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Google Places: Tips on Avoiding Bad Reviews

There are three simple elements to a review management plan:

Great customer service
Ask for reviews
Avoid Negative reviews

It used to be said that an unhappy customer would tell 10 people. Today an unhappy customer can influence hundreds if not thousands of people by leaving a bad review. It is common wisdom that, in the age of the internet, providing excellent customer service is the secret to review success.

While that is certainly true it is also a bit of cliche. What business doesn’t strive to provide excellent customer service? Sooner or later something will happen, despite your every intention. Things will go wrong and you will have an unhappy customer. As Matt McGee says, we don’t live in a five star world. Your client’s business is no exception.

There are two kinds of businesses in todays world. Those that have received a negative review and those that will. Bad reviews sting. Much has been written about ways to garner reviews from your clients. Less has been written about dodging the stinkers. It is equally important in generating a review profile that reflects the mostly positive range of your customer’s experiences to AVOID BAD REVIEWS.

Sooner or later you will have an unhappy customer and you want plans in place to deal with that eventuality. If you assume that your systems will fail, you can be ready to deal with the customer all too ready to trash you in a way that doesn’t drive them to the desperate act of expressing their frustration in the public commons.

Here are some tips on how to avoid bad reviews:

1- Follow up with customers immediately after the sale with a call and/or an email to be sure that all went as planned. Identify problems early on in the cycle so that you can correct them before they become complaints.

2- Make complaining easy. Build a culture that is truly ready to receive the complaint at every level of your business from the cashier to the president. Train your staff and train them well to not be defensive and to solve most problems immediately.

3- Make a complaint form very obvious on your site, perhaps on every page. This not only allows unhappy customers to complain, it makes it clear to potential customers that you are ready to listen. If you title the page “Your company name |Complaints” it will have the added benefit of appearing high on the main search results. This not only telegraphs to your customer your willingness to deal with complaints, it pushes other perhaps less flattering chatter down the page.

4- When you do receive a complaint, follow up quickly and try to resolve it. Nothing rankles like a customer stewing about your bad service and waiting for a return phone call.

5-Respond to negative reviews online. Once the issue is resolved circle back with the customer about the review. A recent survey has shown that an appropriate response to a negative review can get the negative review removed in a third of the cases. A roughly an equal number of consumers posted a positive review after receiving a response to their bad review. Having a plan and responding appropriately to a negative review is critical to this process.

6-Never fake reviews or enter them on behalf of your clients. It is imperative that you not provide reviewers with any trace that you are abusing your review corpus. Getting slammed by a customer review that questions your ethics calls into question your trustworthiness and integrity. It is the most difficult type of negative review to deal with even if it is not true. Responding online to the question do you beat your wife with a stick or a club creates a no-win situation.

7- Communicate with your local competitors. Competitor spam reviews are becoming more common than ever. If you are on speaking terms with them you are much less likely to fall victim to a puerile spam review attack.The reality is that other similar local businesses are not the long term determinant of your success nor really your major competition. In Barbara Oliver’s recent case, she immediately contacted the two other jewelers affected by competitor spam and established communication and rapport to make it less likely in the future.

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The New letterpress maps of San Francisco and Manhattan

Just a quick note to say that we’ve released several new limited edition letterpress prints in our typographic maps store. Check them out, and as always thanks to everyone for the feedback and encouragement in recent months!

San Francisco 2nd edition: This is a new design of the San Francisco letterpress map we made earlier this year, featuring waterlines for a new coastal style. Available in blue or black ink.

Manhattan: This is divided into two maps. A Lower and Midtown Manhattan shows the island from its southern end to 61st St, and Upper Manhattan features Central Park in an extent from 57th to 159th Street. Available in blue or black ink, and individually or paired together.

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Google Maps Masups 5

Street View’s Hot or Not

MIT’s Place Pulse project is a crowd-sourced experiment examining people’s perceptions of different urban environments.

The project presents two Street View images from Google Maps and asks users to vote for which place looks more ‘unique’, ‘safer’ or ‘upper class’.

As well as contributing to the research by answering the questions you can view the results and view which of the Street Views appear most or least safe, unique or upper-class.

SmartPlanet

Standard & Poor’s Credit Ratings Map

Standard and Poor’s downgrading of the USA’s credit rating to AA has sent shock-waves around the world.

You can consult this Standard and Poor’s Credit Rating Map to see the current credit ratings of countries around the world. The map was created with the Ikimaps Google Maps creation tool.

Standard & Poor’s (S&P) is a United States-based financial services company. It is a division of The McGraw-Hill Companies that publishes financial research and analysis on stocks and bonds.

geoblogger.eu

Mobile Place Maps

Mobile Place Maps is a mobile friendly directions map creation tool.

The tool can be used to quickly get directions on your mobile phone. It can also be used by businesses and other venues to provide a link to a mobile friendly map showing the directions to their business from the nearest subway or train station.

The tool automatically detects your current location, so all you have to do is enter your destination. After you have entered a destination the tool will create driving, cycling or walking directions for your journey. The route of your journey is displayed on a Google Map and step-by-step directions are displayed beneath the map.

Once you have created a directions map with the tool you are also given a weblink. It is therefore possible to share your directions map with friends or create a link on a website to your directions map.

Hipmunk – Your Hotel & Hotspot Finder

Hipmunk, the flight planning and booking tool, has added a new hotel search function that includes an interesting hotspot facility.

Hipmunk allows users to search for hotels by location and date. The results of each search are shown on a Google Map, with green markers showing the cheapest rates and red the most expensive. It is also possible to sort the results by price, reviews and distance.

Hipmunk also allows users to overlay a number of heatmaps over the results. The heatmaps help the user to see which areas of their destination have high and low concentrations of restaurants, museums, bars etc.

The heatmaps are a useful tool, especially for users booking hotels in unfamiliar locations. In many ways the function improves on Google Hotel Finder’s tourist spotlight feature.

When you search for a hotel with Google Hotel Finder the map tourist spotlight highlights the most popular areas for visitors to stay.

Motorcycle Roads

Motorcycle Roads is a community driven guide to great motorcycle rides in America. Each of the great motorbike rides is accompanied by a Google Map of the ride’s route.

Each mapped route includes details about the ride’s length, road quality and roadside amenities. The scenery, road quality and amenities are each rated by the route’s submitter and include written details.

Sunday Morning Rides

Sunday Morning Rides has used Google Maps to map over 1,500 great motorbike rides throughout the USA.

You can search for rides by state and view each ride on its own map. Each route comes with an interactive elevation chart, which, if you mouseover, shows the Street View for that location.

Motorcycle Network

Motorcycle Network is a directory of everything to do with motorcycles in Australia. The site uses Google Maps to show all the parking spots in the major cities and also show all the motorcycle and scooter dealers, mechanics and gear shops, as well as all the training facilities, tours, insurance and hire places around Australia.

Mr Zip66′s Easy Rider Map

Denis Hopper’s Easy Rider is to many the seminal counter-culture movie of the 1960′s. Some of us may never get the chance to ride a bike across the States but thanks to Mr Zip we can follow the route on Google Maps.

Mr Zip has pieced together the locations used in the film and managed to put together a rough approximation of the route. The map itself is simple enough, showing the route in blue, with a few map markers showing the locations of the main scenes in the movie.

Via: GoogleMapsMania

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USGS Historical Map Release

USGS Historical Map Release (Coming Soon)

The USGS Historical Quadrangle Scanning Project (HQSP) is scanning all scales and all editions of approximately 250,000 topographic maps published by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) since the inception of the topographic mapping program in 1884.

National Map Viewer can locate historical Maps for user to download

Because historical maps are stored in a limited number of collections and are not readily available, the USGS National Geospatial Program has begun a project to convert these historical printed topographic quadrangles to an electronic format (GeoTIFF and GeoPDF®). This project serves the dual purpose of creating a master catalog and digital archive copies of the irreplaceable collection of topographic maps in the USGS Reston Map Library as well as making the maps available for viewing and downloading from theUSGS Store and The National Map Viewer.

One of the first Maps Created by USGS back in1886 will be available to download.

Source:

http://dracutlibrary.wordpress.com/2011/08/11/historical-maps/

Official PDF on the project

http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2011/3009/fs20113009_013111.pdf [PDF]

Link to the National Map Viewer [USGS Store]

http://store.usgs.gov/b2c_usgs/usgs/maplocator/%28ctype=areaDetails&xcm=r3standardpitrex_prd&carea=%24ROOT&layout=6_1_61_48&uiarea=2%29/.do

*Some maps will require a purchase – but most will be free of charge to download in GeoPDF and GeoTiff formats.

Mapperz Mapping News Blog

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Refugee Camp at Ethiopia

In the wake of intense drought, the Horn of Africa is gripped by its worst famine in more than 60 years. Over 12.4 million people across Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Somalia are threatened with hunger and disease as they are unable to access basic survival means. UN agencies and other humanitarian organizations are rallying to support refugees on the move, particularly to the thousands fleeing Somalia. Valerie Amos, OCHA Emergency Relief Coordinator, has stated that “This will not be a short crisis.” The emergency is expected to persist at least three to four months, and the number of people needing humanitarian assistance could increase by as much as 25 percent. Fresh and accurate maps are among the many critical factors in assessing such a state of crisis, as they provide vital information to facilitate emergency response and planning. Thanks to the efforts of our satellite imagery partner, GeoEye, we now have high resolution imagery of locations with the most pressing humanitarian needs. This has made Google Map Maker community mapping efforts even more effective, by allowing the creation of improved maps over refugee camps in Kenya, Ethiopia and the city of Mogadishu. Volunteers are mapping roads, hospitals, schools, community centers, and water resources, among other vital landmarks. The map data contributed is being shared periodically with the UN agencies engaged in this crisis. Google has also donated 1 million USD to help local and international organizations provide famine and drought relief support in the Horn of Africa.

You can help the Horn of Africa during its time of crisis by creating detailed maps using your local knowledge of places, such as cities, roads, and natural landmarks. If you’re unfamiliar with the region, try pairing up with people who have local knowledge, who can help by reviewing and correcting your edits. To participate in these ways and more, and offer feedback, please join our Africa mailing list and visit the Horn of Africa community mapping site as we all map the way toward crisis relief.

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