Chapter 1

You Are Here: Understanding Your Opportunity

A boost in your online reputation. A stream of new customers. What’s holding your business back from fully realizing the benefits of online reviews? Do you need more reviews? Or do you need reviews that more accurately reflect the excellence of your business’s offerings? This book is not just about chasing a higher star rating. It’s about using reviews wisely as a marketing tool and respecting and responding to the customer voice—in all its honesty, complexity, insight, and nuance—in every aspect of your business.

In this chapter:

• Online reviews: an important marketing channel
• Know where you fit in and how to focus

In this book, you’ll learn about establishing practical protocols to attract more reviews, monitor the customer voice, and identify the most important review venues for your business. You’ll immerse yourself in the technology and psychology of online reviews, learning what makes reviewers tick. You’ll learn how to respond to commentary that puts your online reputation at risk and how to flaunt your positive reviews to the best possible benefit of your business.

You’re reading this book, so we’re betting you have a good idea of what’s at stake for your business. In case you work with someone who needs convincing, here are some must-see stats to illustrate the importance of online reviews:

• On average, a consumer will look at over 10 information sources before making a purchase. (Bazaarvoice, 2012)
• 79% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. (BrightLocal, 2013)
• Over half of young people aged 18 to 34 say they trust online reviews more than the opinions of friends and family. (Bazaarvoice, 2012)

And here’s the kicker: As the years go by, the influence of online reviews just keeps growing.

Many business owners lose sleep over bad reviews like this one:

It’s not an exaggeration: Your bottom line—even your business survival—is on the line. But you don’t need to live in fear of being put out of business by bad online reviews. Strategies in this book will help you minimize the likelihood of getting bad reviews and be responsive, attentive, and hands-on in your handling of the few bad reviews that you just couldn’t prevent.

Online Reviews: An Important Marketing Channel

When business owners we know describe their feelings about online reviews and the people who write them, we rarely hear “love” featuring prominently. One common attitude is apathy. Some business owners don’t think about reviews much. They know they’re accruing them but assume all is well unless they learn otherwise through the grapevine. Another common attitude is one of suspicion, or even fear. We suspect that some business owners have blown out their birthday candles with a secret wish for Yelp to suffer a permanent 500 Internal Server error. Still another stance is “I’ll deal with it when I have time.” Some business owners are aware that online reviews can attract new customers, but they regard online reviews as one of the many forms of marketing that they are too busy to think about. Whatever your attitude, we’re here to tell you that your success in a modern marketplace depends on embracing reviews as a top-priority online marketing effort and fostering a review-friendly approach to your customer interactions.

Why learn to love online reviews? For one, they can attract a lot of customers. From digital natives to senior shoppers, consumers are seeking online reviews for help with nearly every spending decision: which camera to buy, what museum to visit, where to get their teeth cleaned, and where to give birth to their next baby. Business-to-business (B2B) decision-makers are also scouring the Web for wisdom about the software, equipment, and services they need. They have money in their pockets and want plentiful, legitimate, credible, and informative reviews to help them find the right way to spend it.

The usefulness of online reviews extends beyond consumer decisions to personal ones: Choosing which recipe to cook is now a social process, and college students have been rating their professors online for years. Even houses of worship are finding that the path to new members is paved with online reviews. Figure 1-1 shows a review of a local church.

Figure 1-1: One of the many glowing reviews on Yelp for a Kentucky church

People are tapping into the wealth of Internet-based word-of-mouth to find great businesses and make informed product decisions, and they are not going to stop. Here are some of the other benefits they’ve reaped:

• Lower costs for the same product. The Internet has made comparison-shopping a snap.
• Product information that offers a variety of perspectives, not just those of the provider, manufacturer, or retailer.
• An opportunity to sound off (a.k.a, complain, vent, and grumble) about problems they’ve experienced with products or services.

And how do business owners benefit? You have access to the kinds of free business enhancement ideas that were never available to you before the first review star lit up the Internet.

To get the best results from your online review management program, you’ll need to embrace the reality of what consumers want and need and be both practical and creative as you identify the opportunities available to you and your business.

Know Where You Fit In and How to Focus

Whether you’re pouring beers or foundations, there is a place on the Web for people to review you. Your approach to finding these reviews, and managing this piece of your online reputation, will need to be tailored to your type of business. Let’s take a look at what people are reviewing and where they are leaving their feedback, and we’ll get you started thinking about how far your sphere of influence extends.

Your business may fall into more than one category. For example, a bakery that designs custom wedding cakes deals with concerns that affect both brick-and-mortar and service providers. If you sell products both in a storefront and online, be sure read both the “Brick and Mortar” and “E-commerce Retailers” sections that follow. We know a company that makes 3D printers, sells them both online and in a storefront, and offers custom 3D printing services. By our count, that company has four reading assignments: brick and mortar, e-commerce, brand, and service.

Brick and Mortar

Brick-and-mortar businesses such as restaurants, cafes, and shops fuel the online review engine. For example, as of late 2012, 44% of Yelp’s 30-plus million reviews were written for businesses in the shopping and restaurants category. Whether you’re a new business looking to build up a reputation or an established company trying to move the needle from negative to positive, online reviews management is no small part of your business strategy.

What They Review

What don’t they review? Whatever a customer can see or experience is fair game for online reviews: staff, products, food, prices, facility, location, parking, even the other clientele. Many of these attributes can be catalogued and rated separately, and these bits of sentiment come together to tell the overall story of your online reputation—ideally, a large and credible narrative in which the finest aspects of your business shine through. But the sheer volume of fodder your business provides for reviews may also leave you feeling vulnerable. Your excellent gourmet meal loses stars because the customer two tables down had an annoying laugh? Your top-notch merchandise gets dinged because a customer got a parking ticket while shopping? You probably find this nitpicking distressing, but the good news is that people who read your reviews don’t expect to encounter an unending expanse of compliments. Studies show they won’t avoid you in droves due to the quirks of an individual biased review.

Where They Review You

Review sites like Yelp, location-aware social media venues like Foursquare or the Facebook check-in feature, or search/review hybrid Google+ Local (which you often see when you search for a local business in Google Maps) can all be places where your customers leave their feedback. You may have created your own listing, but you don’t control the content of the reviews or the filters and processes that govern their visibility. Figure 1-2 shows Google Maps search results with review excerpts.

Figure 1-2: Google Maps search results showing hair salon reviews from Google+ Local

Review sites make it easy for customers to post feedback for brick-and-mortar establishments, with a wealth of prepopulated categories such as food, décor, ambiance, and dozens of other options that reviewers can rate with just a few clicks and minimal thinking.

Your customers are using mobile devices at a significant and growing rate, and many of your reviews and comments may be read or submitted while your customers are physically at your location. According to a 2012 Google study, 78% of US consumers use their mobile device while in brick-and-mortar stores. Sure, many of them are texting with pals, but others are checking in on Facebook or Foursquare (that is, telling the world that they patronize your business), or popping off a quick compliment or complaint to the Twittersphere. Some are reading tips and reviews while they peruse your menu or merchandise. And, like it or not, some of them are comparison shopping online—pitting your prices against those of your competitors.

Your Unique Advantages and Disadvantages

You may be wondering why you should bother trying to influence a review landscape when you have so little control over the whims of your reviewers and the review venues. But you do have several factors that can work in your favor, not the least of which is volume. Customers are more likely to be in the habit of writing reviews for brick-and-mortar businesses like yours than they are for, say, a mortgage broker or an orthopedic surgeon. With the help of this book, your strategy will include various methods to encourage those of your customers who are review-savvy, socially connected, and smartphone-enabled to become your loyal advocates.

Another advantage you have is face time. Your customers have the opportunity to see you and your staff as real people, not an impersonal Buy Now button. This gives you and your staff multiple opportunities to work toward improving your online reputation by swiftly remedying problems and exhibiting a “customer comes first” attitude. Other types of businesses have these opportunities, too, but you have the advantage of being on display—often to multiple customers simultaneously—when you’re being excellent. And of course you already know this face time is a double-edged sword, because your customers see you on bad days, too.

You also have the opportunity to gain some online cred with check-ins. These quick location announcements that customers make on sites like Facebook or Foursquare—for example, “Knocking back a slice—at Brownstone Pizzeria”—are not formal reviews with stars attached, but if you think of them as shorthand endorsements, they’ll fit nicely alongside reviews in your online reputation management strategy.

As you read on, we’ll help you identify the places where your customers connect, and we’ll give you strategies for facilitating check-ins, preempting negativity, and encouraging the creation of authentic positive reviews from happy customers. We’ll also help you understand how to navigate the features and editorial processes of the online review services that matter to you.

E-commerce Retailers

You sell your own products, or those of others, online. That means your customers take a chance sending you their precious bucks, days or weeks before a purchase makes it into their hands. Clearly, customer trust is paramount, and online reviews can be a major avenue to that trust.

What They Review

Two words: customer service. Did the item arrive on time? How was it packaged? Did returns go okay? What about the accent of the call center rep? We won’t deny that product reviews will inevitably discuss product quality, price, and value, but don’t doubt it:

There is no product fabulous enough to overcome a poor customer experience.

Customer service issues can run your online reviews off the rails. In 2011, Bazaarvoice looked at 5 million consumer comments and concluded, “Product quality and interactions with brand representatives are inseparable in the minds of many consumers.” The same Bazaarvoice study noted reviews that mention customer service had a 91% lower average rating than those that did not.

Many e-commerce sites sell products that can also be purchased via thousands of other sites on the Web. If that describes you, your customer service is your product, and online reviews are the perfect differentiator.

Where They Review You

Reviews that are applicable to e-commerce sites fall into two categories: product reviews and merchant reviews. Your product reviews take place on your own site’s product pages, assuming you’ve set up a reviews platform. Your business as a whole may be reviewed on third-party platforms such as ResellerRatings.com and Shopper Approved. If you sell products on Amazon.com, both your products and your business can be reviewed there. If you list products on a comparison shopping site like Shopping.com or NexTag, customers have an opportunity to post reviews of their purchasing experience with you.

Your Unique Advantages and Disadvantages

Smile—you’re online! Because your transactions take place online, your customers are already tapping on keyboards or swiping on smartphones when they order from you, which means that writing an online review should be within their abilities. Inevitably, you have your customers’ email addresses and you’ve probably already sent them some emails, such as an order confirmation and shipping status. This will make your job pursuing online reviews easier, because you have a good way to contact your customers; you can even integrate review requests into transactional emails. As a second fun advantage of being an online merchant, if you have product reviews on your site, then your sales venue and at least some of your online reviews can both reside in the same place: on your own website. That means you don’t have to do a lot of extra work to put reviews in front of your customers. They can see them naturally while shopping and use them to make their purchasing decisions.

Manufacturers, Brands, Software

You may sell your own products online or at stores. But for many companies in this category, the dominant portion of your revenue comes from other retailers selling what you create. The fact that your reviews are scattered around the Web doesn’t mean you can’t maintain a grip on them.

What They Review

Just like the product reviews discussed under “E-Commerce Retailers,” your reviews will feature product quality, price, and value, with a heaping helping of customer service in the mix. How quiet was the dishwasher, and how many service calls has it required? Were the shoes true to size? Is software support available at a fair price?

Where They Review You

The majority of your reviews will show up on the sites that sell your products—including your own site, other retailers, and shopping comparison sites. Additionally, customer reviews can be posted on consumer help sites that feature both expert and customer opinions, such as CNET.com and Consumer Reports; complaint sites like PissedConsumer.com; or other product review sites such as SheSpeaks.com or Viewpoints.com that are not associated with a specific vendor.

Commentary about makers and brands also easily finds its way into Twitter and Facebook posts. In August 2012, the Burson-Marsteller Global Social Media Check-Up found Fortune 100 companies were mentioned on Twitter over 10 million times in a month. These social media conversations mirror face-to-face ones your customers are having every day, as seen in Figure 1-3.

Figure 1-3: Social media conversations mirror face-to-face ones your customers have every day.

Your Unique Advantages and Disadvantages

Some news articles include speculation that online reviews will mean the death of brands, because brands can no longer present their image in a carefully controlled way to reinforce customer perceptions and loyalty. The truth is, the old-school brand that offers no added value is not well-suited to our modern transparent marketplace. Take a deep breath and accept the inevitable: Your secrets are not safe, your status is not secure, and your message is not under your control. Brands are no longer in a position to dictate the discourse, but you can participate in it wisely.

A big challenge to brands and manufacturers is that your product reviews usually reside on retailer sites, not on your own. Your reviews will be distributed around the Web, sometimes to hundreds or thousands of websites. This will make it difficult for you to keep track of, understand, and respond to them. Furthering the challenge, a major component of reviews is the retailer’s customer service—something you have little to no control over.

Some brands have the resources to throw their weight around and exert a bit of control over how their products are sold. For example, Oakland, California–based coffee roaster Blue Bottle Coffee Company requires coffeehouses that carry their coffee to follow strict guidelines, attend special trainings, and submit to inspections. It’s no small effort, but it helps keep their reputation stellar and the lines for their coffee going around the block.

Chains and Franchises

If you’re selling the same cell phone or foot-long sandwich as the store down the road, you might wonder how much online reviews matter. A 2011 study conducted by the Harvard Business School suggests that, at least for restaurants on Yelp, different influences are at play for chains than for independents.

The study found that a 1-star increase in the overall Yelp rating led to a 5% to 9% increase in revenue for independent restaurants, but it noted that this same revenue increase did not apply to chain restaurants. Why the difference? Perhaps the reviews are less influential because there is less room for persuasion in the customer’s mindset. Chains strive to provide consistency from one location to the next—you drink one blue raspberry slush drink, you’ve drunk ‘em all—which eliminates the guesswork and the need for customers to seek reviews. With Starbucks as ubiquitous as it is, this reviewer seems almost resentful about writing a review:

With the prominence of reviews in Google’s search results, people will stumble across reviews for local chains and franchises even if they are only trying to find the address. We recommend that individual chain and franchise locations put work into online review management. This is partially an administrative task—for example, making sure listings are claimed appropriately for individual locations and no incorrect or duplicate listings are floating around—but there is also an element of reputation management. Consider the following:

Reviewers may not distinguish between your location and your parent company. One review for a Sprint store (technically a dealership, not a franchise or chain) posted a low-star review for an individual location because of an interaction with the parent company: “Even my phone call earlier was transferred to an offshore agent who barely understood what I said and took FOREVER to answer my questions.”

Reviewers speak up when chains fall short of expectations. A customer at a chain or franchise is expecting consistency with other locations. Since you can’t significantly change the recipe or the price, it’s difficult for your product or service to exceed customer expectations. But it can be easy to fall short, causing a pile of negative reviews to stack up before you know it.

Reviewers name names. Typically, reviews of chains and franchises focus on customer service. Because a location may have few distinguishing features, these reviews can get personal, with individual employees being cited for amazing or abhorrent service.

With online reviews expanding in scope and reach, chains and franchises may find themselves a bit squeezed. Online reviews have an equalizing function, reducing some of the advantages held by chains. As the volume of online reviews increases, more information than ever is available about independent businesses, making it less risky for customers to try out an unfamiliar independent shop and providing less incentive to stick with the safe choice of a chain. The same Harvard study we described earlier finds that “there is a shift in revenue share toward independent restaurants and away from chains as Yelp penetrates a market.”

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Brands also have the help of tools and services that allow them to track reviews around the Web, but these can be pricey. Social commerce companies such as Bazaarvoice (www.bazaarvoice.com) and Reevoo (www.reevoo.com) offer dashboards to track product reviews from multiple vendors. With this knowledge in hand, brands can identify and work to improve retailers with poor reviews—or cut them off, if necessary.

Tilt your ear carefully toward the chatter and you’ll find that product and software reviews are a useful blend of free user testing, market research, and focus groups. Bless those verbose venters: Their complaints and wishes could put you on the path toward your next product enhancement—or maybe even inspire your next great product.

Destinations and Activities

Destinations and activities include hotels, museums, attractions, and theaters. It’s natural that your potential customers and patrons seek out online reviews—after all, when a person is planning a trip to a distant and unfamiliar location, opportunities for gathering traditional face-to-face advice are limited.

What They Review

According to a 2012 study commissioned by TripAdvisor, 74% of their reviewers say that they write reviews “to share a good experience with other travelers.” Unfortunately, it’s not just the good stuff that will find its way into your online reviews! Visitors will review every aspect of their experience: Was it a good value, clean, enjoyable, convenient? How was the view from the orchestra seats? Were the lines for the special exhibition excruciatingly long? A 2012 survey by UK accommodations site LateRooms.com identified some hot topics for hotel reviews: Those describing a hotel as “dirty” or “noisy” gave travelers serious second thoughts about booking a room.

If you’re wondering which aspects of their experience reviewers will focus on, you can get a hint by looking at preselected categories on review sites. Figure 1-4 shows Travelocity’s list for hotels, and Figure 1-5 shows the prefab selections for rating attractions from TripAdvisor.

Figure 1-4: Travelocity’s hotel review categories

Figure 1-5: TripAdvisor’s museum review categories

Where They Review You

TripAdvisor is the dominant travel review site, featuring not only hotels but also attractions and vacation rentals. Online travel agencies (OTAs) such as Orbitz and Expedia are also an important venue for travel-related reviews. 2011 research by travel market research company PhoCusWright found that two out of three online hotel reviews were posted on OTAs.

General-purpose review sites like Yelp and Google+ Local are another important venue, particularly for non-hotel destinations such as museums and theme parks. And location-aware social media channels deserve your attention as well. Using apps like Foursquare, anyone who is physically present at your location can check in to leave tips and mini-reviews visible to their friends and other users. These comments are often automatically posted to Twitter and Facebook as well, which amplifies their reach.

Your Unique Advantages and Disadvantages

One nice thing about managing online reviews for destinations and activities is that you won’t have to fight against the current just to get people to review your business. Although lots of people still find it odd and awkward to post a review of a lawyer or dentist, posting reviews of hotels and attractions is a well-established practice. Your ability to manage your online reviews—and your online reputation as a whole—is helped along by an established hospitality and tourism industry, complete with university departments doing research that you’ll find helpful, as well as entrepreneurs building review monitoring tools they’d love you to purchase.

Some statistics for hotels and travel bear out the importance of online reviews for this industry:

• More than one-third of travelers would not book a hotel room without reading reviews first, according to 2012 survey by LateRooms.com.
• Travelers can be heavy researchers. A Cornell School of Hotel Administration study in 2011 showed travelers who booked at an OTA averaged 12 different visits to the website and looked at 7.5 pages per visit.
• A Forrester study commissioned by TripAdvisor found 75% of travelers surveyed said their vacation was better because they had used reviews.

Use of online reviews is less widespread among other destinations and travel services, such as airlines, cruises, and car rentals.

This book will walk you through claiming and improving your listings on review sites, guidelines for figuring out which niche sites you need to care about, available tools for monitoring reviews, and best practices for replying to reviews online, all of which are important efforts for hotels, attractions, and other destinations.

Service Providers

Service providers include lawyers, doctors, home contractors, real estate agents, hairdressers, and wedding planners, to name a few. You put your specialized skills to work for your clients, often at a price point that puts pressure on you to prove your value. To your customers, you have the upper hand in the relationship: Whether it’s a favorable verdict, a dream wedding, an accurate diagnosis, or a flattering haircut, your work has a big impact on your clients’ lives. The combination of power, price, and perceived value can make for high-drama customer experiences, and some dissatisfied clients may try to use online reviews as revenge for an unhappy experience. It’s no coincidence that the bulk of high-profile litigation around online reviews involves service professionals.

What They Review

There’s no way to sugarcoat this: it’s you! For many service providers, your name is your business, and you’re flying solo in the hot seat. Your approach, skills, personality and appearance, and of course, the service that you provide and its outcome are all subject to reviews. If you have staff or a facility, these can spark feedback, too.

Where They Review You

Your online reviews landscape is a bit of a turf war, with niche sites competing against broad ones. A service provider’s reviews may be spread thin across the Web, with some on Yelp, others on general-purpose directories or map services like yellowpages.com and Google+ Local, and others on specialized sites, for example, Avvo.com for lawyers, Healthgrades.com for doctors, Zillow for real estate agents, and Angie’s List and Kudzu for home services.

Your Unique Advantages and Disadvantages

You may be doing everything right for your customers but still find it a challenge to get new reviews. Some of the more popular review venues are not well matched to your service offerings. For example, while the Yelp review interface can include lots of helpful prefabricated survey questions that ask restaurant reviewers to describe everything from attire to noise level, service-oriented business reviewers are often presented with just one or two survey questions, limited to such bland topics as “Quality” and “Accepts Credit Cards.” And though niche sites like Healthgrades may provide opportunities to review specific factors that are well suited to your business, as seen in Figure 1-6, there’s no guarantee your customers have even heard of those sites. Plus, many service providers interact with customers off the wifi grid, so you may not know whether your clients are comfortable with the technology required to hop online and sing your praises.

Figure 1-6: Healthgrades offers detailed features for reviewing medical providers.

To add to these challenges, service professionals like you are limited in the number of clients with whom they can interact. Whereas restaurants or stores can serve hundreds of customers a day, a roofing job could take weeks, a single legal case might play out over months, and a single engineering project may last years. Without a large volume of reviews, the few you have will carry a lot of weight whether or not they are accurate.

You may be extremely well trained in your craft, but you were probably not trained in online marketing, nor are you prepared for the kind of exposure that can seriously affect your reputation. Your reviewers may make your fees public when you would prefer to keep them private, or they may publish photos of your handiwork. You may have specialized expertise that your customers just don’t understand, and they may unintentionally misrepresent you in ways that make you cringe, even when they post positive reviews.

It can be hard for service providers to find appropriate channels to join the conversation or to defend against unfair criticism. Professionals such as doctors, lawyers, therapists, and members of the clergy work within strict confidentiality guidelines, but reviewers are not bound by the same rules. These confidentiality restrictions can be especially frustrating when they prevent you from responding to negative reviews!

We won’t blame you if you’re feeling that online sentiment is biased against you. The truth is that hiring you may be an expensive, stressful, or possibly life-altering decision for your potential customers. Adding to this issue, potential customers may be especially skeptical about the reviews they read for service providers. Particularly in the locksmith, carpet cleaning, plumbing, and roadside assistance industries, we’ve come across anecdotal reports of business owners posting fake reviews and customers being unpleasantly surprised by experiences not consistent with those reviews. Review sites work to allay customers’ fears of getting cheated or worse. Angie’s List, with 65,000 new reviews posted each month in over 500 service categories, serves up articles like “Worst Cleveland Contractors of 2012” and “Tips on how not to get ripped off!” Recognizing consumer anxiety is an important part of your job as you approach your online reviews management.

In the following chapters, we’ll help you identify methods to show off your expertise in the venues where exposure matters, find and fix the sources of incorrect listing data, and use your existing relationships to generate the reviews you deserve.

Charities, Nonprofits, Civic and Community Organizations

You need new people: You want their posteriors in your pews, their kids in your classrooms, and their dollars in your discretionary funds—but first you have to win over their hearts and minds. For your target audience, the decision to join, enroll, or donate is extremely personal and the criteria subjective, but studies show that word of mouth and a person’s social network have an impact, and that’s why online reviews can affect your bottom line.

What They Review

For organizations that serve their patrons in person, such as churches, synagogues, animal shelters, and libraries, your reviewers comment on typical brick-and-mortar qualities like your facility, parking, and staff. You also get wildly subjective experience-based reviews: Longtime churchgoers may award 5 stars based on several years of membership, whereas a church shopper may dole out high marks based on a single warm welcome. A bad fit between one teacher and one child can prompt a negative review for the school as a whole, or the love of one great puppy can start an owner wagging about an animal shelter on Yelp.

Schools and charities have another layer of scrutiny tacked on: organizational performance metrics and institutional data. Publicly available data about the organizational efficiency of charities or the academic achievement and teacher ratios of schools is aggregated and published by some watchdog websites, and this data is molded into specialized (and some argue, misguided) rating systems that are studied with interest by the people you’re trying to attract. Whether or not you’re a fan of these ratings, do keep an eye on them, because your target audience may be checking them. In a 2010 study by Hope Consulting on how people choose to give to charities, the organization’s effectiveness was cited by 90% of respondents, compared to 34% of respondents who cited endorsements by trustworthy individuals.

Where They Review You

Organizations with a brick-and-mortar presence such as animal shelters, schools, libraries, and houses of worship get their hugs and slugs in general-purpose review venues like Yelp, Google+ Local, and regional favorites like Judy’s Book and Berkeley Parents’ Network. Specialized venues, such as Charity Navigator (www.charitynavigator.org) and the Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance (www.bbb.org/us/charity) report on all types of charities, including those without a walk-in option.

GreatSchools (www.greatschools.org) is an example of a site that plays to the public’s desire to base decisions on both official data and personal opinions (see Figure 1-7). This site mixes academic and demographic data with crowdsourced reviews and social sharing buttons, and solicits insider information with its “Are you the principal?” link.

Figure 1-7: GreatSchools.org mixes data and personal opinions.

Your Unique Advantages and Disadvantages

Studies show that donors tend to stay loyal to a charity once they choose it, and many organizations enjoy long-term or repeat patronage. So you may already have a treasure trove of potential 5-star reviews in reserve. On the flip side, many of your most loyal advocates are probably not thinking about online advocacy at all. It may seem like a stretch for a longtime congregant, regular donor, or permanent PTA parent to spontaneously pop over to Yelp, Charity Navigator, or GreatSchools and leave a review. Another barrier: Posting an online review invariably means some self-exposure for your reviewers. Not everyone wants to reveal their participation in churches or organizations, or details about their kids’ school experience. Because your organization is likely to have fewer reviews than a big restaurant or a popular book, those that you do receive can hold an inordinate amount of sway over readers’ opinions. After all, an organization with only five reviews can’t afford to have two duds in the mix.

Profile completeness is another challenge for you. Since your potential patrons may be looking for both data and social context on niche sites, general-purpose review sites, and your own website, you’ll need to be proactive in monitoring your many listings and keeping them updated.

With a better understanding of where your business fits in, you’re ready to start navigating this complex terrain. Fasten your seatbelt, because in Chapter 2, “The Online Reviews Landscape,” we’ll take you for a tour of this exciting terrain.