John Mayer Shows Us How to Manage Online Reputation

I am a self-admitted fan of celebrity gossip. I don’t know how it happened or when it happened but I have been sucked in and I can’t get out. Needless to say on Monday I was skimming through the various ‘entertainment’ blogs and I came across a few stories on how John Mayer Googles himself every morning and how he responded to the accusation. A lot of the authors were making fun of him but I don’t blame the guy one bit.

When you are in the public eye it is so important to know what others are saying about you. Maybe it’s not as important for John Mayer to know what people are saying about him as say a Fortune 500 company but hey…his name is what makes him money.

As I was reading the John Mayer stories I was also sorting through my Google Alerts for the day. One of our clients recently had to recall a product due to lead paint and had issued a notice a few days earlier. Blogs all over the internet had either posted the notice or wrote about the recall.

While it wasn’t a detrimental issue we determined the client could either ignore it and potentially lose customers or head out to the internet and let people know what they were doing about it. After talking it over they decided to address the bloggers and let them know that they were taking every measure necessary to ensure happy customers and safe products.

Would the client have lost customers if they didn’t respond? Would John Mayer have lost fans if he didn’t respond? Maybe not but is it a chance worth taking? I don’t think so and John didn’t either.

By getting out there and responding the client showed they care about their products and their customers. They also may have helped themselves in search results. If a customer happens to find one of the recall posts in search results and visits the particular site, they will see the company took the time to respond. That would certainly prove favorable in my mind.

The bottom line here is whether you are John Mayer or a company issuing a recall notice you should know what is being said about you and more importantly you should know when and how to respond.