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

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.

This entry was posted on 30. October 2008 at 05:28 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.