In this solo presentation, Shaun Whynacht explains what business reputation means and why it matters, then walks viewers through a practical, step‑by‑step audit of their online presence. He highlights common reputation‑damaging issues such as outdated directory listings, broken web‑forms, and unmonitored social‑media messages. Shaun then shows how to turn a great customer experience into a steady stream of Google reviews by creating a review‑request system, giving customers prompts, and timing the ask for maximum impact. He argues that Google reviews are far more valuable than Facebook reviews because they appear directly in Google search results, where prospective customers are looking. The talk ends with a homework assignment: within the next 12‑24 hours, search for your business name, claim or update any listings, and ensure all contact information is current.
Chapters
Okay, let's talk today about reputation. What do we mean by reputation when it comes to your business? We know what it means when somebody has a bad reputation, whether it's in your personal life or, or in the community. But when it comes to your business, what can affect your reputation? Now, if you do a Google search online for the word reputation in business, you're gonna come up with a term that's coined as reputation management. Now that can mean a bunch of different things, but mostly from the marketing side, what you're gonna fall into is how do you get reviews? And we're gonna talk about reviews, uh, in just a moment. But overall, it comes down to managing your entire business reputation online. And there are many things that can tie into that. Commonly, things that you can control are making sure that what is found online about your products, your services, and what you offer is exactly what it is that you offer. You don't want people to go to your website and, and read the content there and, and then, you know, contact you and find out that, hey, that's not what you do, or even That's not the level of service that you offer. That's going to give you a bad reputation. The other side too is when people reach out to you. So a lot of times when we have clients that we work with, we figure out what are the avenues and the channels that their potential customers are going to reach out to them. This can be as easy as a phone number, an email address, a web form on your website, and surprising how many websites have forms that are broken and people don't get those emails that come through there. That is a bad experience. That is also going to tend to lean into giving you a bad reputation. People will perceive it as, hey, you're ignoring me. You're not replying. Another common thing that we'll see is that somebody will have a Facebook page for their business or an Instagram account. And while all those different channels allow the person who's viewing it to message you and contact you through that, but if you're not monitoring it, then again, bad experience, bad reputation. So what do we do about this? What can you do today in your business to audit what's out there? Well, I think the first thing you're going to do is just go and do a Google search right now for your business name. It's a brand search and see what comes up. There may be a lot of different directories. Maybe you're showing up on Yelp or, you know, different directories that you weren't aware even were online and go to those, check them out. Is there a way for people to contact you? Maybe they scraped an old email address off of the internet that doesn't exist anymore. Well, if that's the case, figure out if you can claim that listing or be able to update it. If you can't figure that out, there should be a contact for that site there to ask that question so that you can get that contact information updated. The same thing with your Google listing. Make sure that all the links on there, the website, the call, any of the email stuff, your hours are up to date and current. Again, leading into a good experience and a better reputation. Now, this is all leading up to before you even do business with a customer. But when you do business and you give them a great experience, you deliver an amazing product and a great service. Now it's your time to get a review. And this is a big part of reputation management because no matter how much you spend time on, you know, coming up with the perfect sales copy, the perfect copy for your website, the perfect copy for emails, people are going to believe what other customers have said about you directly from their mouth more so than what you say about yourself. It's human nature. Obviously we're going to We're going to hype up who we are. We're going to come up with the best way to spotlight what we do. But really it comes down to what are other people saying about that experience? Think about travel, right? If you're looking at a resort, you're looking at a hotel or, you know, a different destination, right? Travel experience, whatever that is, you're going to read the reviews. The same thing is going to happen in your business is people are going to look for those reviews. So. Let's not just leave it to fate. Let's go ahead and help put a system in place for that. So that can be as easy as just getting your Google review link from your Google Business listing and sending out an email after you do business with somebody. You know, think about when it is that they would feel the best about what it is that you did. Maybe it's immediately after you deliver that project or you've done that job, or maybe it's something that they have to use for a bit to feel that out. And that's the kind of thing you want people to to have come across in their reviews. So the next part is, is give them an idea of what to say. A lot of people just don't know what to say in a review and sending them a simple link and saying, hey, would you give us a review on Google? Just isn't going to cut it because people that are kind of unsure of what to say are going to say no, right? They may say yes to you first, but they're not going to do it. But if you give them an idea of what to say or what to start with, maybe it's like, hey, would you give us a review on Google and just start with what life was like before you found our service and what is it like now? Right? Or talk about the frustrations you had with X, Y, and Z before, and now that it's been fixed, how does that feel? Because now you're starting to lead into that story that you want them to start to tell. And you're also starting to frame the way that you want those reviews to be displayed and read by potential customers. So focus on your Google reviews. The last thing I'm going to leave you with here is looking at whether we focus on Facebook reviews or Google reviews. Personally, and what I've seen out there, I would lean you towards Google reviews. More so than the Facebook reviews. And the reason for that is people are going to do Google searches for you when they're hearing about your name. So whether they see you in an advertisement or somebody says, hey, you know what, go and check out Shaun, he'll help you. Well, people are gonna go online and they're gonna Google that name or the business name, and the Google's gonna come up and the reviews are there on the right-hand side. Where you have Facebook, probably not gonna go to Facebook and then go into your page and then look for your reviews there. So the Google reviews stand out a little sooner in that search and that journey when they're starting to do that investigation for you. And it's, you know, it's easier for people to consume that and read that. And I just, I just think Google's going to stick around a lot longer with the trusting side than Facebook. So what I'm going to leave you with right now is just to think about your business. Your homework is to go on Google in the next 12 to 24 hours and do a search for your business and see where you're showing up. Making sure that all that information and all that data is up to date so that people can find you, communicate with you, and you're able to get those responses.
