Negative reviews are hurtful to your pride and your business. Enough so that a whole new industry has sprung up: “:reputation management”. But if someone posts a negative review on your Facebook fan page (you do have one of those, right?) you will be tempted to immediately delete it. Don’t.

Lisa Barone, of Outspoken Media,  has written about five excellent reasons to leave those negative expressions in place, and how to leverage that to your advantage. Here they are, but you need to read Lisa’s article for a full understanding.

1. You want the conversation to happen at home
2. It’s a chance to change the conversation
3. You get to show off your customer service
4. Gives you street cred
5. You get feedback you can act on

You certainly don’t want to encourage negative reviews, but if you respond properly you can turn them into a positive experience for everyone.

Share any web page you’re reading with your friends and followers at almost any social media site – instantly from the new Google Toolbar. It also automatically shortens the URL using goo.gl … similar to bit.ly, but faster & easier. That’s important for tweets with its limited character count.

We use it to share our blog posts and to post interesting stuff to our Facebook page or to tweet it. I’ve been very pleased with this new feature and encourage you to try it out.

To learn more, Google has a full description and a video demonstration.

Bill Treloar, owner and principal SEO consultant at Rank Magic, will be joining two other experts at a free seminar and workshop on social media in New Jersey on Valentine’s Day.

Social media is now integrated into the fabric of our daily lives. We encounter it everywhere, in almost every part of our society and culture.  Everyone is talking about social media: Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn and many more.

What many small business owners are just beginning to realize is that today’s social media can be leveraged to help their businesses attract and keep customers. The truth is that social media is a powerful new marketing force and as such the business that ignores it, does so at the risk of underachieving on the competitive landscape.

A free seminar/workshop to bring business owners up to speed is being held on Monday, February 14 from 9:00 am to 12:30 pm in Parsippany. The host is Set Focus at 4 Century Drive. Admission is free to all who confirm their intention to attend in advance.

Running the workshop will be a team of seasoned local professionals. Greg Stewart, founder of NexGen Management, a business management consultancy, will teach the application of business strategy and planning to a social media marketing initiative. Bill Treloar, owner of Rank Magic a search engine optimization (SEO) company that focuses on small businesses will teach Do It Yourself SEO. And Art Jones, owner of The Art of Inbound Marketing a social media marketing company will teach New Media Marketing. The workshop will focus on three areas critical to developing, launching, managing any measuring any successful Social Media campaign.

Participants will learn how to enlist Social Media Marketing to meet their 2011 goals:

• Brand Recognition
• Brand Monitoring
• Competitive Advantage
• Find New Customers
• Generate Site Traffic
• Obtain New Links To Your Site for SEO
• Increased Search Engine Rankings

Leave the session armed with a solid understanding of how to create a social media marketing and search engine optimization strategy. Participants will receive a workbook to implement their own program to take back to the office.

To confirm attendance, business owners can visit EventBrite and indicate their intention to attend.

This is a hands-on, do it yourself workshop designed to get you started on the right foot doing social media marketing and search engine optimization for your website. If you’ll be in northern New Jersey on February 14, you owe it to yourself to attend this workshop.

Bill Treloar, owner of Rank Magic, is proud to announce a new group training class being offered through a partnership with Home & Office Computer Training’s Entrepreneur University.  This class will enable you, as a business owner, to build search engine optimization (SEO) skills.

The Secrets to Do-It-Yourself SEO explains (in plain English) how the search engines work and how you can leverage the power of your own web site and others that link to it so that you achieve improved rankings in Google, Yahoo, Bing and the other search engines. A workshop will teach you how to select the best keywords, how to use them on your web site, how to build link popularity, and how to track your improving rankings in the search engines.

The class requires a minimum of 3 attendees and will hold a maximum of 8, to ensure the students get the personal attention and focus they deserve. The coaching session will be 3 hours of skill building using the web browser on your laptop.  It will be held on Wednesday, February 9 from 11:30 to 2:30pm and lunch is included. This unique group learning experience is $99 per attendee.

Bring your laptop and power cord to Home & Office Computer Training’s Coaching Center in East Hanover, on the corner of Mt. Pleasant Avenue and Hanover Road, East Hanover. For those attendees who don’t have a laptop to bring, Home & Office Computer Training has a limited number of laptops to use as loaners.

Registration is easy – simply email coach@njpctraining.com up to 48 hours before the class. They accept checks and credit cards. Questions can be emailed or directed to Susana Fonticoba at 973-952-0053.

Don’t miss this opportunity to drive more potential customers to your web site with this convenient and productive business skill building course.

When people search on Google, they’re asking questions. “Who does house cleaning locally?” “Where can I buy ice hockey gear?”. And we all know how SEO for local businesses is the best search marketing response to that type of demand.

But people ask the same kind of questions on Twitter, where they ask their friends & family (or followers) questions like “Anyone know a good chiropractor?”

That phrase “anyone know” is very common on Twitter and is a red flag indicating someone’s looking to buy a product or service. Maybe your product or service. So if you’re active on Twitter and have a wide following, chances are someone might respond to a question like that and recommend you.

Even if you don’t have such a wide following, you can still listen for those questions. With a Twitter account, you can search for recent tweets that include certain keywords and phrases, like the combination of “anyone know” and your name, brand, product or service. Search for “anyone know” NJ landscaper or “anyone know” water filter. If you find a tweet that looks like it might present a good lead for you, simply reply and answer the question, volunteer your product or services, or offer a link to your web site. Couldn’t be easier.

Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief at Search Engine Land wrote a terrific article recently where he touched on this technique and expanded it to using Twitter to engage with customers, both happy and disgruntled, by searching Twitter for mentions of you or your company, and responding helpfully.

We’ve written a lot in the past about the importance of link popularity for good search engine rankings. Link popularity counts even more heavily in Google than in the other search engines and it’s not something you can ignore. Links from a web site’s Helpful Resources page are good, but the best links are those that are embedded within a content rich paragraph related to your business. Couple that with the recent increased emphasis by Google on timely information from social networking sources like Twitter and blogs, and you have the basis for a new business model.

There’s a savvy little company called Net-Writers that’s been getting some impressive results with a niche service to help clients gain SEO traction by leveraging the power of this kind of relevant content. They build numerous inbound content-relevant, keyword-rich links by creating and publishing multiple blog posts for a client.  They start with 50 blog posts, each one with three keyword-rich links pointing to the page on their client’s site that’s optimized for them. This can be a powerful technique to supplement the on-page SEO and traditional link building we do at Rank Magic.

The copy they create won’t win prizes for style but it is professionally written and won’t embarrass their clients. This content is also totally controlled, which means it can be edited or taken down if the client has any accuracy or style issues with it.

Net Writers guarantees positive results, too, which they define as an improvement in your ranking position for your keywords. I haven’t seen the wording of that guarantee so I don’t know if it’s specific to Google or Yahoo or Bing, how much of a ranking improvement they promise, or whether they promise improvement on all of your targeted keywords. What I can say, though, is that I’m satisfied their approach works.

Net-Writers’ approach to link building isn’t Black Hat SEO, but it’s not totally White Hat SEO either; I think we need a new category of Gray Hat SEO. That’s because these blog posts are designed to feed keyword-rich links to the search engines, and aren’t really designed to drive traffic to your site in and of themselves. Will search engines eventually learn to detect this technique and lower the value of the links it generates? I doubt it. These are real blog posts, not fakes, and distinguishing them from totally innocent blog posts that just happen to link to a web site would be difficult or impossible. Only time will tell about that, but for now, and for many  businesses, this approach should realize measurable benefits.

No matter how good your company is, someone may still write something negative about you, even if you tried your best to help them.

A customer might write negative comments about your company in their blog or one of your competitors might try to damage your reputation by creating false comments about you. One of our clients turned down a job applicant who then retaliated by writing negative, false reviews about them in several places on the web.

What can you do if web pages with negative comments appear on the first page of a major search engine?

1. Fix the problem (if there is a problem)
If people write negative reviews about your company, the first thing that you should do (if the allegations are true) is to fix the problem that caused the negative review in the first place.

2. It never hurts to ask
Send the webmaster of the web page with the negative review a polite email and ask for removal of the negative comments. Many webmasters will cooperate if you explain the issue, especially if the negative review is false or libelous.

3. Give web pages with positive reviews a bump
If the webmaster does not want to remove the negative review, find websites that contain positive comments about your site. Link to these pages from your own website to increase the link popularity of these pages. The more links the pages with the positive reviews have, the higher they will be ranking in the search results.

If appropriate, bookmark web pages with positive remarks about your website on social bookmark sites such as Digg, Delicious and Faves.

4. Request testimonials from delighted customers
If you receive positive feedback from customers, ask them to write a review on ConsumerReview.com, Epinions.com, Yelp, Angie’s List, Judy’s Book or similar sites.

5. Add your website to company wiki pages
Websites like AboutUs.org allow you to create an article about your company. If your company is large enough, you might even create an entry in Wikipedia. These Wiki pages will also appear in the search results when someone searches for your company name.

6. Make sure that your own website tops the search results
If your own website comes first for your company name then many people will click on your link and not look further. Rank Magic can help you achieve that.

Don’t stop after optimizing your web site. A Facebook Fan Page for your business makes an excellent side kick for your website. While your website is the premier place for prospects to learn about your business, your Facebook page can be a dynamic vehicle to keep them informed and engaged.

There are poor fan pages and fantastic ones. Learn how to leverage the power of this tool to turn a satisfied customer into a raving fan.

Close to Rank Magic’s office in East Hanover, NJ, Home & Office Computer Training offers a productive and fun 3 hour course we can recommend. You can take this course during a slightly extended lunch break in a small group setting. Bring your laptop and lunch while you learn. For those who aren’t local they offer the same course over the web using GoToMeeting.

While we don’t use all the potential of a Facebook Fan Page, we do encourage you to check ours out and sign up as a fan. We hope you’ll also “like” it (that’s a Facebook term that involves clicking on the “Like” button).

A lot of businesses that have been badly hurt by The Great Recession have turned to social media and found it to be a helpful marketing tool to identify and attract new customers, build brand awareness, and stay engaged with customers.

There are, though, some businesses that don’t see the value in social networking. A recent  report found the following:

• 50 percent of small business social media users believe it takes more time than they expected (no surprise there)
• 17 percent are convinced that social media gives people a chance to criticize a business online (we have had two clients run into this problem within the past year)
• 6 percent say social media has hurt their business more than it has helped it (a small minority)

Nevertheless, the study reports that investments made in social media rank third in the online marketing investments small businesses will make over the next couple of years.

SmallBusinessNewz offers a video where social media veteran Chris Brogan maintains that now is a good time to get involved with social media.

Now that Google is showing real-time results from Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites, you may want to consider using those sites to improve your brand awareness. Increasingly, businesses are realizing, as reported in the Online Marketing Blog, “search doesn’t just happen on Google,Yahoo and Bing“. Depending on how you look at it, YouTube may be getting the second largest number of searches, after Google and before Yahoo.