Esther: Welcome back to the BusinessMakers Overtime Show heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com/overtime. I'm Esther Steinfeld.

Katie: And I'm Katie Laird.

Esther: In this segment we have Zain Naboulsi, he is the Senior Developer Evangelist of Microsoft, and we are going to hear all about customer retention and getting in with those customers that might not be your biggest fans or the ones that are you biggest fans and how to harness all the stuff they are talking about.

Katie: Awesome.

Esther: So let's hear what he has to say.

Russ: So before we get into online reputation, tell us what does a senior developer evangelist with most do?

Zain: Basically, a developer/evangelist like me, I'm paid to go around and talk to people about Microsoft products. So in my case as a developer/evangelist, I'll talk about our products like Visual Studio, talk a little bit about Bing, all kinds of different - like the way developers could make Bing maps and do little overlays and stuff like that. That's kinda what I do. I go around showing people how to take full advantage of our products.

Russ: It must actually almost be motivating these days to champion the cause when you've got these sort of competitors that are getting so much media attention nowadays, speaking of Apple and Google.

Zain: Oh, yeah, absolutely. And that's the thing. We're all about getting the word out and making sure people know what we can offer, and really kind of educating the audience on what's available.

Russ: Cool, okay. So here we are, 2010 -

Zain: Yes.

Russ: - online reputation. Do you think that's very important these days?

Zain: Wow. No, not at all. Okay, done with the show, right?

Russ: Right, right.

Zain: So, yeah, absolutely, right? I mean, absolutely. And this is - unfortunately, this is a pet peeve of mine. A lot of people don't realize how important it is, right?

Russ: Okay.

Zain: It's a well-known fact that millions and millions of dollars are lost daily by businesses that are not paying attention to their online reputation. And I wanna just give you a real brief example.

Russ: Sure.

Zain: My favorite Mexican restaurant that I like to go to, pretty close, a couple blocks away from here, I looked it up online the other day. I know it has really good food. It only had two stars, and the picture was the picture of some sub shop, not my restaurant. And the reason - if you look down in the reviews, the reviews were, "You need to change your picture," and they were giving it like one star. So, yeah, and people are making decisions about whether to eat at that place based on that. So, absolutely, absolutely.

Russ: You know what? When I see the star system sometimes, and particularly if I see a negative review there, or two, I can't help but think, "Wait a minute. Do you think that's a real review, or do you think it's a competitor that's just trying to blast 'em?

Zain: That's a good point. So a lot of these review sites, and most notably you're gonna get like your Yelp or your Citysearch and that sorta thing. A lot of the review sites, they're gonna take a little extra effort. They have the ability for you to give feedback, say, "Hey, that's a little odd. Could you please review that, maybe take that off?" if you think that's not fair. I'll go one further with you. Not only do you have competitors doing negative review for restaurants, but it's documented there was actually some cases now coming up where people are threatening to give negative reviews if they don't get free food.

Russ: Oh, my goodness.

Zain: So that all goes to the main point, which is you really, really have to manage your online presence, right?

Russ: Right, right.

Zain: You have to gotta be in control of that. And that's everything from making sure you don't get one stars from your competitor -

Russ: Well, it's kind of interesting, the whole world, but it's a different world, the online reputation. And I think many of us saw that right in the very beginning of even e-mail, the way that people statement communicated differently with e-mail than they would ever in person, or even on paper. There were people that would get real aggressive, real arrogant. And there's just something about it. And I guess that goes across the whole digital landscape.

Zain: Yeah. It's - well, it goes even before that. If you really wanna go back to the roots of it when cars were invented, actually, it was well documented that there was psychological aspect that people took on inside a car where the felt anonymous, and they get more aggressive and more this. That just extended itself when they went online. Well, I'm anonymous. I can do whatever I want. So you'll get people who inside a business, may love you, tell you that they think you're great, and turn right around and give you a negative review because the air conditioning was bad. Right?

Russ: Right, right.

Zain: I mean, just weird stuff like. It may have nothing to do with your service, whatsoever.

Russ: Right, okay. Now so today, though, we have not only all of the digital world of e-mail and reviews and stuff, but we have this whole social media component -

Zain: Yeah, absolutely.

Russ: - that is huge, that is difficult to watch and difficult to keep tabs. I know businesspeople who say, "It's just overwhelming, so I'm ignoring it and just doing the best I can here."

Zain: Yeah. So let's do the short list, right?

Russ: Okay.

Zain: So if you're gonna do the short list, it's gonna start, obviously, with Bing. You're gonna want - you can go on Bing, your company. To go bing.com. Type in your company. See what shows up, right?

Russ: Right.

Zain: Immediately, just kinda look at the first - it's well known that if it's not on the first page and usually the first ten links, it's not a big deal. You may find something negative five pages in or something, not a big deal, right?

Russ: Right.

Zain: The next thing you wanna do, depending on what kind of company you have, but most companies can go to Yelp, yelp.com, Citysearch. Those are some of the big ones. Check it out. See what the reviews look like there. Great. Okay? So that's great sites. Then you wanna go to Facebook, of course. See if there's anything about your company there. And then the last place I would check is Twitter. Those five - you do those five, you pretty much covered all your bases at that point, right?

Russ: Okay, okay. So what should you do if you go there and you find something negative about your company?

Zain: Okay. So there's a lotta steps you could take, right? It depends on where the negative comment is placed. So let's start with the fundamentals. You go and Bing it. You find a negative comment. You can write and send an e-mail saying, "Hey, this really needs to be removed. Could you please remove it?" It might get removed, it might not. Remember, there's a lotta people asking for this. Some are legitimate requests, some aren't. It's hit or miss. The other thing you can do is see where the negative comment is. Is the negative comment on some feedback site? Is it on a Yelp or a Citysearch or someplace like that? Those places have feedback where you can e-mail and say, "Hey, this is not a legitimate comment." I'm assuming, of course, the comment isn't legitimate, right?

Russ: Right.

Zain: "This isn't legitimate. Could you please investigate this? Can we work -?" Those are more likely to happen for you. And then, finally, the third place could be - and this is where it gets really evil - the worst case I've seen is somebody who's so motivated that they create an entire Web site to just slam your company. In those cases, really, your only choice is to find out where the Web site's being hosted, and e-mail the hosting provider. Now, having said all that, Step No. 1, before you do any of that, any of that, Step No. 1, find out who wrote it. Contact them directly and see if you can get it resolved that way.

Russ: Okay. Well, it's all real interesting. I remember when we launched theBusinessMakers.com Web site, which we invite comments all the time, and we were getting quite a few comments, mostly positive. And all of a sudden, we had somebody that slammed a guest on the show and started revealing inside pieces of information about the business and profit margin.

Zain: Wow.

Russ: And I went, "wait a minute. This is too -" so I huddled my team around, which included some Millennials, some real social media advocates, and I said, "I think we have to remove this." Their response is, "No. You leave it there, but you give the owner of the business the chance to comment and debate there in front of the audience." And I said, "Well, that's fine, but I'm sure this is a very disgruntled former employee, and I just don't know if it's fair that he's divulging this information, and even if the owner gets to counter." So you get into some interesting worlds of debate and what's right and what's wrong in this very transparent society we're in now.

Zain: Absolutely, absolutely. And so you see the problem from the standpoint of those places as well that have those comments is it's a weird situation. Is it a legitimate comment, and how do you know? You can state your case. But, yeah, usually the best way to deal with negative comments is either to contact the person directly - the best way you can correct a negative comment is to have the person who made the negative comment turn around and give you a positive comment.

Russ: Absolutely. Just out of curiosity, do you actually attend meetings or get involved with the staff of Bing where they debate issues like this?

Zain: I don't. I don't. No. That's the Bing team, and just a subset of the Bing team. And I imagine those people have probably had a lot of pain and suffering trying to figure it out. 'Cause you can imagine it's a pretty tough job.

Russ: Oh, absolutely.

Zain: When you get those requests, where does the privacy, right? I guess what we call First Amendment, almost type versus somebody's right to not have that on there.

Russ: Right, right. So your overall recommendation is definitely go out there with your eyes and ears and hit all these five point often -

Zain: Yeah, at least those five.

Russ: - to find out what people are saying about you. And then if there is something negative, be assertive and aggressive in trying to track it down and change it.

Zain: Yeah, you have to be. You have to be. It could go all the way from talking with the individual, like I said, requesting feedback. And in some cases, if you have to, depending on what's going on, don't hesitate to litigate if you've gotta go down that road.

Russ: There you go. I knew we were gonna get to that eventually.

Zain: Well, it did. It's rare. Usually you can resolve it. But if you can't - and, again, assuming it's not a legitimate comment, litigation is not out of the realm of possibility.

Katie: Wow what a great interview. I really like Zain's 5 tips on monitoring your social media presence.

Esther: It was really interesting. Well coming up in chapter 3 we are going to be talking about whether your passion matches your ambitions, so stay tuned for that. You're listening to the BusinessMakers Overtime Show heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com/overtime. I'm Esther Steinfeld.

Katie: And I'm Katie Laird.

Esther: And we will be back with chapter 3.