Encourage Your Linchpins for Better Reputation Management!
Linchpins are your creative employees. The ones who help your customers solve their problems with your products and services in creative ways. They’re the employees who will earn your business positive reviews online by performing above your customers’s expectations. They are a key factor at better reputation management for your small business.
IX Brand SEO Services Company helps small businesses build processes for better reputation management, but we can’t do it alone. If our client is not focused on solving customer problems and if our client isn’t meeting customer expectations for service, there’s no magic we can use to fix the situation. We can’t do better reputation management without your effort to provide a better customer experience.
I’ve just finished reading Seth Godin’s new book, Linchpin: are you indispensable?, and his discussion about the importance of linchpins made me think of a conversation I had with a potential client recently. We were talking about how to handle Web customer reviews — both negative and positive. This business has a positive review in Google Maps that identifies an employee by name for providing remarkable service. The business owner also has an MBA from one of the top business schools in the Country, and when I suggested that she make it a practice to recognize such outstanding work, she immediately started to process my suggestion in the context of written policies and procedures and employment manuals. I had to gently redirect her thinking to something impromptu and joyful like gathering the staff together and giving her employee a bouquet of flowers as a token of appreciation.
Linchpin discusses the importance of giving gifts and the concept of emotional labor. It also talks about the need for leadership, in addition to management, in the workplace. My friend’s management training was causing her to think in terms of enforceable, uniform policies, but linchpin leadership thinking would have her searching for creative ways to reward and reinforce linchpin behavior in her staff. Seth Godin might say it’s the choice between creating an organization that’s scalable and one that’s remarkable. I think I’d choose to create a remarkable organization over a scalable one, because in the age of Web Word of Mouth, the remarkable business will be the one customers will talk about.
For help in developing online evidence of your remarkable organization through better reputation management, please contact IX Brand SEO Services Company at 281-343-3284 or send us an email through our contact form. We provide expert reputation management services to small businesses in Sugar Land, Metro Houston and all over the United States.
