Invest in reputation management for your technology concerns – Any tech company needs to be built on brand and reputation.
Small businesses as well as big businesses have the same concerns, albeit on a rather different scale. As well as gathering profits and great networking connections with other businesses in your sector, you will consider it important to ensure that your employees and your customers are happy with you. However, you may not have considered your reputation. Every single time a customer posts a positive or negative remark or review on the internet, it becomes part of your reputation. Your technology services are dependent upon the perceptions the pubic has upon your products. No matter how good your technology is, people are more concerned with the perception that your brand is shown in a positive light.
So what? You may think. After all, the majority of my customers know that I offer quality products, an honest and excellent service, with reasonable prices. But that is exactly the point: your current customers already know that. No business can truly become successful unless it continues to expand, and that means that you need to engage new people and entice new customers to trust you and your products or services. If all they see on the internet are bad reviews and negative comments, then they are not just likely to buy with you, but they definitely won’t. It is important for a technology company to focus on the perception the public has about their services, because sometimes growth is about reputation.
But even most drastic than that: your reputation can prevent you from contracting with other businesses. Your supply line may catch word of a negative rumor about your product and decide to stop doing business with you. It doesn’t matter that the negative rumor was false, and your reputation is incorrect. Reputation is everything, and if you are not taking good care of yours, you will soon run out of people to work with. Look at Apple’s brand: the argument could be made that the technology that runs the iPhone or iPad is far inferior that competitors. Why?
Your reputation should be your priority when building new technology platforms, and if you are not consciously managing it, then it is completely out of your control. If you want to take back that control, you should definitely consider speaking to a reputation management consultant about your fears and concerns.
Hersh Davis – Nitzberg http://davisnitzberg.com/ specializes in: Reputation Management, Social Media, Online Reputation Management, Reach Certified Personal Branding Strategist, Brand Positioning, Digital Brand, Integrated Marketing, Personal Branding, Public Speaking. He started one of the top reputation management firms in 2007, Repair Bad Reputation, http://repairbadreputation.com/.