Tips for Managing Dentist Reputation Assuming you will succeed in business will lead to failure if you don’t manage your reputation as you build your practice. You will make mistakes. Failing to recognize this, and just as important, managing the aftermath of your errors will give you a bad reputation. Once a bad reputation develops, it will kill business and curious patients before they ever click on your website. Be as transparent as possible. You should not give away trade secrets simply because someone asked (and social engineering efforts may target your firm to get things like price lists and patient lists). However, in most matters, you should be transparent. Don’t spend all of your time getting complaints removed from a website. Instead, invest your energy in reaching out to patients to resolve their complaints. Post the steps taken to resolve the problems online so that those who see the complaint also learn how you fixed it. Learn from their feedback so you can improve your service. Develop several websites to correlate to the SEO criteria your patients would use to find your site. One of these will be your main website. The others could be your Facebook page, LinkedIn profile and corporate blog. The more websites tied to your practices name, the more likely at least one will come up at the top of any search for your practice or its services. Ideally, several of your pages will rank in the top few results for your dental practice or searches for services you offer. Given that the odds of someone clicking on a link drop by 10% as they go down the line, dominating top search results increases site visits and thus sales. Build up your presence on social media. Create a Twitter account if you will keep it going with valuable information. Set up a company blog and Facebook page. You may want to set up profiles on other social networks where your patients are based. Search for your own practice online to see what is posted about it. Automate this process using functions like Google Alerts. When you come across inaccurate information, you can request that the site owner to take it down. Reputable website administrators will do this if you can demonstrate that the information is false. However, you should not abuse this right to remove legitimate concerns or you risk your practice’s reputation. Regimes that don’t tolerate dissent are called totalitarian, and practices that rely on similar tactics are proving that they are losing in the marketplace of ideas. Maintaining a good dental business reputation is simple and straightforward once you know how. And now you have the skills necessary to do so yourself. Remember that your dental reputation is everything in business, even in our brave new digital world.