Word of Mouth 2.0 – “Personal References” by Google

  • 1 min read

When I started Vizibility last year, we hired accountants, lawyers and other professionals to help us get the business going. Very few of us choose a lawyer or doctor or Realtor or [fill in the blank] based solely on the company’s television ad or website or phone-book ad or referral alone. We may start with one of these, but we validate what they tell us by getting input from friends, family, and past and current clients.

[Disclaimer: Vizibility.com is a Personal Branding Blog sponsor]

And Google.

Google by warrantedarrest.For service professionals, the best way to find new clients will always be word of mouth and personal references. The Internet won’t change that. But it has changed how word of mouth is spread. Online due diligence is a routine part of evaluating service professionals, and ‘Googling’ is now standard practice.

Understand what’s being found

Having a strong game plan to understand and manage what is being found about you online is just as important as having a good website. What do people find when they search for you? Does someone else share your name and dominate the results? Did the media run a positive story about you that just doesn’t show up for some reason? Did a disgruntled client post a comment somewhere that keeps popping up? Is Facebook showing up everywhere?

To help potential clients find accurate information about their attorneys, leading Intellectual Property law firm Novak Druce + Quigg recently decided to add Vizibility SearchMe buttons to the corporate profile pages of its attorneys(http://bit.ly/96UfBh). Vizibility ensures that their attorneys can be found quickly in Google so they don’t miss an important opportunity to validate their credentials and make a powerful impression. In short, Vizibility will help Novak Druce + Quigg get more business.  And we expect to see to see thousands of other law firms and other professional services organizations follow suit by adding SearchMe buttons to the bios of practitioners on their corporate websites.

Along with Vizibility, there are other tools that can help manage your online presence. But the single most important method of generating positive word of mouth will never change: deliver great service to your clients.

Guest Author:

James Alexander is the founder and CEO of Vizibility. A serial technology entrepreneur and graduate of the University of Oxford, James has been involved with Internet search since starting eWatch in 1995. Google him at http://vizibility.com/james.

Picture of James Alexander

James Alexander

TRENDING AROUND THE WEB

One food blogger watched her traffic fall from close to a million monthly pageviews to under 200,000 after Google’s AI Overviews started answering exactly the questions her posts were built to rank for, down to “how to cut a banana”

One food blogger watched her traffic fall from close to a million monthly pageviews to under 200,000 after Google’s AI Overviews started answering exactly the questions her posts were built to rank for, down to “how to cut a banana”

The Blog Herald
Florida’s ban on social media accounts for anyone under 14 is now moving toward enforcement after challengers lost their court fight and an appeals court cleared the way, and even as industry groups keep filing new motions, any platform, blog, or app whose feed reaches a Florida teenager is one ruling away from facing the state’s fines directly.

Florida’s ban on social media accounts for anyone under 14 is now moving toward enforcement after challengers lost their court fight and an appeals court cleared the way, and even as industry groups keep filing new motions, any platform, blog, or app whose feed reaches a Florida teenager is one ruling away from facing the state’s fines directly.

The Blog Herald
People who stay fit and youthful into their 70s without obsessing over it aren’t genetically lucky or unusually disciplined — they’ve usually built a handful of small, unremarkable habits so embedded in daily life they no longer feel like effort

People who stay fit and youthful into their 70s without obsessing over it aren’t genetically lucky or unusually disciplined — they’ve usually built a handful of small, unremarkable habits so embedded in daily life they no longer feel like effort

The Vessel
Some people don’t find their writing voice until their 60s — and for many it turns out the decades weren’t wasted, they were just research

Some people don’t find their writing voice until their 60s — and for many it turns out the decades weren’t wasted, they were just research

The Blog Herald
A lot of people raised in the 1960s and 70s never heard the adults in their lives say they were proud of them — and some quietly spent the next fifty years trying to earn what was already true

A lot of people raised in the 1960s and 70s never heard the adults in their lives say they were proud of them — and some quietly spent the next fifty years trying to earn what was already true

Global English Editing
Fold a single dollar bill in half fifty-one times, not fifty, and the stack would be thick enough to pass the Sun — exponential growth breaks intuition long before it breaks arithmetic

Fold a single dollar bill in half fifty-one times, not fifty, and the stack would be thick enough to pass the Sun — exponential growth breaks intuition long before it breaks arithmetic

The Blog Herald
Load more
CATEGORIES
Explore