For our purposes, Web Word of Mouth is the sum total of all the information about your business or organization, you, and your employees, that is available for viewing on the Web. In other words, it’s the information on the Web that a prospective customer might use in deciding whether to purchase from your business. It’s also the information that an existing customer might use in deciding whether to continue a relationship with your business.

Web word of mouth is also what people do with this information. If they are prospective customers, do they buy from you? If they’re past customers, have they recommended you to their friends? Does this information engender a feeling of trust and confidence in your business? Is the best information easy to find and in a format that is easy for customers to use?

It doesn’t have to be about your business — it can also be about you. If I’m looking for a car repair facility, and find online references to a DUI arrest of the owner of my first choice, that business will rapidly move to the bottom of my list. If I find a reference to another repair shop’s sponsorship of a Special Olympics event, it might move up my list.

It can be about your employees. A friend of mine, who’s a partner in a large law firm, recently told me that her firm had fired an associate from his six figure job because he had complained about the firm in his blog. While firing him might not be the best solution for the employee morale problem, that blog post could influence the firm’s clients to look elsewhere for legal work.

The first thing you should do to launch a Web Word of Mouth program is to start monitoring the Web for positive and negative references to your business. If you run a non-profit organization or a charity, you should do the same thing. Add searches for you and for your employees. What to do when you find information will be the subject of future posts; however, it’s most important that you get started in assessing your word of mouth online.

If you have questions about monitoring the Web for Word of Mouth, please contact us at 713-234-6346.