What You Can Do, Right Now, to Help the Collections Industry

We here at insideARM.com aren’t telling you anything new when we point out that many consumers — and legislators and attorneys general and journalists and sometimes even you mom — aren’t huge fans of the collections industry. The service you provide, if it’s seen as a service at all, is easy to spin into the worst kinds of exploitation and abuse.

We get it.

One of our missions at insideARM.com is to shift the conversation. Not whitewash what’s going on in the industry; that actually ends up being counterproductive to all of our interests. But by covering news and issues that affect the industry, and trying to cover it fairly, with as little spin and shine as possible, our hope is to at least begin balancing out a lot of the negative press that easily makes it to the top of the hour on most news programs and the front pages of newspapers.

We’ve written before about Google+, and suggested ways in which you might be able to harness this powerful social network for your business purposes. insideARM.com itself has a Google+ page, which you can find here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/111911564110903317604/posts. By cross posting a lot of our content from our own site to our Google+ site (and p.s., if you’re still not quite getting what all the Google+ buzz is about, email me and we’ll be old people together. I don’t have any grandkids, but you can ask me about them anyway), we’re able to harness the search engine power of Google. By visiting our Google+ site and clicking the +1 button on each post, you’re helping to weight our content in search engines, getting more of our content on the front page of Google searches.

This is great for us.

But what’s in it for you?

We’re back to search engines. When people search Google for stories on collection agencies, accounts receivable management, debt collectors, etc., the more buzz or, rather, +1s our content has, the more likely our content is to show up on that first page of a Google search. And the more of our content on the first page of a Google search, the less likely it is that irresponsibly critical stories make it there.

If you’re looking for a fast, simple, do-it-from-your-desk activism for the industry, this is as good a place as any to start (though think about letters to the editor of your local and regional press; they’re effective too — just not as easy as clicking that +1). Plus, I can guarantee you’ll look and feel 10 years younger because all the hip kids are using Google+ and now just look at you! Tearing up the internets with your fingers on the pulse of what’s hip, current, and happening!

(My grandkids? SO CUTE! They’re at the top of their imaginary Montessori schools and adorable and they’re already doing things several years beyond their age appropriateness — like one just refinanced my house and she’s six! Six!)

But seriously: check out our Google+ page. +1 our content. Help us shift the conversation.