The Internet, Friend AND Foe?

Whether your business is offline, on-line or both, the internet is always something to be thinking about. Its such a large part of life these days, you’re pretty much guaranteed that some of your customers will use it on a regular basis for either work, or recreational purposes.

A lot of people use the internet to voice their frustrations and opinions on things, whether it be through instant messaging, a blog, or the hugely popular social networking websites, Facebook and Twitter. This may not seem relevant to your business at all, until one of those blogs, tweets or status updates are targeting you and your business.

Remember that bad day when you were slightly rude to a customer? or when you forgot to purchase the stock you had promised to have by this time 2 weeks ago? well its coming back to haunt you. If you have given a below-par service to someone, they then hold the future of your business in their hands, if they go home, log onto their computer and write up a huge rant regarding your business and how poor you were, then this is on the internet for all to see.

Not only will friends of that person see it and instantly decide against ever using your services in the future, any prospective future clients who maybe saw your sign in the high street, will go home, type your name in to Google, and if you do not have a website of your own, the first result they will see is more than likely going to be that very negative review, which will then make itself into a constant repellent to all possible customers.

Obviously this can also work in the other way, if someone comes away thinking ‘what a fantastic service’ or ‘the web design on their site was brilliant’ then people are going to say the same things, and a Google page full of positive reviews is a fantastic thing to have.

So, whether you are sitting in your high street shop window, or tucked away in an office tweaking your online shop, the things to remember are, the internet can be your best friend, but if you mistreat your customers, it can be your worst enemy.