Reputation can make or break a company. Take Comcast, which has a reputation of very poor customer service, or United, with multiple negative events making headlines this year.

So, you want to manage your reputation to make sure it’s on the up and isn’t losing potential customers, right?

• Create an Online Presence: Yes, that means making a profile on all those relevant web properties: Twitter, Facebook, Google+, maybe even an Instagram account.

• Own Your Search Engine Results Page: Showing up as the top three results is not enough. It’s pretty good, to be sure, but ideally you want your brand to be positively and clearly linked on the first page of an online search.

• Use Social Media: by “use” I mean “be active on.” If possible, claim your brand’s name on all relevant social media platforms. You want to be active and positive with social media posts, but grabbing your brand’s name helps keep others from taking it and having it associated with other, possibly negative things. Plus, social media increases your online presence, and almost everyone uses it.

• Start a Blog: Buy a domain with your brand’s name in it and create a neat, professional blog to share information about your company, products, trends in the industry, and other subjects. Another reason? Blogs get more internet traffic than static websites.

• Don’t Be Afraid to Apologize: Own up to any mistakes your company might make. Be real and transparent, too; openness and honesty go a long way to building a good company reputation. A genuine apology can diffuse a situation or lead a crisis towards a close. Make apologies clear and specific, not vague “We’re sorry this made you feel bad” apologies. Making amends never hurt, either.

Ah, behavior: the root of everything we do. People have been trying to figure out why humans do what they do for ages.

Is it relevant to us? Well, unless society has undergone an enormous change over the weekend, human beings are still the ones buying your products and services, which means you should definitely care about their behaviors and what drive them. Here are a few behaviorally-based merchandising tips for your businesses!

Make a Good First Impression

It matters in job interviews and it matters to your customers, whether they realize it explicitly or implicitly. Your offices should make memorable first impressions - and good ones - or else customers walking in could walk right back out.

Put your best foot forward: stock your stores (or lots, in a dealership’s case) with your new and best-selling merchandise. Keep lots neat, clean, and aesthetically appealing - and don’t stop there. Make sure your office spaces are clean, too, and make the area feel as open and welcoming as you can. This can greatly increase a customer’s attitude towards your business, and a happy customer is more likely to do business with you.

Don’t Waste Their Time

With the rise of online shopping, customers are even less inclined to putter about. Even if customers can’t get what they’re looking for online - like cars, at least at this point in time - they’ll still check out your website. Keep it simple and straightforward and easy to navigate. Plus, customers in-store are still looking for specific items or goals and want to get it done as efficiently as possible.

Streamline your business/dealership as much as you can, displaying clear signage and product information to make it easy for your customers to find their way around and find what they’re looking for.

Don’t Put Too Much on Their Plates

Or, put another way: don’t overwhelm your customers with too many choices. As tempting as it is to have your salespeople show a customer a ton of different options or models, or to spit suggestions at them at a rapid-fire pace, take it easy. That kind of behavior will turn customers off of your business and direct them elsewhere. After all, no one wants to go in with the intention of getting that modest sedan and walk out pressured into a pricier, most lavish model. (It’s okay to ask customers if they’re open to looking at something outside of their price range or stated make/model, but be respectful and don’t push or else you’ll fall into the “pushy car salesman” stereotype.)

Overall, keep it simple, listen to your customers, and be as helpful as you can.

Bonus Tip: tap into their other senses! Customers do more than just look at cars (or pictures of cars): they can inspect them, sit in them, and take them for a test drive. Being able to experience the merchandise with more than just their eyes can make customers more sure of their purchases.

Yes.

According to Social Sprout, 30 percent of millennials engage with brands on social media at least once a month. Unfortunately, almost 90 percent of social media messages addressed to brands are ignored. That's not a great number; the better your brand communicates with potential and established customers, the better your business will be.

So what can you do about it? Well, social media monitoring can help you out. Here are several benefits of social monitoring you might be missing out on - or, alternatively, several reasons to begin social media monitoring ASAP.

Gain a better understanding between listening and monitoring

As the name probably suggests, there's a difference between the two: social media monitoring deals more with collecting social messages into a single stream in order to take specific action in response to individual messages (e.g. likes, comments).

And both are pretty important. Sure, monitoring and analysis are key, but all the analysis in the world won't help your brand if you don't take the time to really listen to what your customers are saying. Listening helps your brand extract insights and monitoring enables your brand to expand discussions and engage with your customers.

Becoming more approachable to customers

According to Lithium, 78 percent of Twitter users who complain to a brand on the social media platform expect a response within the hour. Social Sprout reports that it takes a brand an average of 10 hours to respond, while the average user only waits for four hours.

Using social monitoring would go a long way in improving your response times - and thus improving your customer service. If your customers have a good experience interacting with your brand, it will increase their regard for the brand and lead to recommending the brand to their friends.

Never miss a brand-relevant message

Monitoring social messages also focuses your efforts on incoming brand-relevant messages, whether the message mentions the brand directly or not. Without it, it's all too easy to miss important social messages, especially if the user hasn't tagged the brand, @mentioned the brand, or used your brand's hashtag. Investing in a social media monitoring platform can help you identify and track relevant keywords to increase the important social messages you see and can interact with.

Stay organized with marketing campaigns

Having a single channel to promote might not be the best idea; a lot of companies will have several Twitter accounts, for example, to handle different aspects. As an example, PlayStation has an "Ask PlayStation" account separate from their main Twitter to handle direct inquiries and technical issues.

This can be helpful to reduce the sheer number of social messages to wade through. Separate, organized channels help organize the messages by topic, which in turn improves your brand's ability to respond and interact with customers in a timely manner.

Interact with key customers and brand advocates

What about your "biggest fans"? Don't leave them hanging!

Interacting with key customers and brand advocates (a.k.a. the customers who are sold on you and loyal to the brand) can make the difference between a simple sale and a big win for the business. With social media monitoring, "you can find and reply to those customers on the edge to make a purchase from you."

And it's definitely worth the time to seek out and bolster those loyal customers: word-of-mouth marketing influences 74% of customers in their purchasing decisions. Get interactive and build up those positive experiences!

Understand what is - and what is not - working for your competitors

Keep your friends close and enemies closer - that's how the saying goes, right? Take a good look at your competitors and their social media strategies and figure out what works for them and what doesn't. Once you figure out what works, you can emulate it in your own strategy. You can also avoid any social media pitfalls - learn from their examples.

Of course, you don't want to replicate it exactly (and it might not work even if you did), but gaining an understanding of why what your competitor is doing works can help you improve your own strategy.

Win back lost customers

Responding in a timely manner can make a world of difference. People like to feel valued and listened to, so if a customer tweets a question or a complaint it should be a goal to quickly hop on and try to fix the issue. Even if it's not fixable, taking the time to respond and try and show that you, the brand, cares about this single customer can increase your chances of doing business with them later.

Don't let negative experiences go unnoticed. Use a social media monitoring platform to dig through the plethora of social messages to find the biggest issues to address and fix if you can.

Like it or not, social media is taking over the world, and the business world is part of that. As times change and it becomes even more ingrained in our culture, your brand needs to learn and adapt to stay relevant.

In this age of information, it should be a primary goal of ours to become more, well, informed. With this in mind, I’ve compiled a few resources - visual and auditory, something for everyone - that people in the automotive industry could benefit from, or at the very least enjoy.

For Those Who Prefer the Auditory Things

Podcasts have really blown up in the past few years. Smartphones contributed to the boom, too, making it easy to access all of that sweet, sweet content. Ranging from storytelling to business, they’re a great medium to spread information (and can be a good way to pass the time on that commute). Here are some automotive podcasts worth a shot.

CarStuff: for all things automotive! (No, really: the description of the podcast rhetorically asks, “What's the history of stop lights? What are some common myths about car dealerships?”, a.k.a. the two most different automotive topics ever.) Produced by HowStuffWorks and hosted by senior editor Scott Benjamin and writer Ben Bowlin, you’re sure to find something that’s just right for you in this topically-diverse podcast.

Car Talk: hosted by so-called “America’s funniest auto mechanics,” this NPR podcast takes calls from car owners and cracks wise as they answer questions. And the good news: “You don't have to know anything about cars to love this one hour weekly laugh fest.” Sadly, Car Talk has come to an end, but it’s definitely worth a listen. (Remember what I said about those commutes? This might make them feel a little shorter.)

The AutoBlog Podcast: hosted by Dan Roth, this podcast is a “long-running no-holds-barred audio-only counterpart to Autoblog.com.” Essentially a bunch of automotive enthusiasts getting together to talk cars, the AutoBlog Podcast is a place to, in the description’s own words, “drop the pretense of being professional automotive journalists” in order to talk passionately and without too many reservations. Welcoming special guests including staff from Autoblog.com and “titans of the auto industry,” this weekly podcast is awesome.

The Dealer Playbook Podcast: created by Michael Cirillo, I imagine this is one of the podcasts you’ll be most interested in. Another weekly podcast, episodes focus on marketing, sales, and leadership. “Knowledge isn’t power until you know what to do with it,” Cirillo writes. The goal of the Dealer Playbook Podcast is to provide you with actionable insights to implement into your everyday work.

For Those Who Prefer the Written Word

Fear not: I’ve got some book recommendations, too (although I don’t suggest reading these on your commute behind the wheel).

Drive On!: A Social History of the Motor Car: rated a solid 4.0 on Goodreads, author L.J.K. Setright - considered of the world’s foremost and most forthright authors on the technological changes in the automotive world - follows the history of automobiles, charting it decade by decade and tracing how cars have adapted based on what society demanded of them. Setright covers the progression from wooden wheels to computer control, sharing the origins of the word “dashboard” to the maximum speed of a raindrop along the way. Called “stimulating” and “witty,” you’d be doing yourself a favor by picking up this read.

Six Men Who Built the Modern Auto Industry: written by Richard A. Johnson, this is the story of six extraordinarily important men who rebuilt and redefined the automotive industry following World War II: Henry Ford II; Eberhard Von Kuenheim, the founder of BMW; Shoichiro Honda; Lee Iacocca, the founder of Chrysler; Robert Lutz, an influential key player at General Motors; and Ferdinand Piech, builder of Volkswagen Group. Follow along and witness the huge fundamental changes they brought to the industry, making a sizable dent in the societies they lived in along the way.

The Machine That Changed The World: a collaborative effort by James Womack, Daniel Jones, and Daniel Roos, their book is based on an MIT five-million-dollar, five-year analysis of the future of the automobile. Exploring the underlying history and impact the automobile had from the very beginning, from its mass-production days to more modern technologies, the book takes a good look at the evolution and attempts to predict its future. According to the New York Times Magazine, “The fundamentals of this system are applicable to every industry across the globe...[and] will have a profound impact on human society - it will truly change the world.”

Epic Content Marketing: here we take a detour from the purely automotive-focused books and set our sights on something just as important nowadays: social media and marketing. The book, written by Joe Pulizzi and one of FORTUNE Magazine's Top 5 Business Book Must-Reads, tackles the topic of attracting prospects and customers by creating the content said prospects and customers actually care about. After all, we (and our prospective customers) are constantly inundated with new content, coming from all sides and at all times. In order to be truly effective, your content has to stand out and be meaningful - and Pulizzi will tell you how to achieve just that.

The Art of Social Media: carrying on the previous theme, this book, by the incredibly knowledgeable Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick, serves as the one essential guide to getting the most bang for your buck - as well as for your time and effort. Coming in strong with 100+ tips, tricks, and insights to strengthen your social media strategy, you definitely want to pick this one up if you use social media in your business. (Hint: if you don’t, you should.)

Now that I’ve presented you with quite the wall of text, dip your toes in! Do you have any other podcasts or books that you would recommend? Let me know!

Woah! Facebook! Mark Zuckerberg!

In all seriousness, though, the social media platform has become super popular and a huge number of people use it. So why not take this nifty tool and use it to your advantage? A lot of companies and advertisers have already taken to the social media platform like ducks to virtual water, and you can too.

Still need convincing to make the move? Here are five important (and compelling) stats to encourage you to get started.

1. Facebook is the most used social media platform among all age groups: according to an Edison Research report, some 64 percent of people use Facebook. To get even more specific, Pew Research Centre found that 79 percent of Americans use Facebook; and if you count everyone, even those who don’t use the Internet, a whopping 68 percent of all adults are on Facebook. Not a bad demographic, huh?

2. When it comes to social logins, Facebook takes the cake: a report by AdvertisingAge found that the social media platform accounts for over 80 percent of those logins.

3. Your social media manner matters more than you think (five points for alliteration to me, woohoo): 71 percent of consumers who’ve had a positive experience with a brand’s social media are likely to recommend it to others. If used effectively, Facebook can increase your brand engagement and bring in new customers, as well as retain current ones.

4. Think “likes” matter? Well, they do, but not as much as you probably think. According to Brandwatch, 96 percent of people discussing brands online don’t follow the brands’ owned profiles. You need to step out of your comfort zone and off your own page to monitor these “unbranded” conversations if you want to gain insights and manage your brand’s health.

5. Just like location matters when it comes to realty, time matters when it comes to posting. For your posts to get maximum visibility, the best times to make posts on Facebook are 3:00 pm on Wednesdays, 1:00-4:00 pm on Thursdays and Fridays, and 12:00-1:00 pm on Saturdays and Sundays (hint: engagement is 18 percent higher on Thursdays and Fridays).

So what are you waiting for? Take advantage of the widespread social media craze and get going!