How to Take Advantage of Online Review and Answer Sites: Make It Easy for Customers to Review You
Asking your customers to review you point blank is a bad idea when unsolicited; it is especially unappealing to the under-30 demographic, although it works better after an in-depth, positive customer service interaction. Feedback rates can be as low as 10-15 percent even for successful e-commerce sellers so you should make it as easy as possible for your customers to review you. It's also a good idea to let your employees know that positive customer feedback can boost revenues, as well as their compensation.
1. Use an aggregating service. Services such as BackType and uberVU allow you to pull comments about your company from different social media onto your site in real-time. So, for example, you can set up a section of your website where your customers can go to see feedback, both good and bad, culled from their fellow customers.
2. Create your own feedback community. Creating and hosting your own community of customers discussing your company or product can be beneficial but it can also be costly. "Running a successful community takes about $10,000-$25,000 a month in resources if you want to do it right," says Calacanis, which he acknowledges isn't within the budgets of many small businesses. Still there are advantages for companies that can shell out that kind of cash. "The best thing a brand can do is create a branded community because relying on what's out there has too much risk for my liking," says Rob Frankel, an independent branding consultant.
Both Frankel and Calacanis's companies provide these types of services to their customers but Calacanis notes that, price aside, it's not the answer for every brand; your customers already have to feel a certain way about you for it to work. He says, "Only about 10 percent of brands are ready to 'host the conversation' on their site. Most folks have a hard time even listening and talking to their customers online. Can you imagine if AT&T had a questions and answers community? They would spend all day answering [questions like], "Why does your mobile network make my iPhone suck so much?"
Dig Deeper: Business Owners Warm Up to Online Reviews
How to Take Advantage of Online Review and Answer Sites: Resources
To keep tabs on mentions of your company and competitors:
• Services like BackType and uberVU help you track social media mentions of your brand or company as well as pulling those comments onto your site.
• Alltop is a media aggregator that collects headlines and blog posts on popular topics. You can use it to keep tabs on the movers and shakers in your industry and potentially develop relationships with them.
• Google Analytics lets you monitor your website traffic which, among other things, can help you evaluate the success of your social media efforts and where potential leads are finding you.
To post answers and reach out to customers:
• Yahoo! Answers is well optimized but the quality of the answers provided there tends not to be as rich as on other sites. This gives your cogent response more of a chance to stand out however.
• Mahalo Answers allows you to hold mini focus groups at a great value by paying users for the best answer. Just remember lowball offers might get you poorly thought out answers.
• To get feedback from your customers, you can use services such as RatePoint, which has the capacity to provide business owners with customer reviews, surveys, and newsletters.
• Yelp is becoming an increasingly important resource for people looking for the skinny on local businesses such as restaurants, barbers, and even doctors that they might want to use. Making sure you have a robust profile with plenty of information is an important first step in taking command of your Web presence.
• Niche question and answer sites on a subject such as business, can help you zero in on your target audience. Bizmore and FiLife.com are two good examples of strong niche communities.
To get creative:
• If you want to get creative you can try forming partnerships with existing Q & A services or decision engines to suggest your company as a solution to people searching for a related topic. For example, ChaCha provides answers via text, Aardvark helps people get answers by reaching out to their extended social networks, and Hunch helps people make decisions by asking them questions about their personal preferences.
