Right at the start of the Internet Marketing Bible for Accountants I describe the important of businesses’ ‘getting their house in order’ before they embark on an intensive series of internet marketing initiatives.  The ‘viral’ nature of today’s social media makes it very easy for customers to talk about your business.  Give your clients really great service and they will tell many other people.  The flipside to this though is that, if you give them really bad service, then they’re likely to tell even more people.

Even if you are not already actively marketing your business and making yourself a large footprint on the Web, it doesn’t mean that your customers aren’t already talking about you.  This article from the always excellent Mashable explains how you can monitor conversations happening online about your business and some of the best ways of lessening the damage.

I give more detailed advice in the book as to the best ways of reacting to any criticism you may receive online, but this article gives you some useful basic advice.

Read the article here.