Solving the Yelp Puzzle to Build Your Business

Posted on: 04.01.16 By: admin Posted in: DavidPRBlog

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Founded in 2004, the online review site, Yelp, often confounds business owners. It is, without question, one of the dominant review sites and one that often outperforms company websites on search results. What that means is that a search for a particular restaurant on a search engine, for example, could pull up a Yelp listing ahead of the restaurant’s actual site. Now, if the reviews on Yelp are positive, this may increase the chance of a customer booking. However, if reviews are largely negative, the opposite could be true.

A 2011 Harvard Business School study found that each “star” in a Yelp rating impacted sales by between 5-9 percent. Another study suggested that increasing a star rating from 3.5 to 4 on Yelp would increase a restaurant’s chances of being booked during peak hours by 19 percent.

Some businesses have seen dramatic marketing results from actively working with Yelp and engaging the community.

If handled correctly, Yelp has the potential to help generate business for companies with listings, but the site has some idiosyncrasies that need to be addressed and managed.Read More

3 Pieces of Advice From an Online Reputation Fixer

Posted on: 07.08.15 By: admin Posted in: DavidPRBlog

Originally published on PRDaily.com

For the past two years, I have been building a segment of my business around helping people with online problems.

Striving to get negative content removed from search on behalf of my clients has been, without question, one of the most interesting things I have done in my 25-year career in public relations.

I gained interest in the practice due to a number of factors. Part of it was directly related to hearing an increasing number of online horror stories, and the other part of it has to do with my sometimes overly righteous personality. I have strong opinions about what is fair and what is unfair in life, and the Internet can be incredibly unfair. It enables people to say almost anything they want. The door to the online world is wide open for crazy people, mean people and folks with an axe to grind.

As I develop my own reputation as something on an online reputation fixer, I have learned that a huge number of folks have issues with our digital world. The Internet plays a major role in how we are perceived, and many of the challenges facing PR professionals today have to do with online issues. Quickly and steadily, the two worlds are starting to collide.Read More

Crisis Management Begins Online

Posted on: 05.07.15 By: admin Posted in: DavidPRBlog

Crisis Management Begins OnlineA friend called me recently in a bit of a panic. One of her college-aged children was tangentially involved with a crisis at her university, and my friend and some of the other parents were wondering if it would be beneficial to engage a public relations expert. Should they reach out to the media or not? How might their kids be perceived? They had many questions.

Before we dug into the details of the incident, I told my friend that the very first thing that needed to be done was to ensure that the students did not say anything about the incident that might end up online. I cautioned: Don’t post anything about it on Facebook, don’t tweet about it, and absolutely do not speak to anyone from the media. I told her that the most important thing was to guarantee that her child’s name was in no way associated online with this situation. She needed to keep her kid’s name shielded from this crisis, so the student would not be associated with it in any way – pro, con, or indifferent.

We are in a whole new world of public relations crisis management because the Internet is now king.Read More

Managing Corporate Online Hate

Posted on: 04.03.15 By: admin Posted in: DavidPRBlog

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While I’m certain she wasn’t pondering online reputation management, Taylor Swift had it right when she sang “the haters gonna hate, hate, hate” in her hit single “Shake it Off.” Online hate remains a major problem in business today, and sadly, we can’t always just take the pop starlet’s advice and roll with it.

Hate blogs and hate websites can pop up overnight, and if written by clever authors, can quickly rise to the top of search results. Reputational and economic damage frequently follow.

When confronted with negative online content that hinders your business or damages your organization’s reputation, the best advice is to remain calm and make a sound assessment. While the first reaction may be to blast away at the hate blog, defamatory post, negative news article or nasty review, we have found that it makes more sense to slow down and develop a strategy before confronting the source—assuming you can figure out who posted the negative information in the first place.Read More

Being “Off the Grid” May Damage Your Online Reputation

Posted on: 02.09.15 By: admin Posted in: DavidPRBlog

In the past year, I’ve become increasingly interested in the world of online reputation management and helping executives and other professionals to counteract negative articles, blog posts, and other troubling web content. A couple of things have caught my attention. The first is that almost everyone I speak with has a story (often a horror story) about how a friend or colleague felt victimized by negative online content. Negative reviews impacted business, social media missteps hurt an applicant’s chances of getting a job, and online stories (true or otherwise) injured people personally and professionally. The prevalence of this has surprised me.

The second thing that caught my attention was the fact that so many professional people have no control of their online reputation—on purpose.Read More

New Trend: Be Invisible Online 

Posted on: 09.11.14 By: admin Posted in: DavidPRBlog

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Businesses spend years and millions of dollars making it easier for customers to find them online, but an emerging trend suggests they also are seeking ways to be invisible.

A study last year from the Pew Internet Research Project found that most internet users would like to be anonymous online at least occasionally. The report said that 86 percent of users have taken steps to remove or mask their digital footprints—ranging from clearing cookies to encrypting their email, from avoiding using their name to using virtual networks that mask their internet address.Read More

Online Image Repair: From “Do Nothing” to “Black Ops”

Posted on: 02.06.14 By: admin Posted in: DavidPRBlog

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Managing negative internet content has become part of the marketing mix for many companies.  And if we judge by the frequency of ads on satellite radio for online reputation management firms, it might lead you to believe that we all have a problem that needs fixing.Read More

Digital Reality Meets Jurassic Park

Posted on: 11.07.13 By: admin Posted in: DavidPRBlog

For years, the public relations sales pitch included a reminder that “perception is reality.”  How we are viewed by others helps define us, whether we like it or not.  But the definition of perception is actually changing, and it’s not just the mental image that people have of us that matters.  Today, we have to look beyond traditional mental imagery and also focus on how we are perceived digitally.

Perception is also digital reality.Read More