The Importance of Online Interactions with Your Customers

Have you ever wondered when you tried to search for your company’s website on famous search engines like Yahoo! Search and Google Search and you found some other links not related with your official URL? Some of them maybe familiar to you if you joined with some organization where in you pay them to be a member for Thousands of Pesos and in return they include your company’s information to their website. However, you noticed other sites where in you are not familiar with, but features your company’s information and give comments whether your product or service is good or not. Of course you will be happy if the reactions are in favour with you company’s goals, but what if you’ve read the other way around? What will you do?

Please take note that customers have many different ways on expressing their complaints or favorable feedbacks based on what they experienced with your product or service. It is good that you indicated a customer service hotline or number or e-mail in your packaging but did you know that the number of customers’ feedbacks that you have not received is roughly more than double than the number of these feedbacks you received over your hotline or e-mails? The Internet so far is one of the major tools customers are using to express their sentiments if they are not satisfied of your product or service but may voluntarily make an article concerning their delightful experience if they are happy with it. Some employees may write their own experience with the company they work with. Loyal employees may write positive comments, while there are dangers that they will express there sentiments out over the web if they feel they are maltreated by the company. And, before you know it, everybody else is writing the same against or in favor of your business.

These are just some of the many reasons why a certain company should take focus on online communication or mediums where in you can address the concerns of your customers—both external (buyers) and internal (your employees themselves). Other than your official website, you may participate or even ask somebody to write an article for you over the net. The person will be the one to maintain the site to have good reader traffic in order to increase awareness of your product and services offered. He will even summarize both the negative and positive feedbacks of the readers and submit it to you. You may reply on giving answers to these summarized feedbacks and the author or writer will post it back to his site for the purpose of interaction with the customers.

You already have you official website so why not just stick to it?

Well, while it is good to have an official website, you should know very well that Internet Surfers will consider it BORING if your site is not maintained or updated frequently. More worse is that they have no means of posting their comments or feedbacks directly with your website or so to speak, a means of interacting with your company other than e-mail and hotlines. Maybe they will visit it ones or twice or thrice; but if they found the same content from the first up to the third visit, do you think they will revisit your webpage again for the fourth time? I don’t think so, unless they forgot to take note what they need to get from your site. If you really want to maximize your official website, make it interactive and update it most often.

“But, the cost of maintaining a website by updating it frequently and making it more interactive is too much for me. I need to hire an I.T. professional for these and this will be very expensive for a starting entrepreneur like me. Are there any alternatives to reinforce my site?”

Of course there are alternatives!

Blogging as One of the Alternatives
Blog or Web log is one of the hottest phenomenons occurring on the Internet today. As a proof, Technorati.com, a blog search engine was tracking over 20 million blogs as of late quarter of 2005 and CEO Dave Sifry noted that 70, 000 blogs were created every day (Blogging for Business by Shel Holtz and Ted Demopoulos, 2006). The Blogosphere, a term for a blog community, is one of the online interactive medium that any ordinary internet surfer who can publish or post his or her own views, principles, comments, knowledge, company or product reviews, and more! Before you know it, you have encountered it in the past and may have got hooked on to it especially for some interesting topic.

So, how much would it cost?

Other than your internet connection and time, this is free if you will be posting your own articles and sign up for some famous blog providers. But if you cannot afford to write articles for your own, you may want to let others post your article or make a review of your product or service and they will be the one to post it to their own blogs. Some bloggers will charge you for a fee but this is much cheaper than hiring a writer for a press release or posting your ad to newspapers. Other bloggers will just ask for a donation from you and you will decide how much you will give to them. Of course when it says a donation, you have no obligation to pay. However, the reason for some bloggers to ask for it is to have means of supporting or maintaining his blog site in the long run. This is much cheaper than hiring for an IT professional to maintain your own website.

Rewarding Freelance Writers Who Featured Your Company Whereabouts
Try to visit and interact to those unfamiliar links that featured your company’s valuable information for the benefit of your target customers, give them simple rewards either money or in kind and you will expect more articles featuring the whereabouts of your company. Of course this is not a guarantee but if you will do it more often, then expect for a positive interaction with them. What more, is that, they will be the one to defend some of the minor flaws of your company.

I believe that these two alternatives can reinforce your website in a much time efficient and cost effective manner while building up credibility with your Internet savvy customers. This is one way of promoting your product or service in a non traditional method of marketing and business development. For a related article about the web please click here.

Note: If you are interested about this article and would like to begin posting your company’s articles or press releases, please contact the author. You may get the author’s contact information by clicking here.