Jane Griffith, Director of Marketing at Pinnacle called recently to talk about the importance of monitoring and responding to Better Business Bureau (BBB) listings.

BBB and the Chamber of Commerce business listings and reviews are old school. But they’re online, user-generated content. They’re SEO-optimized, locally searchable and validated by a staff of experts. In other words, they still matter and can make or break a potential customer’s impressions. Renters, investors, lenders – they can all find your properties’ reputation at www.bbb.org.

Do you know how your property ratings are affecting public perceptions of your brand?

Bad ratings at the BBB or Chamber of Commerce can happen to anyone. I checked four San Francisco properties owned by one of the most prestigious apartment owners. One had an ‘F’ failing rating due to non-response to complaints. The good news is that complaints and disputes with the BBB can be constructively resolved.

Jane kindly offered to share with the industry a step-by-step process for checking and responding to BBB reviews and ratings (use link below to download).  If you don’t want to monitor reviews yourself, ask your ad agency or ILS if reputation management is service they can look at providing for you in the future.

By the way, Jane and Donald Davidoff, Group Vice President, Strategic Systems at Archstone will be co-presenting at the Apartment Internet Marketing Conference (AIM) 2010.  We hope to see you there!

Very best regards,

Steve Lefkovits
Executive Producer, AIM Conference

Jane’s BBB Process (click to download)

Register for AIM 2010

PS – BBB and Chamber of Commerce listings can provide great search engine optimization.  At last year’s AIM Conference Chris Sherman, one of the country’s leading experts on search laid out a step by step approach to improving a business’s visibility to the search engines.  First on his list was leveraging Chamber of Commerce and local community guides.

Even if you’re not going to do it yourself, be sure to ask your agencies and listings vendors if they’ve seen Chris’s presentation.  He is executive editor of Search Engine Land and producer of the internationally acclaimed SMX Events.  His presentation contains new product ideas, competitive research and insights into changing local business search behavior that might interest them – and you.  Check it out:

Chris Sherman’s AIM 2009 Presentation