Performance Media Placement : Performance Media Placement

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

How to Handle Inbound Marketing

The primary purpose of the online marketing is to make your phone ring. Many things can go wrong if you’re not careful. You can lose customers by simply not picking up the phone or by using an answering machine to screen calls. Remember, potential new customers who have found your phone number online have many additional choices. With the click of a mouse they can easily find your competitors’ phone numbers. Statistics show nearly all potential new customers won’t call back if your phone just rings and very few will leave a message on your answering machine. Both of these outcomes result in wasted marketing dollars.

Statistics show that over 90% of all buyers do not use price as the primary reason for buying a product or service. You should do your best to have a caring and enthusiastic person answering the phone. Your customers won’t buy from you unless they know that you care and that you are working in their best interest.

If you can’t immediately service a potential sales call and the call has to be transferred to someone more knowledgeable, make sure you get that person back on line with the potential new customer very quickly. The MIT study below shows that your chance of turning that call into a customer drops off rapidly after the first five minutes!

Performance Media Placement offers a broad range of positive return on investment (ROI) based online marketing programs for small to mid-sized businesses (SMB’s). The Company tailors campaigns to fit specific business types and geographic targets. The Company’s contracts are month to month and all changes can be made at any time, allowing for continual optimization. All programs are completely turn-key, i.e. customers don’t even need a website to receive immediate presence online. Results can be seen as soon as 10 days after the customer places an order.

Performance Media Placement provides our customers open and transparent access to all of our processes and campaign metrics. We never operate any black hat, scam or fraud processes.

Monday, October 4, 2010

How to Check for Negative Information Online

Most of all the negative information posted online against small businesses comes from past employees or competitors. This is an extremely common problem; you’re not alone. It gets worse as you grow bigger and have a larger base of employees. This information can cause you great harm and you should be aware of it. Today 94% of your potential new customers begin their search with a search engine. During the search process any negative information could quickly dissuade them from contacting your business.

It’s very common for a prospective new customer to do a cursory glance to see if there is any negative information on your company before they begin a business relationship with you. A quick way to check is first just put your company name in Google. Look for any negative comments. If you still don’t see any negative comments, try the following queries in Google. Users often make the query Company Name and Scam, Fraud or Ripoff. The user of the double quotes around your company name assures that Google will only search for your full company name and not one or more of the words making up your name.

“Your Company Name” Scam

“Your Company Name” Fraud

“Your Company Name” Ripoff

www.companyname.com scam

www.companyname.com fraud

www.companyname.com ripoff

The most common sites where complaints are posted are the following:

www.ripoffreport.com

www.scam.com

www.complaintboard.com

www.complaintwire.com

You can search for your company here by using the query below:

“Your Company Name” site:ripoffreport.com or scam.com, complaintwire.com, etc.

Note: there are no spaces around the ‘:’

If you see any complaints, please read our blogs on How to Handle Negative Blogs online and How to Deal with Stupid Bloggers.

To continuously monitor what people are saying about your business, you can set up Google Alerts, which will notify you any time someone mentions your business online.

Simply go to http://www.google.com/alerts, enter your business name in quotes (ex: “ABC Business”) and your email address, and Google will let you know whenever new results appear.

Performance Media Placement provides our customers open and transparent access to all of our processes and campaign metrics. We never operate any black hat, scam or fraud processes.

How to Handle Negative Blogs

Our sales department talks to hundreds of potential customers each day. Bad blogs are a re-occurring theme with our customers and a huge concern. We believe that the large majority of negative blogs, as much as 90% or more, are from disgruntled past employees. The few remaining blogs are from actual customers and sometimes your competitors.

Under current law, there is almost nothing you can do against false and slanderous blogs. Anyone can post an anonymous complaint on a number of sites, accusing your company of scams and fraud. If you choose to send a threatening letter or attempt to take legal action on the company that hosts the blog, such as www.complaintwire.com or www.ripoffreport.com, you will get a letter back stating that they are fully within their rights to host this information and that if you proceed with legal action, they will prevail and you will be responsible for their legal fees incurred to fight you. They are right in this regard. Unlike information published in a newspaper or TV station, these comments are not considered libel, and thus the companies that provide this space for users are not responsible for the content on their sites.

Furthermore, most ex-employees and competitors register on such sites with fake email addresses, or addresses that do not reflect their true identity. Attempting to trace fake addresses is not only hard to do, but will typically lead to nowhere. Your time is better spent addressing these blogs in 2 ways:

1. Take on the blog directly. Respond directly to their false accusations stating that this is a blog is fraudulent. Explain how your company operates, and disprove the accusation. Be honest and sincere in your reply and point out that the original complaint is from an ex-employee. This is also a forum for you to state some of the benefits of working with your company, so enjoy the free advertising! Be sure to include your contact information, which will distinguish you as sincere and honest in contrast to the anonymous blogger.

2. Put your company domain name in the Google search box and see what shows up on the 1^st page (most people don’t search beyond the 1^st page). Typically you’ll see your company, the blog, some local directories like Merchant Circle, Yelp and others. Now go to the 2^nd page and see what’s there. Do the same for your competitors and see where they are showing on the 1^st and 2^nd page. Repeat this process until you see which directories and blogs show up most frequently. This means that these pages rank well in organic search. If you can list your company on these pages, creating profiles, etc, then you can “push” the bad blog out of the search results. Sign up for these directories and blogs and add content about your business. Over time these postings will show up and displace the negative blogs. If your competitors or ex-employees continue to add information, you will likely have to move solely to step 1 above. Don’t hesitate to addresses the false blogs directly.

We believe that over time the laws will change, so keep track if any lost business. You may decide to sue this blogger for damages in the future. Keep in mind that most hosting companies keep data for a very long time and some forever. Much of the accounting for your lawsuit will always be available.

There are many ways to find the name of the actual person using services such as www.emailfinder.com and if that doesn’t work, private investigators working with law enforcement can often easily find who is actually behind the email address of the blogger.

Performance Media Placement provides our customers open and transparent access to all of our processes and campaign metrics. We never operate any black hat, scam or fraud processes.

How to Deal with Stupid Bloggers

Most of the negative information posted online against small businesses comes from past employees or competitors. Neither is often very smart. They often make mistakes. In order to successfully combat such attacks on your company’s reputation, you need to capitalize on these mistakes wherever possible.

Case Study: We terminated an employee who immediately went online and created a fake account with Merchant Circle (a very popular directory for small businesses), and tried to pose as Performance Media Placement. This fake account showed up almost immediately on the Internet and was intended to make our company look like a scam. This ex-employee posted a listing as us using verbiage such as “we will rip you off”. Did we mention how dumb some of these people can be? I doubt anyone would have taken this seriously, but we continued to pursue this false listing anyway.

We contacted Merchant Circle and told them our problem. They verified that we were the real Performance Media Placement and that the other account was a fraud. They then disclosed the email of the person that set up this listing. This ex-employee had used a Gmail account with their name (name@gmail.com). This is the kind of mistake that is easy to take advantage of. Having determined their identity, we quickly called this ex-employee and asked that they remove the listing. They refused. We then called our local police department, who quickly dispatched an officer. The officer proceeded to call this employee for details of the investigation and in the conversation convinced him to remove the fake account. Problem solved in less than a day from the day we discovered it. If law enforcement had declined to pursue the action or Merchant Circle refused to remove the listing, knowing the ex-employee’s information will allow you to respond these fraudulent claims by calling them out on their real identity.

An alternate solution would to contact the ex-employee’s current employer and apply pressure there, at the very least by warning them that if they ever part ways with this employee in a negative way, their reputation will be at risk. Be sure not to break any non-disclosure laws your state might have against revealing the details of the person’s employment history.

If you aren’t sure who is posting fraudulent blogs or calling your company a scam, you can use www.emailfinder.com to try to find out. If you are willing to spend some money, a private investigator with connections to law enforcement can dig even deeper.

We’d like to thank Merchant Circle for their ability to be reached and their professional assistance in helping us resolve this fake listing very quickly. What a fantastic company!

Performance Media Placement provides our customers open and transparent access to all of our processes and campaign metrics. We never operate any black hat, scam or fraud processes.