When social media goes bad

18. November 2008 by Andrew Ward.


Here is a point of view about the dark-side of social media that hasn’t gotten much attention to date but it certainly has been percolating for some time. A cornerstone strategy of reputation management is to constantly publish positive content that supports your brand or company. But the openness of social media also provides fertile ground for unscrupulous businesses to launch negative attacks against competitors. Read G. Crouch  “Social Media As A Weapon”.

 

Active reputation management is becoming just as necessary for business owners to protect their good name as putting a lock on their doors to protect their physical assets.

 

Every reputation management strategy should include the proactive creation of a natural online reputation. Natural online reputations are the most cost effective and the most credible way to protect your business from bad social media. View this video for more information on Natural Online Reputations.

 

Author: Andrew Ward, Founder, TrustFX

 

 

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Natural Online Reputations (NORs) raises the credibility bar on consumer reviews

30. October 2008 by Andrew Ward.


According to a global Nielsen survey of 26,486 Internet users in 47 markets, consumer recommendations were chosen to be the most credible form of advertising by 78% of survey participants. Of course, given that 75% of people feel that advertising is less than truthful (Yankelovich) the advertising credibility bar is set pretty low to begin with.

 

Every recent study that I have seen comparing the effectiveness of social content to advertising, consistently rates social media higher. The gap is accelerating as awareness of social content grows across a broader demographic and the skepticism of consumers continues to rise.

 

Trust and credibility are important for consumers and businesses alike. Consumers want information that they can trust to make safe purchase decisions and businesses need prospects to trust them before a sale can be made.

 

However,  the unspoken secret of social media is that its biggest strength is also its biggest weakness. Social media gives everyone a voice on any topic and often there is no cost for individuals to contribute. Its openness also makes it easy to exploit, game, and manipulate by unscrupulous individuals and businesses. Businesses can have friends and family post positive comments about their business and /or post negative comments about competitors.

 

As unscrupulous individuals exploit the weakness of social media, its credibility will decline and consumers will lose a valuable aid in making important decisions. If the process that captures and rates consumer comments has limited integrity, so will its results. When a person has to guess if a comment is authentic or not,  its value is diminished.

 

A Natural Online Reputation  (NOR) reflects the real or authentic reputation of a specific business. It is created entirely from the authentic and unfiltered feedback of its customers. When an average score is computed from valid responses it represents the average experience for all of its customers and is becomes the single best predictor of future customer satisfaction. The creation of NORs aims to protect the integrity of authentic user-generated content by eliminating the common forms of abuse.

 

The challenge facing sites like angieslist, yelp, insiderpages and ratepoint is that they rely entirely on user provided information. Their processes rely heavily on the honor system to maintain the integrity of the comments posted on their sites. This is ok for low risk decisions like choosing a restaurant but more important decisions that have higher costs and risk require a much higher level of authenticity.

 

The creation of a natural business reputation requires the participation of the business, its customers, and a way to validate that a transaction occurred. The complete criteria required to create a Natural Online Reputation must include all of the following:

 

·       Every customer must have the ability to contribute.

·       Only customers can contribute.

·       All customers have the same weight.

·       Ratings cannot be filtered. (Offensive comments will be redacted)

·       A neutral third party must manage the reputation management system.

·       The identity of the user creating the comments and ratings must be protected.

·       All users and transactions are authenticated.

·       Ratings process can be audited.

·       Authentic ratings cannot be revised.

·       The rating shows the numbers of participants.

·       The rating shows the span of time for which ratings were collected.

·       The ratings show the recent trend. Are ratings improving, going down or are they holding steady?

 

Although it is easy for ecommerce sites to adopt the above criteria by incorporating the feedback process to the shopping cart, this technique hasn’t been possible with local businesses because there is no equivalent to the ecommerce-shopping cart.

 

TrustFX created a solution that incorporates all of the above criteria in a simple to use process that enables local businesses to create robust natural online reputations that are authentic and that consumers can trust.

 

 

 

 

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Add reputation management to your local search strategy and increase your ROI

12. March 2008 by Andrew Ward.

There is no doubt that local search is booming. Consumers like having control over their personal information needs 24/7. Businesses like it because it enables them to connect directly with prospects actively seeking their services. For these two reasons alone local search will take a big bite out of the $100 billion local advertising market.

But local search also has risks, which can impact prospect conversion rates.

Consumers use the Internet to find local businesses but they’re not just looking for ads, they want to make good decisions. Consumers are increasingly performing a level of due diligence on your business never before available and it is fast and free. They simply Google your business name with “complaint.” If any negative comments are posted online, this will uncover them. Even a few negative comments can have a chilling effect on your results and send your hot prospects to your competitors.

According to ComScore, 24 percent of Internet users access consumer reviews prior to making offline purchases a trend that is increasing as more reputation information becomes available.

So what can you do to protect and manage your online reputation? Here are several effective strategies that you can use to actively manage your online reputation:

  1. The first thing is to always do good business. Focus on creating great products and delivering great customer service. Satisfied customers don’t complain.
  2. If and when problems do occur, address them promptly. Think of problems as opportunities to create awesome customer loyalty. Today’s skeptical consumers have low expectations with businesses when it comes to problem resolution. In a world where the norm is to over-promise and under-deliver resolving customers issues quickly can create a customer whose loyalty is greater than customers who had a perfect experience with your business. How you respond to customers in difficult situations demonstrates the integrity of your business.
  3. Even if the customer is partially wrong, “they are always right.” In the local search market it is always more profitable to find the most expedient means to satisfy the customer promptly and move on. What is the cost of a negative comment on future businesses and what is the cost to your business if your time and resources are tied up doing battle with a hostile customer?
  4. Be proactive and find ways to build a positive online reputation. Create a way to capture customer feedback on your website or use your website to link to 3rd party sites that include customer reviews about your business. Ask your customers to participate. You risk getting a few negative reviews but even a few (very few) negative comments mixed in with many positive reviews actually builds credibility and trust with potential customers.

Search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) can attract qualified prospect to your business very efficiently but those companies who can build trust with online reputations will convert more of their prospects to customers and in less time.

Both local search and online reputation are very new concepts. Businesses that combine local search marketing with credible online reputation (shills not allowed) can achieve a sustainable competitive advantage that will increase over time.

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Trust-Based Marketing - Grow your business in a slowing economy

8. February 2008 by Andrew Ward.

We are not in a recession but our economy is definitely slowing down and for most small businesses that means cutting advertising expenses. But an incredible opportunity exists for any quality businesses to ATTRACT and CLOSE high value customers at a fraction of your current cost and you can try it FREE.

FREE removes a large barrier for most small businesses to try new things but, what if you could increase your prospect conversion rate and attract customers willing to pay a 20 percent premium just to use your business?

Oh, and one more point. Would you rather compete based on the quality of your service versus the size of your advertising budget? Quality businesses who act first will achieve a sustainable competitive advantage that can never be copied or sold to your competitors. Request an overview and you will see what I mean.

Trust-based-marketing is all about building trust between potential customers and your business. We all know that consumers are much more likely to buy from businesses that they can trust. The value of trust to consumers rises directly with the costs and risks of any purchase. Stephen M. R. Covey clearly articulates the explicit business value of trust in his book The Speed Of Trust where he provides many examples that demonstrate the effects of trust on transaction speed and cost. Speed always increases and cost always go down with higher levels of trust.

But how do you build trust? In the good old days you could build trust by providing prospects with a handful of referrals and letters of recommendations. But today’s consumers are different. They are very skeptical and rightly so. A Golin/Harris poll found that nearly 70 percent of all Americans agree with the statement “I don’t know whom to trust anymore”. After all, in the past decade we witnessed scandals in the private sector, media, government, churches and the United Nations. People know that references can be created, manipulated and faked with ease and often written warrantees can only be enforced in a court.

Consumers don’t place a lot of trust in what you say because they know that you’re trying to sell them something. But they do place a lot of trust in what your customers have to say about your business. In fact consumer-generated-content from “actual” customers will influence your prospects up to 4 times more than any other source of data! Consumers value your customers’ feedback even more than “expert” reviews.

The concept of trust-based-marketing has been around for many years but hasn’t been able to created any real traction with local businesses because there wasn’t a credible way to objectively quantify “trust”. You can conduct your own customer surveys but the results never carry much influence with consumers because they will be perceived as biased.

Ebay successfully created a reputation system that consumers trust but it works only for online merchants on ebay not local businesses. But consumers embraced ebay’s merchant rating in a very large way and propelled ebay revenue grow from $0 to over $4 billion in just ten short years. Today over 200 million consumers around the world purchase over $50 billion worth of goods from businesses with confidence using consumer generated merchant ratings. Ebay motors will sell about $5 billion dollars of used cars and consumers trust car dealers on ebay more than local dealers. Again, reputation matters.

TrustFX brings the same trust building value to all offline businesses. Similar to ebay’s merchant ratings, the TrustFX process involves the buyer and the seller using a simple process that enables every customer to give feedback after the purchased service has been delivered.

A unique key is given to each customer at the time of sale that allows that customer to give feedback. This patent pending process eliminates the common forms of abuse that taints the value of sites that rely entirely on consumer generated content and basically use an “honor” system for validation. Angieslist.com, yelp.com, and insiderpages.com some of the more popular sites that are can be gamed easily. It is not that consumers lie but rather some of those “consumers” can be competitors, disgruntled employees, unhappy vendors etc. The point that I am trying to make is that that there exist a natural tradeoff between control and credibility, which diminishes trust when consumers have to question the motive of the reviewer.

Trust is hard to earn and easy to loose but consumers prefer it and are willing to pay more for it when they understand that it is real and credible.

We are introducing TrustFX completely FREE. It is FREE for both business owners’ consumers. I invite business owners to contact us for a personal demonstration and learn how to grow your business by creating a robust and credible online reputation with TrustFX.

Glen Urban, MIT Sloan School of Management said it best in his working paper the trust imperative –“As trust in society and corporations continues to decline, increasing consumer power will drive a new paradigm for marketing, a paradigm based on advocating for the customer by providing open, honest information and advice. Consumer power is reducing the effectiveness of old-styled push-based marketing. Thus, the shift to trust-based marketing may be more of a mandatory imperative than an optional opportunity.”

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