Why You Need to Manage Your Online Reputation June 21, 2018 By Jackie Katz There is no excuse for leaving your practice’s online reputation unmanaged. Consistent growth of a medical practice demands constant attention to online activity. Depending on how active your team is on social media, you might already be practicing certain parts of this public relations discipline. Are you responding to customer complaints with constructive answers? Congratulations – you are well ahead of the curve. Important Balancing Act Many managers and business owners fail to recognize the impact poor online reviews have on the bottom line. It may not be the most pressing task at hand, but it should fall high atop your list of priorities concerned with driving new business. Ask Patients to Write a Review There are many opportunities to convince a patient to leave a positive review. This is especially true after an excellent visit. There should be a mandatory practice that the final interaction be coupled with a specific request to the patient. By clearly asking a patient to leave a response on a specific site you can quickly build up a reputation online. What matters most is how this request is delivered, too aggressive and you will start receiving bitter reviews. Key Takeaways Leaving your practice’s online reputation unmanaged even for a short span of time can decimate search engine rankings. Take a moment to perform a quick audit of your practice’s online reputation by searching social media and sites across the web, chances are you will find some unsavory notes that are turning away potential patients. OMA Comp partners with medical practices to help them manage their online reputation and to keep new business flowing through the door. Our tactics focus on leaving a good impression on people when they read about your business. To learn exactly how we can help your online reputation or to provide a seminar to your team, we invite you to give us a call. #OMAComp #ReputationManagement #OnlineMarketing #MedicalReviews
Happy Father’s Day Weekend! June 15, 2018 By Jackie Katz The team at OMA Comp hopes all the great dads enjoy their special day. #OMAComp #HappyFathersDay #IfYouCanThinkItWeCanDoIt
We Honor YOU This Memorial Day May 25, 2018 By Jackie Katz Thank you to those who sacrificed everything for our freedoms and liberties. #OMAComp #MemorialDay #GivingThanks
You Can Change Your Online Reputation May 21, 2018 By Jackie Katz A business or medical practice’s online reputation is not a static, unchangeable record. Specific practices and tools can be used to change how a company is represented across the web on social media and consumer rating websites. Online reputation management is widely accepted as the best tool for thwarting online reputation threats and fostering new business and patient relationships. Communicating with consumers and/or patients who leave public reviews is one piece of managing your online reputation. Sites recognize when a business responds to an individual’s comment. Whether this interaction resolves the problem at hand or not, this is an excellent means for publicly accepting the account of a situation as unacceptable or making the record clear. Unfortunately, for medical due to HIPAA laws, there are only a few circumstances where a response can include detail, yet an adverse response can leave a serious mark when people are considering using you for their medical needs. Online reputation has internal consequences, too. Employees can feel the impact of a negative review. Who wants to apply for work or be part of a business that treats patients poorly or is shed in a negative light? Even if the review is not true, if it claims an undesirable experience, it can still diminish an employee’s professional reputation and damage the business. Resolving poor assessments and building up positive experiences will quickly instill confidence within your practice. A poor review can be embarrassing, but it shouldn’t ruin your new patient growth rate. Taking an active approach to managing your reputation will restore it to its original presence and likely improve response across major platforms. If you are actively encouraging reviews from happy patients, this will also improve conversion with different sites. To learn more about online reputation and how OMA Comp can help your business or practice, contact us today. #OMAComp #ReputationManagement #ReputationRepair #MedicalReputation #OnlineReputation
How Online Reputation Affects Patient Opinion May 15, 2018 By Jackie Katz Selecting a medical provider to care for yourself or loved one can be a daunting task. Who can I trust to take care of my family? It’s a question worth posing when we think about the online reputation of a practice, since its likely to be the only source for information on a specific provider. Depending on your field, patients may learn about your practice by word of mouth via a current patient or doctor referral or come across your team online when searching for local providers. When a prospective patient begins to select a medical practice, they often will complete an online search to learn about your practice. Online reputation will influence both prospective and current patients. Quick Scan of Search Engines Similar to shopping for physical goods, people will type your medical practice’s name into a search engine and hit enter. This broad inquiry can highlight some unforeseen links and images, some of which may be improperly tagged to you. No matter the relationship, what appears on the screen is likely to influence what people think about you. Consumer protection and advocacy sites work hard to make every review public and most critically, searchable. These results often show inflammatory reviews with little to no context. Social Media Interactions and Conversations Tech savvy individuals recognize social media sites as an excellent means for seeing how patients are treated. In certain cases, patients will take to these sites to vent feelings of frustration or positivity following an appointment. It is ultimately up to the individual whether they trust your practice, though there is plenty you can do to influence this feeling. To learn about how to manage your online reputation and increase your positive reviews, contact OMA Comp. #OMAComp #ReputationManagement #OnlineReputation #PatientReviews #MedicalReputation
How One Bad Review Can Affect You! May 7, 2018 By Editor Having an online presence is a necessity for the modern business and medical practices. As a key driver of organic patient base growth, an up-to-date website serves as a marketing platform and tool for communicating with patients. Being on the web also presents certain challenges, such as managing your online reputation. Individuals are quick to search online for reviews of everything, from the products they buy to the individuals they request services from. General Ratings Sites like Google, Facebook, Healthgrades, RateMD, and Yelp allow individuals to review the organizations and medical practices they interact with. These raw, unfiltered accounts of person to business interactions can prove useful in generating interest yet can also drive people away with a single poor review. A 1-star review can drastically reduce the average rating, especially when a practice has just begun the journey of building an online presence. A patient can write whatever they want, no matter what occurred during their appointment. A great visit can be portrayed online as a hostile and costly interaction. No matter how hard you try, people will eventually leave a sour remark on your online reputation. Reputation Management OMA Comp helps businesses thrive online. We understand that it is not enough to launch a website and hope for it to drive business. Actively managing a site and the associated online profiles is critical to making an impact on the practice’s bottom line. By scanning the internet for poor representations of your business’s quality of service, we can actively prevent malicious reviews. Our deep understanding of content management practices enables us to rapidly respond to these incidents. If your practice or business needs help managing its online presence, we invite you to contact us for a free consultation. #OMAComp #ReputationManagement #OnlinePresence #WebsiteDesign #OnlineReputation
It’s World Password Day May 3, 2018 By Jackie Katz World Password Day is a great reminder to change up your passwords. Always use long, strong, unique and complex passwords to reduce your chance of hackers wreaking havoc or successfully stealing information. Never leave passwords laying around or near your devices. A password manager is a better way to store this information. Always change passwords immediately if there is a breach. #OMAComp #Password #WorldPasswordDay
Tax Day Is Here! April 17, 2018 By Jackie Katz Today is the last day to file your taxes unless you have an extension. As a reminder, there are people who scam the public by impersonating an IRS official through phone calls or online phishing emails. The IRS almost always notifies by regular mail first. If you do receive contact, it is better to hang up and call the IRS directly to make certain that it is not an impersonator trying to con you. #OMAComp #EmailPhishing #PhishingScams #TaxDay
Leverage Office Trainings to Promote Team Improvement April 3, 2018 By Jackie Katz Actively managing your team’s talents and skills can help maximize performance over the long run. When performance is stagnant or perhaps even dwindling, education and training is a good option for getting the wheels turning. If your team is experiencing either of these two potentially fatal situations, continue reading to learn how OMA Comp may be able to help. Professional Development Individuals with career aspirations will jump at any opportunity to develop themselves professionally. Offering your team regular training on topics relevant to their role and the good of the company also provides a means of progression when courses are tied to rewards or promotion criteria. Team Improvement Educating your team on critical issues like Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media, and Reputation Management can have a profound impact. Furthermore, keeping your team apprised of the most effective practices in a topic, like marketing for instance, can improve the timeliness and professionalism of your brand’s response to issues. Unlike traditional executive training, our programs are specifically designed to fit within difficult time constraints of our clients while retaining 100% of the value expected with an external training partner. As a dedicated training partner to many businesses, we understand the need for cost constraints and time, which is why we offer seminars in-house and on location to fit your needs and to deliver the desired level of training. Key topics OMA Comp offers training on include: Reputation Management, Cybersecurity, IT, Marketing, Social Media, and more. Please contact us to learn how OMA Comp’s practical training methods can help benefit your team. #OMAComp #OfficeTraining #TeamTraining #ReputationManagement #ITServices #SocialMedia #OnlineMarketing #Cybersecurity