It’s true – we generally only go to review sites when we’re upset with a business. So how can a business owner trigger more positive reviews and social mentions?

Please note: DO NOT under any circumstances, contrive positive reviews for your business. This is unethical, easily detected, and most likely illegal. This is called “astroturfing” and just like in politics, can ruin your credibility or damage your reputation even further.

Make sure you deserve a good review.

Most business owners think their service is impeccable and as long as people continue to buy, they have nothing to worry about. Like an IT technician is trained to look for problems with the physical layer first, you should make certain that your business gives exemplary service BEFORE you should expect any positive mentions or reviews. If your business model or practices are uncouth or shady, you cannot expect anyone to say anything nice about you online. Some businesses are inherently going to make some people upset, but this comes down to managing expectations.

Look at the reviews you already have.

Duh. You can’t generate good reviews (at least not legally) unless you have happy customers to write them. No amount of asking for user reviews or soliciting feedback will help compensate for a bad first impression. Greasy fingerprints on glass doors are a turn off of mine. Even if I get great service and the food is great, my first impression is that diner doesn’t care if they appear to be clean. Start by making sure to resolve any issues that particularly bother your customers if you possibly can. How do you find out what those issues are? By reading reviews left about your business. If you know a patron that left a bad review, ask them if you’ve improved.

Consider asking for reviews.

Tread lightly if you decide to do this. Don’t ask for good reviews, just reviews, and not until the end of the transaction. The request should come after a meaningful interaction of some sort, not with every routine transaction. I had an exterminator ask me to give a 5 star review on their page on the yellow pages website. He explained there was a contest going on for the field techs to get good reviews. I thought, “That’s a neat idea,” until I went digging into the full scope of their reputation online. There was a reason they were asking for 5-star reviews, to cover up the 300+ 1-star reviews they had. After reading several, I could tell which reviews were contrived, which ones were asked for, and which ones were legitimate complaints. I chose not to leave any review at that time, and decided I didn’t want to contribute to this company’s cover-up. I may have left a good review had I not been asked to write a 5-star review, when the service was not the extra mile.

Make your web presence known.

If a majority of your customers are younger than 30, asking them to post a review may turn them off. Instead, simply engage with them in the online world by creating a Facebook group and Twitter account for your business. Customers in this age bracket are so accustomed to posting online about every experience they have, they’ll almost certainly share their thoughts about your product or service without asking them to… good and bad. So make sure you are prepared for them.

Respond quickly to bad reviews.

The best way to deal with a bad review is to resist the urge to defend your company, product, or employee, an approach that almost always makes things worse. The key is how you respond is not just for the person who made the complaint, but for the general public that will see how you reacted. If a complaint is valid, thank the customer for the review and apologize for their bad experience. Most times, the consumer just wants you to acknowledge that you, the business owner, understands there’s a problem and wants to fix it. Some customers will often go back and update a negative review once the issue has been resolved, so you can turn a negative into a positive if you act quickly. If the bad review is unwarranted, it’s especially imperative to resist the urge to get defensive. Respond with empathy and appreciation for their honest feedback.

Reach out to negative reviewers directly.

Not everyone recommends responding publicly to bad reviews. Sometimes it is never a good idea to respond online to negative reviews, because doing so tends to put the business in a defensive position. Some companies elect to contact negative reviewers directly if they can be found, and tries to resolve the issue. Thoughtful, constructive responses go much further than ignoring them or rebutting them defensively. You may offer an extension of a complimentary dessert or a coupon for their next visit.

Make reviewing your business easy.

By putting a link to a review site page right into your website, you can expect you’ll get more reviews. Some strategies include ‘give feedback’ or ‘suggestions’ button on your website so that users can do so without going public. Think of this as the comment boxes you used to see in places that were corporately owned but locally operated. This does a few things for you; it can keep a good majority of complaints from ever being seen by the public, help you address and resolve the customers problem in private, and allows you the opportunity to ask for a review. If you’ve not claimed all your profiles on Google Maps, Yelp or Urban Spoon, you should do so right away to prevent a situation such as this from getting out of hand.

We may not have a crystal ball with all of the answers, but here at TheeDesign Studio we have a few 2012 predictions on how internet marketing will adapt to changes in web design.

Responsive design will become mainstream.

Responsive design is the concept of creating websites that automatically scale and rearrange their content according to the device and screen size it is being viewed. We saw a bit of responsive design in 2011 with smartphone applications and games, but in 2012 it will become necessary for websites to function and become just as visually adaptable.

Responsive web design will require internet marketing experts to decide what content is the most important and how it should be placed on the page. A call-to-action button, like “Call us Now” or “Place Order Here,” in a sidebar on a desktop computer might not fit on a mobile browser, and so they’ll have to think about the size and placement of that button on the page.

Mobile design will become industry standard.

Smartphones are everywhere and tablet usage is growing every day. In order to stay in front of their audience, websites are being forced to adapt to the various mobile platforms available on the market.

In 2011 we saw marketers start to capitalize on mobile technology by offering incentives to customers who used their smartphones to scan promotional codes or check-in their location at their business. We will still see this mobile approach to marketing in 2012, but we will also see more business executives using their tablets as high-tech marketing brochures. Mobile devices allow the traveling salesperson to bring and showcase their portfolio, quickly pull up reports, or process a credit card payment instantly and all on one device.

Flash will become extinct.

Flash was once very popular for web designers, but it has slowly lost momentum. In 2012, flash will likely lose all or most of its momentum. CSS3 and HTML5 have come into the picture and offer faster loading, interactivity for users, and is simply better than Flash for mobile devices.

HTML5 has taken over most of the actions that Flash could do. HTML5 will greatly influence internet marketing in 2012 because it can create really rich and interesting typography, graphics and video which combined can create a dynamic marketing website that compels the viewer to stay on the site longer or make a purchase.

This analogy could be used with any number of other professions other than auto repair; attorney, family dentist, accountant, dog sitter, realtor – whatever, they are all relationships you would build and forge with trust. The same trust is necessary from your SEO agency.

Mechanics (and SEO’s) sometimes get a bad rap because even if you find one you know and trust, they charge handsomely for their time and expertise. What you may not consider is to keep up with how to fix newer cars with newer technology, costs are considerably expensive.  Take for instance, the amount of time it takes to replace your timing belt and the cost of the tools to do it correctly. It takes an average minimum 4 hours to remove everything in the way of the belt, replace it, and put everything back properly. Depending on your make and model, the necessary tools can cost about $8,000 just for the basics. Finding a mechanic that you know and trust is crucial to your vehicle’s value, performance and most importantly – your safety. Consider the same when you shop for an internet marketing agency.

Unsolicited phone calls and emails from SEO companies are usually not a trustworthy folks to hire. Would you agree to pay a mechanic a monthly fee to make sure your tires stay on and your doors close? That is essentially what you’d be getting if you buy into an internet marketing agency that comes to you.

Let’s say you choose to go with the dealership mechanic because you trust the salesman that sold you the car. What you may not know is that the service department is run separately from the sales floor and the management is a bit crooked. What I’m getting at is just because the company that made your website did an outstanding job at designing it, may not be the best at getting you traffic. This can be true even if you do trust them.

Much like your relationship with your mechanic, as you get to know your SEO provider, you should start to learn what his time and expertise is worth. You can do this by what data they show you and if your conversions have increased. It’s a lot like the mechanic giving you back the old parts as proof of a job being done. Even better, my mechanic actually shows me what he’s doing and makes sure I’m aware of the options for band-aids if my budget is low. He always suggests I take his advice and go with the best solutions to ensure my car runs at peak performance and is optimally safe. I hope your mechanic  or internet marketing agency does the same for you.

Managing a business website is now easier than ever with the availability of open source Content Management Systems (CMS). A CMS allows a business owner to update and edit their website’s content without advanced webmaster or programming skills.

A good CMS helps you:

• keep your website well organized
• reduce site maintenance costs
• generate and manage sales leads

WordPress is a very popular blog posting platform. But what many people don’t know is that it is also an excellent open source CMS. Here at TheeDesign Studio, we use WordPress to design and build websites for our clients. Our designers and developers customize the CMS to fit each client’s needs and design preferences.

A few of the top reasons why we believe WordPress is the best open source CMS of 2011:

• Supportive global community.

Since WordPress is so widely used, there is an abundance of tutorials and help forums available to find any and all information a developer could possibly need in customizing the CMS.

• Easy content editing.

Once the design and development are done, our clients love the user-friendly CMS platform that allows them to update their content, post blogs or company news, or update contact information.

• Search engine friendliness.

WordPress makes it easy to optimize websites for search engine results. That means your site is more likely to land on the first page of Google, Yahoo, and Bing results when someone is searching for your keywords.

• Sales lead management.

We design websites are not just pretty, but are powerful marketing tools. WordPress is great for keeping track of your internet leads coming from your website and submitting information on your website contact form.

Our marketing and web design team here in Raleigh is working hard filling your website and internet presence with holiday cheer (and search engine friendly keywords). But sometimes even hard working elves need to take a break and share a laugh…

Internet marketing efforts can fall into two holiday categories: Naughty and Nice. Here are a couple examples of both to help you assess, is your marketing Naughty or Nice?

Naughty List

• Boring Content

If you aren’t keeping your website and social media content fresh and interesting, you are wasting your time. A common marketing mistake for businesses is that they believe they should talk only about themselves and their achievements. This might be interesting to you and your staff, but can be boring to your audience.

It is more valuable to your marketing efforts if you can tell your audience what you can offer them. How you can make their lives better or easier. Useful or entertaining information is much more interesting than self promotion.

• Christmas Spam

A holiday ham can be tasty, but spam is a different story. No one likes spam messages regardless of the time of year. However many businesses abuse the holidays as an excuse to send excessive amounts of email promotions. Being too pushy or spamming with your internet marketing can have the opposite effect of what you intended, as your would-be consumers start to opt-out of your messages or blacklist you as a spammer.

Nice List

• Holiday Keywords

The holidays are a great opportunity for marketing your products or services as gift items. Including keywords like “Christmas” or “Gift” can help your target consumers find your products easier as they are searching for the perfect gift items for loved ones. If you are a bakery for example, you could add the keywords “Christmas cupcakes for holiday parties” or “gifts for bakers.”

• Spreading Social Cheer

Wish your Facebook fans a Merry Christmas. Take some time out of your busy day and write personal thank you messages to clients on their Facebook wall. Make someone smile for the simple joy that it brings. People trust brands with good intentions and respond well to messages that don’t have an alternative or hidden agenda.

• Keep your page updated with new content.

One place to start is with content. You want to keep your Facebook posts and statuses new, fresh and interesting. The more interesting or relevant content you have on your page, the more likely users will see it and interact by commenting, sharing it with their friends, and liking your page.

• Ask interesting and fun questions to get fans talking.

In addition to good content, it’s also a great idea to ask questions from time to time. Not just Yes/No questions, but something that encourages comments and sharing like: “What’s your all-time favorite Christmas jingle?” Many time you’ll find that the simplest questions get the most responses.

• Hide your wall content behind a Like filter.

There are many Facebook social plugins and widgets available on the web. Many of them will hide your wall content of your Facebook page until you click the banner image or Like button. This pushes the visitor to Like your page before they have access to see and make comments on your wall or view any of your photos or info.

• Tag your fans in photos and videos.

If you host client appreciation events or networking opportunities, you can take photos and videos and encourage fans to tag themselves afterward. This pushes the pictures onto their wall and friends’ News Feeds, providing valuable exposure. We all know that a picture says a thousand words – think about all the times you notice thumbnail images in your news feed before text.

In today’s economy, consumers are searching for the most bang for their buck. Researching prices takes consumers online where they are more likely to buy the product than go to a local store. As a result, the majority of this online spending is directed towards national retailers who have strong online and social media presences. To stay competitive, small business retailers need to ramp up their own internet marketing and social media strategies.

Here are a few marketing tips to make sure your Raleigh business generates online holiday revenue:

• Promote Web Only Holiday Deals

Hosting online deals unique from your in-store sales is a great opportunity to attract consumers to your website. Whether you offer a site-wide percentage off or choose to reward customers for making purchases above a certain threshold, holiday offers give users a reason to shop your site instead of one of your competitors. While you’re busy promoting, it’s also a good idea to highlight your holiday deals on special landing pages.

• Create Holiday Specific Landing Pages

Consumers looking for a specific item will not have time to click around your site to find it. Be prepared to show them what they want (sometimes before they know they want it). Landing pages, also known as lead capture pages, are single page websites that appear in response to clicking on an advertisement or keyword specific link. It has directed sales copy that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link.

• Reward Your Virtual Fans

The holidays are a perfect time to reward your Facebook fans and thank them for their online loyalty. The holidays are when consumers are more likely to be trolling their Facebook pages, not just because work is usually slow as more people are on vacation, but their also checking their friends’ holiday party plans, and seeing if anyone is sharing holiday coupon codes. So their Facebook News Feed is right where you want to call attention to your own holiday deal and offer a bonus like a discount code specific to Facebook fans. By offering your Facebook fans a token for liking you, you not only give them a reason to make a purchase, but you also create something shareable they can forward to friends.

• Fine Tune Your Shopping Cart

All of this marketing work will be useless however, if your website’s shopping cart doesn’t function properly. Test and retest your shopping cart’s functionality to make sure there are no flaws. This is also an opportunity to implement some of the shopping cart suggestions we blogged about here before.

Bear in mind that your business page is different from your personal profile. I’ve seen some businesses set up their business profile on the personal profile page. This is a big no-no with Facebook and could get you banned. You must however have a personal profile page before you set up your business page or you lose much of the marketing benefit available from your Biz page.

So assuming you have your personal profile set up let’s get started setting up your business page.

1. Don’t Use Your Business Name

Say whaaat? Ok, you can use your business name UNDER ONE CONDITION… that it contains relevant keywords. Remember that you’re trying to attract NEW clients not just those that already know your name. New clients will be searching in Facebook using keywords not your business name. Do a little keyword research to find out what terms people are actually using to find your goods or services.

2. Pick the Most Relevant Category

You’ll see an option to pick from 6 categories each having multiple subcategories for more specificity. Pick the one that most closely describes your business. This can be changed in your “page” settings later so don’t obsess. Remember your keywords and think about what people might search out of these options to find you.

3. Fill Out the Info Page

Take the time to go through each section of the info tab. Use your keywords in the content and don’t forget to put the URL for your website. Bear in mind that Google and other search engines actually index Facebook pages, which can help with your page rank for designated keywords. Speak in your clients “language”; don’t be technical, high brow, etc unless your clients are.

4. Design a Relevant Profile Picture

This is located in the upper right hand corner and can be as large as 140 pix x 580 pix. The default is much smaller so this needs to be strategically laid out. Graphically I like to design them to coordinate with the company’s website. Make it graphically eye catching, not too wordy and have a call to action like “Call Now” (w/ phone number) or “like” our page.

5. Optimize the 5 Photos at the Top of the Page

These 5 pictures or “thumbnails” as they’re called, are rarely used to market products or services so it’s a huge missed opportunity for marketing. Have 5 graphics designed to represent 5 of your products or services. These are uploaded as JPEG photos and in the description you put a URL link to the relevant service or product page on your Website. You can even add some description to your photo/graphic that shows up when someone clicks on the thumbnail. VERY COOL! These links also create back links to your site that help with SEO

6. Feed Your RSS Blog Feed to Your Site

There are tutorials you can “Google” that will walk you through the steps but you can actually feed your new blog posts automatically into your Facebook page through “notes”.

7. Link to Other Social Media Sites

You can link you page to your twitter feed. Just go into you admin area under resources. Once you connect your posts will auto-feed to Twitter.

8. Add Valuable Content

Make sure you post regularly – several times per week – and make sure your post include valuable FREE content you potential clients can use. Don’t just continually sell. Use the 80/20 rule; 80% free valuable content, 20% promotion.

9. Add Applications

You can add things like contact forms, review pages and even auto-responders from some suppliers like Aweber.
Ok, that’s the infrastructure. Once you have the above set up, looking good with a few weeks of content posted it’s time to get some Fan’s.

10. Invite Your Friends

Your initial goal is to get over 25 “likes”, which I’ll explain in a moment. When you initially set up your page you should see a set up page that lists things you should do; one of them being invite your friends. Your friends are those that you’re connected to on your personal profile, which, as mentioned before, you need to have BEFORE you set up your Business Page.

11. Change Your URL When You Reach 25 Likes

After you reach 25 “likes”, you’re able to change your URL, which now has a long number behind it. You can change this on your info page. This URL does not need to be the name of your page. Remember your keywords and pick something searchable; This helps with SEO and page rank as well.

12. Jumpstart Your Number of Likes with Facebook Ads

There are 2 ways to grow your following; organically and paid advertising. It takes some time to grow organically, which is done by putting an icon on your website linking to your Facebook page, put the same in your email signature and on all your stationary; anything to get people to your Fan-Page.

The faster way to drive traffic is set up a Facebook ad that redirects to your page where you can have an offer on a landing page with a reveal tab. The “reveal” tab encourages people to “like” your page as a means to get to your offer. This method is proven to increase those “liking” your page. Then your landing page offer has an auot-responder opt-in box to collect those valuable names and email to market to later and also delivers your promotional offer.

• Local Business or Place
• Product or Brand
• Company, Institution or Organization
• Arts, Entertainment or Sports
• Other

What this Means for SEO

Google is hands down the most recognized search engine in the world. The most recent figures reveal that 65% of search traffic is run through Google. Though Google offers a plethora of both free and paid services, its primary functionality remains serving as a search engine. Although Google’s page ranking algorithm is continually evolving and adapting in many ways unclear to SEO experts, one can be certain that Google+ will most definitely affect search results.

Another new feature for businesses is the ability to have their Google+ pages found through a service called “Direct Connect” in Google Search. This will happen for businesses that Google determines are particularly relevant for a specific kind of search query. What this means is that if someone types into the search field the name of your business with a + symbol in front of the name, they will be automatically pointed to your business. See the following example for Chrome:

What this Means for Social Media

If you’re setting up a page for a local business, you have special features including the ability to list your company’s phone number. Local Google+ pages are unique from other categories of pages because they have features that enable customers to easily connect with your business’s physical location. For example, local pages include a map of the business’s location and feature its address, phone number, and hours of operation.

Of course, many local businesses have already claimed their pages in the completely separate Google Places. Much of the information that Google+ Pages for local businesses wants – and more – are on those pages. But they remain unconnected.

Currently, Place pages and Google+ Pages must be managed separately. A Place page provides information about a business and makes it easy for customers to find local businesses on Google Maps and local search; while a Google+ page provides business owners with additional ways to engage, build relationships, and interact directly with customers.

Hackers and malware propagators are going back on the offensive. Actually, they never stop. These folks are relentless in their pursuit of disruption and according to a report released in 2007, malware has caused over $13 billion in damages during the years of 1996-2006. No current estimate for this trend can be found because of the exponential and untamed growth of malicious code. Scary.

Do you ever wonder about how these hackers start out? Most likely as script kiddies that start by infecting ordinary people’s blogs and websites to gain experience. All of your hard work of building your site and your readers and your voice and your traffic and your revenue and your reputation is compromised by one of these jerks. Lucky for us, WordPress is fairly secure and they provide frequent security updates when they know there’s been trouble. But what can you as a site administrator do to harden WordPress even more?

1. Move wp-config.php into The Root Folder!!!

The wp-config.php file contains all of your WordPress configuration information and settings. You can pretty much tap out if hackers gain access to this file. From here, they can inject malware into your website’s pages, or even worse, delete all your content and replace with their own.

A smart safety feature in WordPress allows you to move the wp-config.php file one level above the WordPress root. On most LAMP host servers, wp-config.php is located in:

~/home/user/public_html/wp-config.php

Use your FTP client to connect into your server, and then move your wp-config.php above the public_html directory so that it is located here instead:

~/home/user/wp-config.php

This way, wp-config.php is no longer in the public-facing root folder, thus disabling the scripts and bots that hackers use to infect your site.

There’s nothing more to this feature, WordPress automatically knows to look for your wp-config.php file one folder above. I wish someone would have told me this sooner, it may have saved my blood pressure from sheer terror as I watched a whole handful of my sites get whacked one after another.

Vigyázat! Caution! Achtung! Увага!

This will not work if you installed your blog in a subdirectory (e.g. public_html/blog) or as an add-on domain in cPanel (e.g.public_html/yourblog.com).

2. Delete The Main Admin Account

The default Administrator account on WordPress has a username of ‘admin’. If you leave this as your default username, you have made the work twice as easy for hackers. You should never use this as the main account. Always choose a different username when installing WordPress.

If you have been using the ‘admin’ account, go into the Dashboard » Users » Add New User screen. Create a new user with the role of Administrator. Now log out, and log back in as the new user.

Go to the Users screen again and delete ‘admin’. WordPress allows you to transfer all of the content created by ‘admin’ to your new user account before confirming deletion.

Another benefit of getting rid of the admin account and switching to, say, your real name, is that it is better for SEO as well. This way when somebody searches your name you will rank higher with yourdomain.com/author/your-name/ than you will with yourdomain.com/author/admin/

3. Update WordPress, Plugins, and Themes

WordPress is so easy to update core files, plugins, and themes, to their latest versions. It’s so easy that it can be easy to forget. But WordPress makes it abundantly clear that you should take heed to the warnings located all over the dashboard. Spending a few minutes installing updates can save you from the destruction and embarrassment of getting hacked.

Plugins and themes should be updated religiously. All plugins and themes from the WordPress directory integrate with the automatic update feature. Many premium plugins and themes also have automatic updates, which is a great reason to invest in a high-quality theme for your WordPress.