RMV Episode 28
Online Reputation Management 3
Welcome to Resort Marketing Vids. I’m your host and resident marketing expert, Michael Grimm, here for the Resort Developers Association to help you navigate the world of online marketing.
Today we’re wrapping up our three part series covering online reputation management, or ORM. Last week we covered the second area, monitoring and tracking your brand, and any threats to it, online. And of course, before that we showed you the tools necessary to set up early warning systems that alert you the moment something negative about your brand goes online.
In fact we just had a training webinar where we walked through these steps and did the work to set up the early warning systems for one resort that attended the webinar.
This video, part three, is all about influencing the search results you have out there.
In the last video we took stock of what’s out there, figured out who the negative influencers were, and identified what types of sites they were. Now we have to jump in there and be a part of it.
Most sites allow you to participate in the conversation, which means it’s time for us to get in, identify the complainers problem, apologize, and offer a solution. Whether you’re right or wrong, people don’t respond to reason and logic online, they respond to emotion. So just offer a sincere apology and make a good show of trying to make things right. That’s what people want to see.
But of course, that’s just a defensive strategy. What you want to do is take the offense and start creating positive content to replace the negative contents place in the search results online.
This can  be done in so many ways it’s dizzying. So here are a few of my favorites: Get a Flip Cam for seventy bucks online, start going around the resort filming people saying nice things about it, then put those videos online with your keywords (like your resorts name) in the title and description. It’s that easy. Another way is to start a blog. Go on once a week and talk about something related to the families, camping, or fun. It’s easy to pepper in some keywords with a blog. Then the search engines pick your blog posts up and start putting them in the search results.
Another great way is to elicit the response from your members and get them to do all the work for you. Print out some conversation cards, basically a business card sized card that has your logo along with a call to action for the member to rate or review your resort online. It instructs them to go to Google Places or Yelp and share about their experience with you. Search engines love this stuff. Especially Google. I’m sure you can put the pieces together there between a Google search and the importance of having reviews on Google Places.
So, taking both the defensive and offensive approaches that we’ve covered can help boost your brands appearance online. When it comes to online reputation management, nothing is really more powerful than having solid reviews of your resort online. So get started by appealing to your members and friends to go online and tell the world how they feel about your resort.
Remember, if you want to learn more, start participating in our webinars. We have them every 2nd and 4th Wednesday. We really go deep on these topics in those. If you want to learn more about how to get involved with our webinar training programs just click on the “Stay Updated†link in the menu bar on the RDA Support home page and fill out your information.
Join us next week as we continue to explore the fringes of marketing and new ways we can take massive action to create a huge impact. I’m Michael Grimm for the Resort Developers Association and I’ll see you later.