A look at using customer forums and review sites such as Yelp to generate sales, tips on responding to negative feedback, plus how and why to make it simple for customers to review you.
As a business owner, you're used to calling all the shots, so it can be infuriating when the Internet seems like a vast, uncontrollable forum for customers to heap criticism on your company. Getting a rave review on an obscure website but being unsure of how to highlight it as an example of your devoted customer base and quality services can be just as frustrating.
Many businesses get caught up in the frenzy over social media such as Twitter and Facebook, while neglecting review and answer sites. Comprehensive surveillance of review sites could save you the cost of consultants and focus groups, and allow you to interact directly with customers to manage and monitor your company's reputation. Responding to criticism, within limits, and posting answers to online queries in your industry can bring in new and repeat customers if done properly.
Some key sites in this field to familiarize yourself with are Yelp, Yahoo! Answers, and Mahalo. Yelp has millions of reviews of local businesses around the United States. It's free to set up an account, and it allows you to answer questions about your business and see how many users are scoping out your business' page. Setting up a detailed profile with useful information such as images and a link to your website will give your company more visibility and clout, while you can offer special discounts or promotions for customers that give you a review.
The upside of Yahoo! Answers, is that it is immensely popular and largely dominates the Q & A market. However, the quality of the answers is typically low because absolutely anyone can ask or answer a question. On the bright side, that just gives your well-thought-out response more of a chance to shine.
Mahalo is a human-powered search engine with a growing Q & A section. That section allows users to post a question and offer a monetary prize or tip for the best answer. A $50 or $100 tip can draw dozens of respondents who are incentivized to think hard about your question and your brand. It's like an instant, public focus group with marketing built in," says Jason Calacanis, Mahalo's CEO.
Sometimes a niche Q & A site targeted to your industry is more effective. For example, if your company does business consulting, a site such as Bizmore, which is an advice community for small and mid-sized businesses, can really help you zero in on your target demographic. Examples of smaller players in the Q & A field that are still useful to know about or look into are peppered throughout this article.
How to Take Advantage of Online Review and Answer Sites: Answer Questions to Find Customers
Surfing message boards and Q & A sites to answer the questions of current and future customers can be a serious boon to a small business. It's a relatively easy way to raise brand awareness, build your SEO strength, and even generate sales leads. But you can't just rampage through the world of online queries dispensing unwanted advice like a magic eightball gone haywire. You need a primer on the etiquette and strategy of online Q & A.
1. Be flexible. When Best Price Nutrition discovered that the questions they answered on Yahoo! Answers had a higher click-through rate and resulted in more new customers than their company blog, they retooled their online strategy to focus more on reaching out to customers through Yahoo! Answers.
2. Be genuine. It always helps to link to your website at the end of a post, though some forums forbid it and you should examine any online community's rules before engaging. Also, keep the tone personal rather than promotional. Use your name and title at the company, and for forums that require a user name, make sure you are consistent across all the platforms you post on. At all costs eschew corporate speak.
3. Don't lie or mislead. This rule sounds simple, but enough companies flub it that it bears repeating. Some obvious examples to avoid emulating include John Mackey, Whole Foods' CEO, who was caught cheerleading Whole Foods and bashing its competitors on online stock market forums. In a similar vein, Lifestyle Lift, a national plastic surgery company, was forced to pay the highest price yet for this sort of practice when New York State fined the company $300,000 for "deceptive commercial practices" after its employees posted positive reviews of the company's services without revealing their, ahem, conflict of interest.
4. Put quality before quantity. Each answer you post reaches not just the original poster but anyone with similar interests and access to a search engine. This means you don't need to kill yourself responding to every forum user whose question has some bearing on your business.
5. Don't feed the trolls. An inevitability of anonymous message boards is angry or spiteful people with a lot of time on their hands. If you become engaged in a conversation with someone who is clearly irrational or has some sort of ax to grind, the best strategy is to ignore them.
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