what do you do as a business? What do you do as an individual when you get reviews? The number one thing I'm gonna tell you to do is respond to them. Now, the knee jerk reaction is to only respond to reviews that are bad and say, hey, that's not true or we're gonna help you out or whatever. But you've gotta understand, you've got to respond to reviews that are good also. You've gotta thank those people who put in a good review because let's face it, if they had a good experience with your business and your product and they went through the effort of putting a review in there, they're trying to communicate with you. They're trying to make contact with you. Now, here's the flip side. Some people won't like you. They won't like your business and they're gonna give you a bad review or they're gonna contact your business and say, hey, I had this problem with your business and I don't like the way it was handled or I didn't like this food or I didn't like this product or I didn't like this software. Now, most businesses do respond to those but here's the problem. 39% of all the people that gave bad reviews that were surveyed said they expect a response in 60 minutes, 60 minutes. Now, the truth is most businesses large and small wouldn't respond for minimum of five to six hours and you think, well, that's certainly quick enough. It's not quick enough for the respondent, okay? It's not quick enough for the person who filed a complaint against you. That is where the real problem is. You're not battling bad reviews. You're battling how you handle bad reviews. The problem is not the bad review. The problem is how you handle the bad review and the worst thing you can do, the very worst thing you can do is ignore them. Please, please, please don't ignore them. I know the thought in your mind is, oh my gosh, this person's upset and maybe if I just ignore them, they'll go away. That's not what happens. I found out over the years in my food company, in the automotive business, when you ignore a problem, it grows and grows and grows to where it's a huge problem and then it may be out of your control. Now, keep in mind if these reviews are posted on your website, if they're posted on your Yelp listing, if they're posted anywhere where the public can see them, the public's also gonna look to see if you responded to them. I know a lot of times I'll be on Yelp and I'll look at restaurants and the restaurants that respond to everybody's comment, whether it be good or bad, I'm more likely to go to that restaurant. If I go to a Yelp review and I find that there's a whole bunch of bad reviews and the restaurant never responded to them, I know they're really not in touch with their customers. I know they really probably just don't care. Now, maybe they do care but they're scared to respond but it comes across to me like they just don't care and that's what customers are gonna think about you and your brand. According to a book called Talk Triggers, 19% of all purchases are made by word of mouth contact. So something somebody else said about your company, something somebody heard about your company are gonna determine if they buy from you or not and 90% of purchases are influenced by influencers, people who have a following. So it's super important that you're responsive to this and that you stay on top of it. Now, outside of your reviewed channels, people go to different websites and they will review you. It is incumbent upon you to figure out what those websites are, what those review sites are. Recently, I just got a new doctor and I went to health grades and I looked at doctor's ratings. I would look at somebody on my plan that I could go to that was covered which in Texas is pretty bad but anyhow, I would go to my plan and then I would try to find them on health grades and see what people said about them there and that determined which doctor I was gonna pick. That never happened when you were younger. That was all word of mouth. When I was a kid, growing up in the 60s and 70s, there was nothing like that but it's there now and you've gotta realize that your customers are using these sites. So now you have to take charge of this. You gotta wrap your arms around this and you gotta get into those sites and you got to respond to these people out there that are reviewing your company. Now there are review sites out there like Meltwater and Sprinkler and they actually monitor all these sites and they can help you respond to all these reviews that you're getting at your business. You can also use many tools that are AI enabled and they will help you monitor what your reputation is online, what reviews you're getting online. And I highly suggest you run a search, you find some of those and figure out what's appropriate for your company. I could do a whole list here but they may not match what you're selling. If I tell you about health grades that has to do with doctors. If you're selling lawn mowers, that site wouldn't matter to you. So you've got to figure out what sites are out there and then look at some of these tools that can help you monitor them. How you handle these reviews online will greatly affect the sales of your business and that can affect it in a negative way but it can also affect it in a very positive way too. It's just a little bit of effort and you can get somebody in your company to do it. You could have a VA do it or you could do it yourself if you want to be a little bit more hands on. I hope this video helped you out. I hope it lets you understand that you got to take charge of your reputation. You remember that girl in school that had the bad reputation or that guy in school that had the bad reputation, everybody knew about it and it was a small community of people. It's a huge community of people now and you don't want that bad reputation at all, right? You just don't, okay? And you don't want to be a perfect person either. Nobody likes a perfect person. So don't shoot for all five store reviews, embrace the good and the bad, stay in touch with your customers, let them know you care by being in touch with them, by contacting, by responding to anything they post about you online. Thanks so much for watching this video. I hope it's helped you out and your business out and if you got value out of this, do me a favor, hit that subscribe button down there, turn it from red to gray and don't forget to ring the bell. Turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each and every single time I go live or I upload a video. I also have a free course below. It's a $97 course. You can get it absolutely free. All you got to do is opt in and grab it. It's really simple. You don't even need a credit card. Thanks so much for watching this video. Give me a thumbs up if you don't mind and I'll see you in the next video. Hey, thanks for watching my video. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel and click that little bell right there so you can be notified every time I do a new video. Also click on one of those videos there. Keep watching on my channel.