Avoid Overpaying for Reputation Management Services For Your Practice

In a recent article in Crain’s New York Business, Cara Trager reports on three professionals who have recognized the importance of online reputation in their practices.

You don’t have to spend the money they did to successfully manage your online reputation for you or your practice.

Summary of the story

Cara tells the stories of an attorney, a foot surgeon, and another attorney who had problems with their online reputations.

One attorney had a nasty comment posted on one of his YouTube videos. He hired a “virtual image consultant” to help him proactively combat negative online comments.

The foot surgeon lost a potential patient when her husband read a negative review online about him. He is paying another popular reputation consultant $2,000 a year to improve his online image.

Using a slightly different approach, another attorney pays the attorney (and now doctor) review site Avvo several hundred dollars a month to rank highly when patients search for him on their site.

Is paying reputation consultants really necessary?

Here are X reasons why you need to consider paying large fees to these companies for their services:

• You can tie enough lost revenue dollars to a sullied online reputation to make the cost worth it
• You are in a practice particularly vulnerable to being discussed on social media sites like Facebook
• You have a high transaction value practice like plastic surgery or cosmetic procedures, where comments are likely to be passionate, whether negative or positive
• Your local competitive environment is so vicious that it would take you a year to create a positive image on your own

An easier, cheaper approach for most of us

For most physicians these expenses are probably not that helpful with one exception: if you’re so unmotivated to be proactive for yourself or cannot delegate the task to a competent staff person, it may be worth the expense to “get things started”.

However, I can tell you from my own experience, the tools for doing most of this stuff on your own are mostly free, and if you can send email and upload pictures, you can do much of this work yourself.

Where you can get started today

Download my free Quick Start Guide To The Doctor Rating Sites – there you’ll find simple, straight-forward instructions on how to use these sites to start controlling your online reputation this week.