Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos says “The definition of a brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.”

If you want to be a successful business owner, you need to keep an eye on what people are saying about your brand.

One way to do this is to look for what people are saying about you on the internet.  (A side note: you might want to take a Valium BEFORE you do this!)  Go online and check out the local forums and bulliten boards. 

9 times out of 10, you’ll find something about your store.

Here’s some things to keep in mind:

The Internet is an unregulated wasteland.  Anyone can go onto forums and say whatever they want.  That means you’re open to commentary from competitors, angry ex-employees, people who just don’t like you, and more.

Guess what?  These people aren’t going to say nice things!  It’s a sad truth about human nature that people are more than happy to say bad things whenever they’ve got the opportunity — yet when the time comes to say positive things, you can almost hear the crickets chirping!

So what good comes from reading bad things about your organization?

First and foremost, you’ve always got to be open to the fact that some of what might be out there could be true.  If you’re reading that your stores are dirty, that your employees are rude, that your prices are the highest in town, you might want to investigate.  If the stores are dirty, if the employees are rude — well, these problems can be fixed.  If your prices are higher, you need to have a good reason why — and make sure that reason is clear to the public!

Use a mystery shopper!  Have someone investigate these claims for you. 

Other things you read aren’t going to be true.   For me, that’s the infuriating bit.  It’s very hard to read lies about your business, the one you’ve put your heart and soul and life into.

However, you’ve got to, absolutely HAVE to, set emotion aside when dealing with false commentary on the internet.  As good as it may feel to tell some random internet poster that they’re an idiot, the fact is you’re a business.  You need to be calm and professional. 

Defend your brand by presenting facts.  If you’ve got research you can link to, great!  Stay level-headed and make sure you’re representing yourself in a positive light.

This is hard to do.  I’ve screwed up in this area, and wound up alienating a lot of customers.  I regret that — but at the same time, at least I’ve had the experience and learned from it!  It’s hard to stomach that there are people who aren’t going to like you no matter what — but the more important fact is that there are a great many readers who judge you and your store by how you respond to that angry, unpleasant person.

In the great blogging tradition, I’m going to use my little corner of the blogosphere to rant for a topic near and dear to me.  If you’re in retail, you’re going to be more than familiar with this rant.  In fact, if you own any kind of business at all that hires young people, everything I’m going to say will resonate with you!

Let me start this out by saying that over the past 33 years, I’ve hired more people than you could ever imagine.  Hundreds and hundreds of people –  many of whom are on the younger side.

Lately, I’ve discovered that I’m not just hiring the young people.  I’ve got their parents on board, too!

99% of the young people we hire are GREAT!  They work hard and they do a good job.  But there’s always teh employee who just isn’t right for our store, for whatever reason.  They might not understand the importance of customer service.  They might be incapable of running the cash register properly, no matter how many times we train them.  They might, frankly, rather be anywhere else but working — and it shows.

Then we have to let those people go. 

That’s when the phone calls start.  Angry parents who cannot believe we’ve fired their child.  They call, confident in their knowledge that their child is an absolute perfect angel and that we’re the biggest jerks on the planet for firing their kid.

What are you supposed to say at that point?  I can tell you this: if I’d gone home as a young man and told my father I’d gotten myself fired, he would have been angry too — at me!  Clearly, if I got fired, I did something to deserve it.  No one fires employees for the fun of it!

I’m a parent too.  I know how much we love our kids.  I also know that sometimes the best thing we can do as parents is to step back and let our kids stand on our own two feet.  We don’t help them by interfering in their jobs!  Somehow that message has gotten lost along the way.

We get a lot of parents who tell us, “My kid needs a job.”  Now we say, “We don’t hire parents.  If your kid is looking for a job, have them come in and pick up an application!”

Last time, I talked about a challenge we had in our store.  Rest assured that the situation didn’t stop when I was done blogging about it: I knew we had to do more training.

Some times, as retailers, we wind up training on the type of things that just seem like regular, ordinary common sense.  The truth is we have to train on this kind of stuff — because we can’t afford to take common sense for granted.

What happens if we do?

Your crew will make mistakes.  Big mistakes.  And when you ask your crew member why they didn’t do the proper procedure, they’ll look at you with this vacant, clueless stare: “I never knew we were supposed to do that!”

If you want a fool-proof, guaranteed way to eliminate this problem, just keep reading.

Write out the procedure you want your employees to follow.  Keep it short and to the point: you only want to focus on one issue at a time.

Include the procedure in your employees paycheck.  Before they get their NEXT paycheck from you, they have to read and SIGN the paper and return it to you to be kept in thier employee file.

That way when you’re faced with the “I never knew that..” scenario, you can say, “Well, according to this paper you signed, you did know that.”

Since we’ve started this policy at our stores (and it’s been in place for years now) the whole “I never knew” situation has virtually disappeared.  This is a quick, simple, and effective way to start improving your employees performance — TODAY!

You’ve heard of a tempest in a teapot?  Recently we had a dust up in the litter box — litter box aisle, that is!

I was standing in our North Hampton store, and saw a customer walking out empty handed.  That’s pretty unusual.  Generally when someone comes to our store, they’ve come with a purpose.  They have a mission in mind, and they come to us because they know we can help them achieve their mission.

I asked one of our cashiers what the story was.

“Oh,” she replied.  “She was looking for a LitterMaid.  We didn’t have one, but I told her it’s an item we regularly carry, and that it will be in on Monday.”

I looked around the store and discovered that we did INDEED have the LitterMaid on the shelves.

I counted to ten, and then went back to that cashier.  “Of course, you’ve got the lady’s name and phone number.”

“Oh, no,” she said.  “She’s a regular.  She’ll be back.”

This type of thing happens all the time and it drives me NUTS.  There’s two ways to handle this situation, the CORRECT way and the LAZY way.

The LAZY way was to do exactly what my cashier did: tell the customer we don’t have the merchandise, and when it would be in, and when the customer should come back.

What’s wrong with that, you ask?  Well, it leaves out the whole customer service part of the transaction.  Where in this model are we actually taking care of the customer?  You’re shifting the burden of monitoring when your inventory arrives onto the customer.  If they want to deal with that, why don’t they sit home and order their merchandise online?  They don’t need us for that!

The CORRECT way to handle the situation is this: (Assuming you’ve actually checked for the merchandise, and it’s really, actually not in stock!) Get the customer’s name and number, so you can call the customer back when the merchandise arrives, and when it would be convenient for the customer to pick it up!

This puts the customer service back in the deal.  You’re demonstrating concern for the customer’s needs, and demonstrating that you want to take care of them. 

Yes, it’s a teeny, tiny bit more work.  We’re talking about what?  Five minutes, maybe? To get the name and number and make the follow up call when the merchandise arrives? 

That’s five minutes that will make all the difference to the customer.  That’s the five minutes that will make the customer feel cared about and important.  That’s five minutes that’s critical in CREATING CUSTOMER LOVE.

Last time, we talked about the value of marketing to and retaining your existing customer base.  This is one example of this concept in action: we keep our customers five minutes at a time.

My friend Bill Eisner, one of the smartest, most creative people I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet — and the force behind Nonbox Advertising , sent me the following article, and I think you should all read it too:

Marketers Put Emphasis on Loyalty
Budgets Shift to Programs to Keep Core Audience as Economy Tightens
By Michael Bush

Hilton’s Mr. Burke said that’s why the company focuses on customizing its offers. “We’re in an environment where we have, at any given time, as many as 100 offers in market being personalized on individual customer preferences. It’s become a very cost-effective way to run the business and generated a ton of business for the hotels.”

Why do I love this article? Besides the fact that it reinforces one of my core beliefs: that we’re far better off concentrating our time, energy and resources on making our existing customers happy, it points out a tremendous truth:

As the economy gets tighter, it’s critical to spend each dollar wisely. You need to consider the return on investment (ROI) of each and every marketing and promotional decision you make!