Blue Fountain Media’s Founder and CEO, Gabriel Shaoolian, was interviewed by Crain’s Business to Business on the subject of online reputation management. The interview first appeared online on March 10, 2010.

Here’s an excerpt:

HOS: What should companies do about negative comments?

Shaoolian: If there is controversy about your company on the Internet, deal with it head-on. Everyone makes mistakes. How you deal with the mistakes can make all the difference in the world.

If you know the identity of the persons making the complaints or criticisms, try to personally engage them. Get to the root of the problem—be candid, open and apologetic. If you’re at fault, fix the problem. People really do appreciate when a brand is responsive.

If there has been a major problem with an entire product line, then keep people informed about the steps being taken to fix the problem and how affected customers will be treated. This is a great opportunity to include a “Message From Our Chairman/CEO” landing page, where the negatives can be turned into positives.

In the past few weeks, senior BFM executives have also been featured in The Wall Street Journal, SmartMoney and Crain’s New York Business.

To read the full interview, go here.

Gabriel Shaoolian, BFM’s Founder and CEO was interviewed by Crain’s New York Business (March 8-14 edition) and the interview can be found online here.

With BFM experiencing explosive growth, Shaoolian provided his keys to making great hires… and avoiding bad ones.

Here’s an excerpt:

Vague responses or yes-or-no answers weed out about half of the applicants, he says. “I want people who are passionate and articulate,” Mr. Shaoolian notes. “If people can’t communicate a clear vision of what they can contribute, I don’t want them talking to clients.”

For those who pass that first screening, Mr. Shaoolian has devised further tests. He asks designers, for instance, to explain how they would improve a given Web site.

“We want people who understand that the point is to grow the client’s business, not just to look prettier,” he says.

Shaoolian has also recently been featured as an expert columnist on YoungEntrepreneur.com.

Blue Fountain Media’s Director of Marketing, Alhan Keser, was just featured in the Wall Street Journal and Smart Money’s SMSmallBiz.com in a story covering Pay-Per-Click advertisements. In an extended interview, Keser helped explain why paid advertisements resulted in higher conversion rates–the ratio of users who actually make a purchase–when compared to the organic, unpaid search results.

Here’s a quick excerpt:

The reason for the differential: Conversion rates tend to improve as shoppers progress through the buying cycle, says Alhan Keser, an SEM specialist at Blue Fountain Media, a boutique web site development and online marketing firm in New York. Although search engine users typically troll organic results to conduct online research, they start favoring sponsored links when they’re ready to buy, he says. “Most people who click on ads are ready to be sold to; they are at the buying stage,” Keser says.

Keser is a certified SEO and SEM expert, meaning he is well versed in all aspects of marketing through search engines–both improving organic results and paid results. Keser has previosuly been featured on Entrepreneur.com, in the Google section of About.com and is a guest expert for Ultra Light Startups–a forum for technology entrepreneurs.

YoungEntrepreneur.com has chosen Blue Fountain Media Founder and CEO Gabriel Shaoolian as an expert contributing columnist on their blog. Today marks Shaoolian’s first article, Online Reputation Management: 6 Steps to a Rock Solid Online Reputation.

Check back twice each month for the latest installment of Gabriel’s YoungEntrepreneur articles. He will be covering a range of topics relevant to doing business on the web, including web design, e-commerce, online advertising and search engine optimization.