73 The Counselor's Moral Compass for Obtaining Google Reviews and Managing Online Marketing

Unlock the secrets to ethically garnering Google reviews as a counselor with Dr. Kate Walker. This episode promises to guide practitioners through the complex terrain of client feedback, highlighting the importance of respecting professional boundaries while leveraging online tools for business growth. As we walk together, you'll gain insight into the ethical nuances that make the counseling profession unique, especially when it comes to managing your digital presence and ensuring your services are appropriately and effectively showcased.

Navigating the landscape of Google My Business can be tricky for counselors wary of crossing ethical lines, but with Dr. Walker's expert advice, it becomes a path of integrity and professionalism. She details the steps to claim and maintain your business listing and why colleague reviews, rather than client testimonials, are the gold standard in our industry. You'll learn how to organize your marketing tools using platforms like Trello to safeguard client confidentiality while still promoting your practice wisely.

Wrapping up the episode, the focus shifts to outcome surveys as a tool for refining your counseling services and reinforcing business success. Dr. Walker emphasizes the collection of anonymous client data to maintain privacy while highlighting your effectiveness and areas for improvement. She assures Texas counselors that an ethical approach to soliciting feedback not only upholds our duty to clients but also strengthens our practices, ensuring that these vital services continue to reach those in need with utmost integrity.

Get your step by step guide to private practice. Because you are too important to lose to not knowing the rules, going broke, burning out, and giving up. #counselorsdontquit.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

I think that's it. I'm Dr Kate Walker. Welcome to your Tuesday training, where I'm going to help you get googly with it. So our theme for February is sharing the love, and there are lots of ways we share the love. Number one we're amazing counselors and we share our passion by delivering amazing services to the individuals in our community. But people in our community at least I'm a people in the community, right? I am trained, as are most people in the world, to look for reviews. I mean, when you go to a new town, if you want to do a new restaurant, you're going to most likely look for reviews.

Speaker 1: 0:42

And the dilemma for us is we cannot solicit reviews from our clients. And that's why, when we go to you know, if we hire outside marketing professionals or business coaches and they're like, hey, you have to get reviews, you have to make sure everyone leaves your review, and we're trying to explain to them. Yeah, but we can't do that. And there are lots of reasons we can't do that, even though in the Texas rules, there's no rule that says you may not solicit reviews from clients. Okay, I'm going to tell you right now, there's no rule that says that, but there is a rule that says you may not benefit from something at the client's expense, and I'm paraphrasing here. So what you're going to get from this training is how to give someone your Google link so they can leave you a review, how to give a review, how to get a review and even how to use client data that you can publicize in an ethical way. So it's not that we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to client feedback. Right, we can still solicit that in an ethical way and even publish the results. So hang out till the very end, because I want you to really understand how to do that.

Speaker 1: 2:04

And if you are someone listening to me and if you're on a replay, you know I think you're amazing because you're probably doing something super boring and you're in your earbuds Awesome, go you. If you're listening to be live Trying to figure out ways to get reviews, and if you're the person who's already got client testimonials on your website and you're kind of shaking in your boots right now like what's Kate going to say? Take a deep breath, it's okay, I'm going to kind of give you a way out of that. If you're ready to take those testimonials down and I, like I said, I mean you do, you, you are amazing, no matter what. I'm just going to give you another way to do it, and so if you decide to get out of that camp that posts text testimonials, I'm going to throw you a lifeline.

Speaker 1: 2:58

So, having said all that, let's start at the beginning Glasses on. So here's the thing emails I'm sorry, I'm sorry, let me scratch that not emails. Getting a Google review has to start with you claiming your business. Now I'm going to give you a quick review of this, because I could probably spend 30 minutes on how to do all of this. So I promised and I'm going to deliver. I will be sharing a screen today because, yeah, I said I would. So if you're listening to me on a replay, don't despair, I will talk you through everything that I'm doing and everything that I'm looking at. So, as I share my screen, you'll see I'm already queued up to the Google my Business site.

Speaker 1: 3:51

And how did I get here? Well, I googled Google my Business, because I don't use bookmarks, I don't know why, I just don't. So when you Google Google my Business, it will take you to a site where you can claim your business. So you know, for example, I just wanted to Google. Let's say, joe's Counseling Shack. Let's see if anybody owns. No, there's Joe's Crab Shack, lots of Joe's Crab Shack, so nobody over here claiming. So if that's your business, you might want to claim it. And you may see that sometimes when you go to Google something, it'll say do you own this business? Would you like to claim this business? So this is you saying yes, this is my business. So let's go back to our 져. Obviously, customer agreement is open customer.

Speaker 1: 4:45

So I'm back on the Google my Business page and you'll see there's a blue box that says Manage Now. Or up here in the right hand corner, it says Sign In. So if I manage now, I'm kind of curious. I don't know where it's going to take me. Okay, so I'm logged in. I'm actually logged in to my private practice website, which is good because that's what I'm talking to, right, private practice owners. So my private practice, achievebalanceorg, is located in Texas and it looks like it has some Google reviews. It has my hours. There's some missing information here. I can go over here. Anyway, it's kind of all about achieve balance. Well, if I say, let's say, I want to click Edit my Business Information, it's going to take me to. It must know that I'm logged in, right. So here's all my stuff here. I can go in and edit. I can add lots and lots of stuff, which I don't want to do today.

Speaker 1: 5:50

So there is a process with claiming your business and, as I mentioned, you can go back into the trainings actually even in your membership and see how folks have talked about that. And if you're attending the free webinar if you attended the free webinar with Jenny Melrose, you could ask her that question. But, in a nutshell, you have to prove that that's your business. And the way you prove that it's your business is with snail mail. So you would put in your address. They would send you a postcard in the mail that says you know to you, and then it would have a code. And when you enter that code, it's like well, okay, now your business is verified, now you have your business. So what you can do then is go to your dashboard. Now the dashboard is going to have all kinds of fun stuff you can modify, like your hours and your holiday specials.

Speaker 1: 6:48

But that's not why you're here today. You're here for that magical Google review link. So I'm going to take you to my Trello board. If you have followed me, if you've listened to me teach, you know that I am a Trello fan, so I keep everything on my Trello board. So if I can get to it, here we go. We'll go to my example board. So this is my example board. As you can see, it's called example over here and this is an example of a board that I have with tons of links that I keep handy. And here's my link to Google reviews. So if I want a review, all I need to do is share. Now this is the link to my Kate Walker training. So apologize for that, but it is my Google review link. So if I click that, you'll see a lovely pop up window that says you can give Kate Walker training a review. So if I were to go to my achieve balance Google review and click that, I could give that to someone and they could review me on Google and it would show up.

Speaker 1: 8:00

So now we're getting into the ethics of it. So, step one you've got to claim your business in Google Google my business. Go through that process. Once you get verified, then you will have the link to share with a friend who can then review your business. Now why don't we give this link to clients?

Speaker 1: 8:25

So many reasons. Let me count the ways, but number one and I'm going to stop the share for a minute is with counselors, there is a power differential. So we are in a position where we're helping our client and we have a certain set of skills, as Liam Neeson likes to say. So, while we're not hired killers like Liam Neeson and Taken, we are still in a position where sometimes we're helping our clients by oh, I don't know challenging them. Or we might be helping our clients by paraphrasing, summarizing, extending, and here's this truth you may not have thought about that they don't really like or they're not prepared for yet. So, in a nutshell, sometimes when we're doing good work, our clients pissed off. All right, just in a nutshell.

Speaker 1: 9:23

So if you're listening to this and you're not a counselor a little peek behind the curtain there. We're not in that room to create fans. All right, I want you to hit pause, rewind that and play that again. We're not in the therapy room to create a fan. And you have heard me if you've listened to my marketing videos before. I love creating fans. You know that when the potential client calls and we're not able to help them, we are going to create a fan who will refer our services to family and colleagues, etc. Etc. But once they become a client, this is our sacred duty. Y'all we have to understand that. We're not in that room to make friends. We're there to do good work.

Speaker 1: 10:12

And when you ask for a review, in that moment that power differential shifted and your client is now saying, hmm, okay, they asked me for a review. I really like my counselor. I'd hate for them to be pissed off at me. So yeah, I'll give them a review. And then now imagine you're the counselor who just offered that client your Google link. Are you going to change the way you counsel so that they don't go back and give you a bad review? So there's so much going on here. That's for your gain, but not necessarily for the client's gain. Right and worst case scenario if it changes how you do therapy, it's not good for anybody. So that's my stance. I'm sticking to it. And if you're in the camp that posts testimonials on your website, please don't hang up the Zoom call here. I want you to keep listening, because there is a way to get that data from your clients. I'll get to that in just a second.

Speaker 1: 11:17

So you may be asking well, kate, what the heck is the Google link for if I can't give it to my client? Well, it's kind of what this whole month of February is about in Texas counselors creating bad-ass businesses. We are colleagues and we can review each other. So you have colleagues that you have setting classes with before You've heard them present. Maybe you've gone to conferences and they've offered CEs, you've gone to community events and you're like hey, I know that person. That was an amazing talk on parenting adolescents in the age of COVID.

Speaker 1: 11:55

You're able to give a colleague an amazing review that speaks to their expertise. It may speak to their speaking ability, their personality, their person. What am I trying to say here? You know, like when you're good with people and you can make them laugh and you can shake their hand, so you are able to speak to so much with your colleague, that translates into yeah, I bet this person's a pretty good counselor too. So don't think that, okay, I'm going to talk about this person's amazing presenting skills.

Speaker 1: 12:31

Kate, that has nothing to do with counseling. That's not going to attract a client for my colleague here. Well, I don't know If you were trying to seek out counselors and you saw oh my goodness, this person has an amazing review from a colleague that says they're a good presenter on this topic, that I need counseling for Holy moly, this is the person for me, so your review can still matter, even though you're not speaking as a client about this person's counseling skills. That makes sense. Now I don't want you to get hung up on this thing. Oh, you know competition. I hear that a lot.

Speaker 1: 13:13

Well, why would I review my colleague? We're in the same town. We serve the same population Y'all. If there can be a mattress store on every corner and a Starbucks across from a Starbucks, there is enough business to go around on this planet that we don't need to get into that scarcity mindset that somehow I cannot help my colleague grow because it means less for me. That's not the way it works. Your town, your community, your region has plenty of folks who need your particular services. So you building up a colleague is only being helpful, it's only helping the community, it's only making sure that we are truly filling the gaps and access to care, and it's not taking away anything from you.

Speaker 1: 14:06

I talk about this in another presentation that I do about what to do if you get a bad Google review right, because I think I mean I showed you a second before. If you were looking at the screen share, you see that I have five Google reviews on my private practice site. I didn't solicit those. I can't stop people from giving me reviews, so if a client wants to disclose their very own identity and give me a review, I don't have to go in and take that down right. Remember, protected health information belongs to the client. They can do whatever they want to with it. So that review I'm very happy. It's their five, five star reviews, yay, but let's say that I had done something in session that had pissed off one of my clients, and they went over there and gave me a terrible review.

Speaker 1: 14:59

This has happened, so one of the things that can offset a bad review are good reviews, and so you have to be really careful here, because, remember, you can't announce to the world that this person's your client. Remember, you can neither confirm nor deny that client's identity when you have that Google review right. So you going back and forth with that client online in public, I don't know. To me, that's a little gray. What you can do, though, is you can contact trusted colleagues who have seen you speak, who have seen you do amazing things, and say hey, could you guys do me a favor and give me a good review? I you know there's a bad one on my site. You don't have to say that's my client. You don't have to say anything about what the content or who the identity is of that review. You can simply ask colleagues to give you a good review. But I'm not going to go deep into that because that's in another presentation, another podcast episode, another blog post. So, last but not least, I know you want to. You know this is the. This is the part you needed.

Speaker 1: 16:11

There is a way to use client data that you can publicize that will show how amazing you are. So one of the things folks often do I know my doctor does this They'll send out a survey saying how did how, did we do Right? So I can go answer like a five minute survey about was your appointment on time? Did we, was the waiting room clean? I don't know. There are a lot of questions, though, that I get asked about the services that I received from, let's say, my, my physician, right, and we've all gotten those before. Well, what you can do is collate that data and announce the results, if they're good, to your public.

Speaker 1: 17:02

So I'll screen share for a minute till you can see what I'm talking about, and my software that I use with my clients is called Full Slate. It is a HIPAA compliant software that allows me to send out some template emails. So these are preloaded emails that I've gotten together. I'm not an affiliate for Full Slate. I think they're awesome, though. I would have recommend them anytime, as long as they stay HIPAA compliant, it's wonderful for those of us who work in this field. So here's an example. If you're listening to me, what I'm looking at is the template for my follow-up email. When a client has had their last session with me and or they haven't come back in a while, they'll get this email. It will trigger after a certain amount of time. It says name. That'll be the client's name. Again, this is not a mass email, right? That's not HIPAA compliant. We're sending out just one email with HIPAA compliant software.

Speaker 1: 18:05

We appreciate you choosing us for your care and we hope you were satisfied with the services you received. If you have a moment, it would be very helpful if you would answer three questions about your experience with your therapist at our client satisfaction survey. Your responses are completely confidential. Thank you for helping us to improve Achievebalanceorg, our phone number and a link to our online scheduling. So when you go to, when you click this survey, which I've already opened it, that's not it. Okay, I'm going to just click it again. Then here I go, here we go. So here's what it looks like when the client clicks it.

Speaker 1: 18:49

If you're listening to me, basically what I'm looking at is a survey monkey survey that I made a few years ago and it says thank you for taking the time to answer three questions about your experience with the therapists at Achievebalanceorg. So this is back when I had multiple therapists. So if I click next, I would say I would see number one how satisfied were you with the service you received? And then they get to answer on a scale of not satisfied to very satisfied. And then the second question how likely would you be in returning for future services, if needed? Three how comfortable are you referring family and friends to your therapist? Four do you have any comments? Five would you like to tell us your therapist's name? So the first three, those are just data points. So you remember back in the 80s when they were like four out of five dentists surveyed would recommend crest, toothpaste or whatever. That's what we'd be doing here, right? We could collate the data, we could come up with some averages. We could say something like you know what 95% of the folks who responded to this survey said that they were very satisfied with the services they received from us. Right, see how that works.

Speaker 1: 20:05

I'm not revealing any information. I'm not giving any identifiable information. Now the comments and number five would you tell your therapist's name? Those are internal. That's what we used back in the day for quality control. Because if somebody cared enough to leave a comment in their therapist's name, then I, as a boss, would have a good idea about what next steps to take. Because remember our rule here just because someone's pissed at us, that doesn't mean the therapist did a bad job. Just because the person is not coming back doesn't mean the therapist did a bad job, right? We have clients in the pre-contemplative stage. They like the idea of therapy, but they're not ready for therapy. So of course, as a boss, I want to ask more questions, but I'm not coming down with a sledgehammer when maybe all I need is, like you know, a tissue, right? So I'm going to stop sharing.

Speaker 1: 21:04

So when you get the results of that data and remember that's ongoing. Because if you're giving out these outcome surveys after let's say, let's say I don't know, let's say the client doesn't come back for three months or two months, let's make it two months, the client hasn't come back, you send the outcome survey and things are coming back that you're like, hey, I kind of want to celebrate this. Well then, go to your website and celebrate it. Four out of five people would recommend our therapists to family and friends. That's wonderful. If no one else is publicizing that data and I'm searching for a counselor that's going to mean a whole lot to me Internally. If you see there are problems, then you have a way to course correct and fix things. If you notice that I'm looking over at my survey now I'm not screen-sharing how comfortable are you referring family and friends to your therapist If four out of five people would not refer you? Okay, that's good data too. You're not going to publicize that, I wouldn't, but that's something you definitely would need to stop. Have a staff meeting, let's see what's going on here. I mean that's pretty horrendous, right, you would need to course correct internally.

Speaker 1: 22:25

What did I talk about today? February is about sharing the love, and that means all of our colleagues taking the time to give a colleague a Google review as a colleague, so we can give Google reviews. You can get the link to get a Google review. The ethics behind that I discourage you from soliciting reviews from a client ever. I stand by that. So there's another way to do it, which I've already explained, but just to remind you, grab the data from an outcome survey.

Speaker 1: 23:05

Give your clients an outcome survey that's de-identified or anonymous, and then publicize the data because you're awesome. They're going to love you. They're going to give you great reviews not reviews, sorry, scratch that. They're going to give you great data that shows you're doing a good job, and if they don't, we'll then fix it. That's what we're here for. That's what Texas counselors creating bad-ass businesses is all about is making sure you stay in business because you're too important to lose, because you did something like client testimonials wrong or you didn't do any kind of outcome data at all and you had a problem that you fixed too late or before things were too far gone. All right, that's it. I'm going to hit the record button. Thank you so much for attending, watching, listening, replaying whatever it is you're doing, and I will check Facebook to see if we have any questions. I'm Dr Kate Walker. Have a wonderful week.