Food for thought as Google labels law firm poor value for money β if youβre hungry that is
March 6, 2010
In my article on Web 2.0 and online reputation monitoring I discussed the potentially serious implications arising from the fact that online content is widely accessible on the internet to millions of people around the world.
Because any negative comments are magnified, and can have an impact on your bottom line, it is important to keep abreast of mentions of your brand by monitoring your reputation. This is basic brand protection that anyone doing business online needs to put in place.
Now there is added reason to closely monitor your online reputation, to make sure there are no errors or other misleading information online. In this blog piece on Google Local Search Paul Smith highlights some interesting developments in Google local, whereby Google is scraping review sites to add information to your results.
Amusingly, Pennington Solicitors is mistakenly linked to reviews of a restaurant. But the less funny side of this is that some surfers may eliminate Penningtons as a potential firm once they see at the very top of the page the words ‘Value for Money – None whatsoever’. Given the speed with which surfers move around the web, it is more than likely that this little error on the part of Google could cost Penningtons business.
I would recommend putting in place a strategy to regularly monitor your online reputation, and decide in advance how you will deal with various scenarios you may come across.
