In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Small-business reporter Raymund Flandez talks to Ken Henson, Nationwide Candy’s general manager:

Keep in mind that a negative review can often be helpful. Case in point: an online customer of Nationwide Candy LLC of Albuquerque, N.M., complained after she received the wrong bubblegum product. Turns out, the candy wholesaler had posted an incorrect image on its site. “It just casted a bad image on us,” says Ken Henson, its general manager, who immediately corrected the error.

By simply having RatePoint’s customer feedback tools on its Web site, Nationwide Candy was able to quickly resolve a customer complaint and remove the incorrect image before it caused additional confusion or customer feedback.

Resolving customer issues and taking the steps to respond and listen to concerns can turn good customer service into a memorable customer experience.

The small-business community has been abuzz about Twitter and its use for SMBs. The New York Times recently published a story highlighting successful uses of Twitter by small businesses and tips on how small business owners are using Twitter to market their business (NYT link requires log-in …it’s free, and is worth a read!).

At RatePoint, we’re big believers in social media as extensions to marketing strategies and today we’re taking another step to integrate social media into your marketing efforts, and connect to a larger audience. With RatePoint, your e-mail marketing campaigns now can be posted to Twitter automatically.

Twitter is a great tool to reach customers where they already may be spending time and also enhances your search engine optimization. It’s a complementary strategy that expands your reach beyond an e-mail list and promotes your campaigns to new customers.

Some of our customers are already taking advantage of this feature.

http://twitter.com/almightycreates
http://twitter.com/atterdagkids
http://twitter.com/mysterycafe
http://twitter.com/SaltWaterFishCo
http://twitter.com/SprinklerStore
http://twitter.com/unique_coffee

Getting started is as simple as checking a box. Once your Twitter information is entered in your account, you click the “Publish To My Twitter Account” box. Your campaign will be posted with your subject line and a shortened URL to your campaign.

If you are already on Twitter, you know that it’s a great way to engage with existing and potential customers. If you aren’t yet signed up, it’s pretty easy to get started. We recommend Twitter’s business guide for pointers.

To learn more about how to use Twitter to extend your email marketing efforts, sign up for our upcoming webinar Wednesday, August 26th at 2PM EDT

At RatePoint, we love to highlight customers on Twitter. Our success is the success of our customers, and Twitter is a great place to showcase the great things RatePoint customers are doing.

If you have any questions, a RatePoint coach is always available to help you get set up to use Twitter with your email marketing. As we roll out this feature, we’re excited to hear your feedback and successes with integrating Twitter into your marketing efforts.

Follow us on Twitter @RatePoint

We recently announced a strategic partnership with the Advertising Specialty Institute at the 2009 ASI Show Chicago. The partnership gives ASI distributors the ability to market their business through RatePoint’s easy-to-use e-mail marketing and customer review tools.

Soon after our announcement, we are already seeing ASI members who are turning to RatePoint to help them. One ASI member, Theron, blogged about his experience talking with a RatePoint coach who helped him to get started using RatePoint.

We’re looking forward to connecting with more ASI members to see how using RatePoint may benefit them and to hear more stories like Theron’s.

This holds true for the SMB market, as well. We recently surveyed some small-business owners and found some interesting data that we announced recently.

Our research found that reviews are six times as likely to impact a business positively (24 percent) than negatively (4 percent.)  While many small businesses are apprehensive about reviews due to the possibility of a negative review, the reality is they are more likely to see positive feedback.

Additional analysis of our survey was covered in Entrepreneur, Small Business Newz, Small Business TV and Blogtrepreneur.

While reviews are a low-cost, high-return marketing strategy, many SMBs aren’t taking advantage of the opportunity. We also found that a third of small businesses weren’t even sure if a review had impacted their business.

Want to find out how to better collect positive reviews for your business? Are you a small business who doesn’t know how a review has impacted you? Contact us and we’d be happy to get you started on a trial of RatePoint that will empower you to use this low-cost, high-return marketing tool to grow your business.

The Product of the Year winner is determined by a vote of the MassNetComms membership and recognizes an innovative product, released in 2008.  Winners were announced at the awards ceremony on April 14 at the Hyatt Regency Cambridge.

Reputation management is really starting to generate a lot of interest from businesses and the media. However, RatePoint has been concentrating on developing this category for several years because we know that the reputation economy is here. For businesses, this means that you not only need to know what’s being said about you online, you also need the tools to act when necessary and promote positive feedback when the opportunity arises.

We’re thrilled… and energized. A lot goes into developing a great product - the hard work of our employees and the relationships we hold with our board, investors and our customers! Keep watching for more great things to come from RatePoint.

And if you’re interested, here’s a bit about our award-winning enterprise product (oh, and of course we have solutions for you, the small business - too.) RatePoint Enterprise includes the online reputation management and customer feedback features already well known in RatePoint’s small- and medium-sized businesses solution, and expands on existing features to broaden support for companies that need scalable dispute resolution, advanced user management and additional reporting features. RatePoint Enterprise’s platform scales to handle massive customer inquiry and disputes while enabling customer service departments to respond effectively and efficiently. The multi-user environment provides pre-defined roles and role-based access to varying levels of data and customer records.

Lists like these prove these types of discussions are happening. Small businesses have the option not to participate and let it spiral out of their control - or take a more proactive approach to their online reputation.
This Sunday, our co-founder and CEO, Neal Creighton, will be featured on KKOB in Albuquerque talking about how small businesses can proactively approach customer feedback and their online reputation.

Do you have a story of how an online review negatively impacted your brand?

I encourage you to share it with me at ygaudette@ratepoint.com

RatePoint’s co-founder and CEO, Neal Creighton, was recently quoted by bMighty offering tips for small businesses to manage their online reputation to increase customer retention and create attention from potential customers.
Here are the tips from Neal:

1.    Move From Reactive To Proactive — It’s impossible to track everything that’s being said about your business or products online. Even small businesses without a Web presence — the local pizza shop or hardware store — find themselves being talked about on review sites. Until now, the strategy has been to chase after the latest negative review to either put out the fire or pursue the most recent positive review to encourage additional dialogue. Small businesses should change their mentality from being reactive to proactive when it comes to customer reviews. This means proactively soliciting feedback from your customers at every opportunity and in a timely manner while the experience is still fresh. The majority of feedback that is proactively solicited is positive.

2.    Don’t Be Afraid Of Negative Feedback — To know what customers are thinking, businesses have to ask. Many small businesses fear negative feedback, but failing to recognize and fix negative customer experiences can harm your business, its reputation, and its future sales. A negative experience is an opportunity to display superb customer service and personify a brand as being in-touch with its customer base. Customers want to know businesses care about their experience. By proactively asking for feedback and proactively responding, a business can significantly enhance its brand.

3.    Make It Easy To Collect (And Ultimately Promote) Feedback — A suggestion box or a standalone survey doesn’t create communication between a customer and a retailer, nor does it fix a problem that may have just happened. Traditional brick and mortar businesses can also leverage new online tools to collect and promote customer feedback and reviews. Customer feedback request tools can be used not only on Web sites, but also on receipts, invoices, e-mails, and at point of purchase.

Read more about how your business can stay ahead of the competition.

A survey conducted by The National Association of Retail Marketing Services revealed the impact of a negative experience on a brand - for every one customer that complains, businesses will lose 10 customers. Also, 13 percent of those surveyed indicated they tell more than 20 people about their negative experiences.

We’ve all seen examples of how the Internet makes it much easier to tell others quickly what we think. It’s up to the business to be proactive in seeking customer feedback and responding to negative comments. RatePoint customer, BuyMMOAccounts.com, has proactively been able to address information online about its reputation by pointing to its collection of customer reviews on RatePoint.

As we wrote earlier this month, the lawsuits surrounding reviews left on Yelp have highlighted the importance of managing reputation online before it turns into a larger issue. It’s great to see businesses becoming proactive about reputation to minimize the impact on the brand.

So what’s a small-business owner to do? Instead of taking a backseat to building customer trust, business owners have the opportunity to strengthen customer relationships with proactive reviews.

When small- and medium-sized businesses proactively request feedback and reviews from consumers, it also creates an opportunity to mediate and resolve any potential disputes before those consumers take their complaints to another Web site. For example, if a business requests feedback after a purchase and the customer reports a shipping issue, the business can take steps to resolve the problem, which creates a satisfied customer and dispels the need for negative feedback elsewhere.

In an economy where reputation is essential, small businesses have the opportunity to harness the power of reviews and resolve any issues before consumers take their feedback elsewhere – and before a war of words turns into a court battle.

Online reputation is important, and companies of any size should be looking for what their customers are saying about them – and what potential customers are seeing.

However, rather than concentrating on earning customer trust after the fact, businesses have an opportunity to become proactive and seek out reviews from their customers, build a positive reputation and turn positive feedback into measurable marketing and sales tools.

Customer feedback is always important to the bottom line, especially when marketing budgets are tight.

We’ll be talking about this regularly here on the RatePoint blog and highlighting some of our customer success stories. It’s time that someone represents reputation from the business point of view. Small businesses need to take control of their online reputations.

Drop us a line or ask us a question.