Are you actively monitoring your online reputation? If you’re not, you should because more and more people are using search to find everything.
“Whether it’s a restaurant review on their mobile phone, buying a new car through their laptop, or finding out what their friends think about a physician, people are using search engines to find out what they want to know,” says Erik Deckers, owner of a blogging and social media consulting agency in Indianapolis, IN, and who has also co-authored two books on social media for personal branding and businesses.
“If someone has said something negative or nasty about you, that will show up in a search, and can affect whether someone visits or avoids you, he adds.
All kinds of things can happen if you’re not monitoring your reputation, notes Deckers. “A lot of businesspeople I talk to refuse to participate in social media because they’re afraid people will start saying bad things about them,” he says. “What they don’t realize is that people have been saying bad things about them for years. They just don’t know it. But these if these comments and negative reviews go unchecked, you’ll hurt your practice and lose out on potential patients.”