Managing Your Online Reputation: 7 Crucial Steps

New York Times: Managing Your Online Reputation – 7 Crucial Steps

Henry Posner of B&H Photo offers seven tips for ensuring you get good reviews from customers at your e-commerce site. They include admitting you’re wrong when you are and apologizing, defending yourself calmly when you’re right and keeping in mind that customers don’t always know what they want.

“A camera-store salesman recently steered me away from the compact, ultrahigh-tech camera I thought I wanted. Smaller is fine, he told me, but only if it fits in your pocket — any bigger will end up hanging from your shoulder anyway, so what’s the advantage? And don’t buy based on fancy features, he added; the differences between comparable models rarely result in better pictures for amateurs. The one feature you’ll really appreciate, he said, is how the camera feels in your hand.

Simple insights, but they pointed me to a very different camera, one that I’m deliriously happy with. Not only that, it was a few hundred bucks cheaper than the one I had wanted. Maybe that’s why everyone at the five other camera stores I had been to was a lot more enthusiastic about the compact model.”