ReputationDefender
Press Room

How do you bring a vision to life?  Michael Fertik talks innovation and entrepreneurship at the 2012 Blouin Leadership Summit.

How do you bring a vision to life?  Michael Fertik talks innovation and entrepreneurship at the 2012 Blouin Leadership Summit.

How do you bring a vision to life?  Michael Fertik talks innovation and entrepreneurship at the 2012 Blouin Leadership Summit.

How do you bring a vision to life?  Michael Fertik talks innovation and entrepreneurship at the 2012 Blouin Leadership Summit.

How do you bring a vision to life?  Michael Fertik talks innovation and entrepreneurship at the 2012 Blouin Leadership Summit.

How do you bring a vision to life?  Michael Fertik talks innovation and entrepreneurship at the 2012 Blouin Leadership Summit.

In early 2006, Michael Fertik was in Louisville, Ky., finishing a clerkship at the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, when he noticed that people and companies were increasingly being pulled online without their consent, through cyberbullying and theft of personal data. We’re supposed to control our experience on the Internet, Mr. Fertik said he thought, “but instead we’ve become the objects of the Internet.”

While an undergraduate, Mr. Fertik had co-founded and sold TruExchange, a software company that set up online marketplaces. While completing his clerkship after graduating from Harvard Law School, he started to think that creating a company that helped people and businesses control their online reputations and data might be his logical next step. He turned down the legal job he had lined up in Washington, and moved to Silicon Valley.

In October 2006, he started ReputationDefender. Originally, he thought his biggest customers would be parents concerned about their children’s online reputations, but it turned out to be white-collar professionals worried about their own reputations. Later, after customers began to tune into social media, the company added social media monitoring and management tools. Since it started, ReputationDefender has raised $67 million in venture capital and attracted more than 1.6 million customers. It generally charges small businesses $1,000 to $4,000 a year, Mr. Fertik, 35, said in a conversation that has been condensed and edited.

Q. How do you help companies protect their online reputations?

A. The No. 1 thing we do is help them collect real reviews from real customers. Then we help them publish them on the web in a variety of places and ways. Companies understand that 90 percent of consumers are looking at reviews and relying on reviews when making a purchasing decision.

Q. You also help them push negative mentions down Google rankings, right?

A. If a former employee is attacking you in a blog and that’s the third thing people see about your company online, what we’d do is take the other stuff people could see online and move it up in the search ranking. You sponsor a Little League team; you’ve been in business for 10 years; you’re voted the best place to work in your town. It’s like a cousin of search engine optimization. There’s no reason that the damaging content from the former employee has to be the first thing people see.

Q. Of course, sometimes that negative content is right.

A. Our customers are hungry for constructive feedback, positive or negative. They tend to take action, and they tend not to deny the substance of negative feedback. The receptionist at your medical office or the bouncer at your bar is rude. The business owner wants that feedback and takes action on it. What they don’t like is that a year later it’s the only thing people see about their company. That’s the part that really bothers them. And that’s the part I understand.

Q. How can small-business owners encourage reviews from customers, especially if they’re in industries, like dry cleaning, that don’t normally inspire strong opinions?

A. Only two categories get a lot of reviews, lifestyle and hospitality/entertainment. But in dry cleaning the only kind of strong reaction you get tends to be negative. No one goes online and takes the time unless you burn their garment. So you have to ask. And you have to make it easy. You can email them at home. Or one of the applications we offer is a tablet so people can enter a review right as they pay.

Q. The New York State Attorney General’s investigation of fake reviews showed that not all businesses get reviews the right way.

A. Never, ever, ever manufacture reviews. That’s a clear No. 1. No. 2, we discourage compensation for reviews. There are a lot of companies that have done this for a long time. But too easily it can start to be a biasing thing. And the truth is, you don’t need to incentivize people. You just need to make it easy.

Q. When should a business that has been attacked online in reviews or on social media sites respond?

A. The first thing you do is breathe. Some of this stuff is written for an audience of one: you. Unless it’s very visible, it’s not worth a response. If something that they are saying is unambiguously false, you do want to consider a response: “These people do not serve lasagna.” “They fired their key person who handles accounting.” Those are examples when it’s very easy to correct the record. In a very sanitized, polite way, you can say, “In fact, so-and-so still works here.”

Q. What if it’s really nasty?

A. As we say in Kentucky, when you wrestle with a pig you both get covered in mud. The last thing you want to do is start fighting these guys. You can’t take this personally.

Q. So what should the owner do?

A. Collect real reviews from real customers who are not that person. Get more voices in the conversation.

Q. What if the owner really did screw up?

A. The only thing you can do is reset and make a sustained effort to bring humor, light and grace back into the discussion. “Yup, sorry, major screw-up, totally learned our lesson, here’s some humor about ourselves, thank you for the feedback, we’re going to work hard to regain the standing we had.” And you touch it every month or every few weeks for a year. You don’t let it go.

Q. Your company had a data breach last year and got battered online. What did you do?

A. We decided to talk about it publicly very fast. The data breach was of a shape and size that only one state would have required us to notify residents in that state. Instead of just telling them, we told everybody. And it was painful for a company that does privacy to do that. We told everybody, we made it clear, and we said this is what we have to do, and this is what we offer you, free services and so forth. We owned the fact that it would be an unpleasant 48 hours. We didn’t tell the press first, we told our customers first and the press found out. And since we’ve made radical changes to our security.

Q. How much time should business owners invest in social media?

A. Social media is often a waste of their time. A rule of thumb: If you’re selling cupcakes, useful; if you’re selling power tools, not useful. So: pleasurable, joyful items? Probably yes. More female-facing? Probably yes. Power drinks? Sure. Orthopedics? No.

Q. How often can a business owner be expected to tweet? 

A. A couple times a day to a couple times of week is more than enough depending on your sector. If you’ve been doing it a year, and you have 100 followers in your community, you may want to reconsider what you’re doing, or just stop. Having said that, having a presence is useful because it gives you real estate online.

Q. How can small businesses identify the best social media options for them?

A. If your customers are basically women, Facebook is a good bet for you. You don’t need to have multiple platforms and there are easy tools that can amplify your reach by rebroadcasting your stuff on Twitter. If you’re trying to reach professionals or those who are going to pay north of $500 to $1000 for a product, LinkedIn is the way to go. For your standard small business, Twitter is a good place to be.

Original article: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/27/business/smallbusiness/dealing-with-online-reviews-you-cant-take-this-personally.html

How do you bring a vision to life?  Michael Fertik talks innovation and entrepreneurship at the 2012 Blouin Leadership Summit.

How do you bring a vision to life?  Michael Fertik talks innovation and entrepreneurship at the 2012 Blouin Leadership Summit.

How do you bring a vision to life?  Michael Fertik talks innovation and entrepreneurship at the 2012 Blouin Leadership Summit.