When it comes to dentists and online reputation management, fear is often the overwhelming emotion preventing most dental practices from capitalizing on what is already most likely their number one new patient acquisition source – word of mouth.
Fear about what patients might say online about their practice, fear masses of people will see a negative review and immediately launch a county-wide boycott of their services, or maybe just fear that they’re going to be found out – maybe they’ve been faking it with hopes of making it all this time.
Good thing is, being a dentist there’s nothing really to fake – right?
That one was rhetorical.
Fear (noun) – a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, pain, etc., whether the threat is real or imagined; the feeling or condition of being afraid.
You already made it, now go take advantage of the positive reputation you’ve worked hard to attain in your local community.
Whatever your fear is about eliciting, collecting, and broadcasting digital word of mouth about your dental practice, one thing is certain; that fear can be paralyzing.
Our hope with this post is to examine the fear some dentists experience – not you personally of course – with regards to protecting and benefiting from their online reputation.
In this age of digital social connectivity it is of the utmost importance for dentists to actively engage their patients. Dental practices need to collectively (as a team) welcome feedback, ask for assistance, and reward loyalty.
Dental practices need to be part of the conversation or they are missing a grand opportunity to capture the hearts and minds of new patients in their local communities.
Why Fear?
When it comes to their local online reputation, a lot of dentists are totally clueless on what the ‘Internet’ says about them.
A lot of dental practices dismiss the ‘Internet’ as a waste of money or a novelty when it comes to effective practice marketing.
Some dentists think they deal in the real world with people actually walking through their doors, and there is no need to manage their online reputation.
What these woefully unprepared dentists don’t realize is this; although people are definitely walking through the door, they’re also talking to each other online about their dental practice.
And the more dentists ignore the online aspect of their practice word of mouth, the fewer new patients they’ll see. The smart practices out there have been leveraging the power of the Internet for the past 10-15 years. Dentists need not fear a patient broadcasting their innermost dental experience to the masses.
They need to welcome the digital social chatter, but that’s not all.
Fear should not be the underlying reason for dental practices to not openly and effectively communicate with their patients. If bad word of mouth is the fear, and that fear is preventing them from participating in the conversation, they’re not only doing themselves a disservice, they’re also being unfair to the local community.
No Fear
The people have a right to know what their dental experience will be like when they choose your dental practice, and whether you fear it or not they will go talk about it.
Offline and online, whether you like it or not.
And more importantly, if you don’t provide an online forum to actively engage and syndicate patient reviews there are plenty of websites out there that will broadcast the dental patient musings.
For dentists to fear the online review, is like we as humans fearing our own mortality…we can’t get away from it, and it will happen.
Now do we want to be able to put our socks on each day or would we rather remain a shut-in and stew on the inevitable.
You see, if we did that we’d miss out on life!
And if you continue to fear the online review, your new patient acquisition return on investment will continue to shrink.
Click the link to see if negative online reviews really matter to dentists?
Patients will chat away on Facebook, yip on Yelp, or proselytize on Angieslist. Dentists no longer have a choice, the paradigm has shifted.
How is the return on engagement with your dental practice digital word of mouth?
And how is this dentist dealing with negative digital word of mouth from another dentist on his own website??
