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January 21, 2010 | dentalproductsreport.com

The E-volution will not be televised

Use online opportunities to grow your practice and manage your reputation.

2009 was a year filled with opportunity and challenge (more of the latter than some may have preferred).   As the pace of change continues to accelerate, we should expect no shortage of challenge and opportunity in 2010.

Much of this opportunity for growth will continue to be found online, specifically, in the area of reputation management. The challenge will lay largely in trying to keep up without being distracted from what you find fulfilling and profitable.

My friend and mentor Bill Blatchford suggests that the decision to engage in any activity be made by answering two simple questions: 

1. Will it contribute to my livelihood?

AND 

2. Will it enrich my life?

If the answer to both questions is no, then don’t do it.  While that sounds simple, sometimes we don’t know the outcome of a given activity until we try it, and therein lay the challenge.

The E-volution will not be televised

I use E-volution to denote the Electronic Revolution sweeping over us. One area where growth and change are particularly great is the relatively new phenomenon called Online Reputation Management (ORM), which, according to Wikipedia (as of 1/2010) is: The practice of consistent research and analysis of one’s personal or professional business or industry reputation, as represented by the content across all types of online media.

I offer a slight refinement to that definition: Effective Online Reputation Management, or E-ORM, is the process by which an entity (or a representative of that entity) exerts control over how its perception is formed, maintained, and accessed via the Internet.

I feel this definition is more useful because it: Asserts that E-ORM is a process, which goes beyond the simple gathering and analysis of information and it's an ongoing, ideally proactive, process of controlling how perceptions are formed and maintained.

The great divide

As noted above, there is an accelerating trend where people turn to online media to research and purchase local services (like dentistry).

Though 63% of consumers and small business owners turn to the internet first for information about local companies and 82% use search engines to do so, only 44% of small businesses have a website and half spend less than 10% of their marketing budget online, according to research from Webvisible and Nielsen.

This disparity between how business owners act as consumers, and how they market their own services, is termed The Great Divide.

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