Local Market Monopoly

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Clarence Fisher: Hey, what's up? Welcome back to Local Market Monopoly. I am Clarence Fisher, your host. Oh, no, she di'int! . Yes, she di'int! . Do you ever wonder what people say about you and your business online? Of course you do, and you should. You need to know about people's comments so you can address them promptly, whether it's a positive review on Google or a negative tweet, but with so many platforms out there, how can you keep track of everything? The answer is to create a system for monitoring what people are saying about you and your business online. Doing this allows you to quickly and easily see what people are saying and respond accordingly. How do you create such a system? You're in luck. I'm going to show you how when we return.

Intro: You're listening to Local Market Monopoly with Clarence Fisher, uncovering the tools, tactics, and strategies the most successful small businesses used to dominate their local market and own the block.

Clarence Fisher: Okay, let's get started about this. This system for monitoring what people are saying about you and your business online. It's gonna be easier than you think and harder than you thought. . Wooh. That was smooth, huh? Okay. Number one, claim your business listings. I don't know how many times I have to tell you this. Hold on, hold on, hold on. Shout out to Anj Baker in Florida who made, who left us a comment on a review, I think it was iTunes, and said, Hey, we're listening out in Florida and love your show. Thank you, Thank you, Anj, I love you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Everybody be like Anj and leave us a great review. Anyway, how to give you a shoutout salute to you. Back to our scheduled programming. Claim your business listings. Okay. As I was saying before, I don't know how many times they're gonna say this, but the first step is to claim your business listings on major directories and review sites like, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Google Business Profile, formally Google My Business, and Angie's List.

Clarence Fisher: This is going to allow you to respond directly to reviews and show up and search results when people are looking for businesses like yours. Number two, this one, it surprises me that more people don't know about this, but it's Google Alerts. Set up a Google alert. You wanna go to alerts.google.com. This is an OG way of, uh, knowing what people are saying about you, because when you set up an alert, you wanna set up alerts for your business name and your name. Any owners in a C level, executives, anybody who of , I don't wanna say any importance because everybody in your business is important, but I mean, anybody who's public facing, I'll put it like that. Anybody who is public facing, you want to create a Google alert for them so that when some, when someone types in anything online and mentions that name, that you will get an alert.

Clarence Fisher: You can say, Hey, send me alerts every day. That's probably a lot you can say every week, or you can say every month. When I very first started, I wanted every day to know about Clarence Fishers, and then I finally, I, uh, realized a lot of Clarence Fishers were dying . So, uh, I was like, you know, this is a little, I don't wanna know that. I don't wanna know about my, be reminded of my mortality every day. So I moved it to every week, and now I just get a digest every month. And it gives me things like when a blog, when one of these podcasts post, when a blog post that I write posts, somebody mentions me and somewhere else it'll, you know, say, Hey, you're being mentioned here. And then every now and then I do get a Clarence Fisher and I try to look and see like how old they were when they passed, and, you know, and I'm trying to beat that number.

Clarence Fisher: All right, Number three is monitor social media. Of course you wanna do this. So in addition of setting to, uh, setting up Google alerts, you wanna monitor social media for mentions of you and your business. You can do this manually by going to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram searches, use your business name, use any relevant keywords, or you can make things a little easier by using tools like Hootsuite or Sprout Social, which they allow you to set up keyword searches and view all the mentions in one place. So could be, you know, depending on how much action you you take on social media, it could be, could be worth it. Number four, respond quickly and appropriately. You gotta be swift. You have to be swift, Okay? Once you start receiving notifications about what's being said about your business online, don't just don't say, Mm, that's nice.

Clarence Fisher: Ah, you say no, see d and you respond quickly. But don't respond with that attitude though. Here's, you know, you wanna just sit back, relax, take a deep breath and ask yourself, I don't really know what was going on in that person's life at the moment that they decided to write all that nonsense about me. All that untrue nonsense. You don't know what was going on in your life, but don't respond too quickly, I guess is what I'm saying. If it's a negative review and we've got all kind of episodes about how to respond to a bad review, you, you can do a search, how to respond to bad reviews, and we even give you some templates for that. But respond, don't wait until next week, but you don't have to respond absolutely immediately. If it's a positive mention, thank the person for their kind words and invite them to contact you if they have any more questions.

Clarence Fisher: If it's a negative mention, take the conversation offline. If you possibly can get your butt offline, no, take the conversation offline. Just say, you know, Hey man, we're super sorry that you've experienced that, This was your experience. That is not indicative of, you know, how we do business. You know what? Let's put a link in the show notes to the review response templates. Okay? You can click there and we've got probably a hundred over a hundred variations of templates that you can use for both good and bad review responses. So click that and just remember that you're not really responding to the person who's leaving the bad review. You're responding to the people who are reading that, the people who aren't doing business with you yet. Those are the people you're responding to. But either way, by setting up a system for monitoring your businesses online reputation, you can quickly and easily see when people are talking about you, good or bad, this is going to allow you to take appropriate action and maintain a positive reputation for you and your business. Okay? You got it? Did you pick up what I put down? I hope so. That's going to be it for today. If you like this episode, do me a favor, share it on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter #ClarenceFisher, #LocalMarketMonopoly, #owntheblock. Rate us on iTunes and do all that good stuff, Okay? Most of all, put what I shared with you today in use and let us know about it. Till then, until next week, go do what you gotta do in order to own the block. I'll see ya.

Outro: We appreciate you listening to Local Market Monopoly. Be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the show and visit ClarenceFisher.com for more resources that will help you dominate your local market and own the block.