Chapter 5
How to Get More Reviews
There’s a well-kept secret about online reviews, and we’re going to spill it now. The success of your business doesn’t depend on getting 5-star reviews. Rather, it depends on getting more reviews, as many as you can ethically accumulate, so that the customer voice can tell the real story of your business to your prospective customers. In this chapter, we’ll show you straightforward tactics for getting more reviews and a more representative sample of your customers, clients, or membership while remaining authentic and steering clear of review site filters. Put some energy into these efforts, and you may just feel sorry for your competitors by this time next year.
In this chapter:
- Tools and techniques for getting new reviews
- Cultivating a word-of-mouth mentality
- Authenticity and ethics
It’s easy to say “be great, and the reviews will follow.” And maybe a business that does extraordinary, remarkable things every day or creates unbelievable, amazing, noteworthy products that never fail and always arrive on time doesn’t need to spend a lot of time in the review cultivation effort. This chapter is not about how to be amazing. Rather, we give you real-world techniques for encouraging reviews and making it as easy as possible for people to write them. You want the path of least resistance to flow right to your online reviews, and here’s how to make that happen.
Tools and Techniques for Getting New Reviews
Like so many things in life, online reviews follow the basic precept “Ask and ye shall receive.” As you learned in Chapter 3, “Understanding Reviewers and Reviews,” studies show that people who are asked to provide a review are more likely to write one. That finding? Pretty obvious. But the right way to ask may not be so obvious.
To be most effective, a method of asking for reviews should be…
Easy for the Customer The path to writing a review must be fast and easy. It should require the least possible effort on the part of the reviewer.
Easy for the Business You need a process that is simple for the staffers executing it and sustainable so that it can be performed consistently for the long term.
Broad-minded Target the largest number of customers or clients possible, not just the happy ones. Variation among reviews enhances credibility, and negative reviews are often informative and helpful.
No Pressure You’re asking for a favor, not making a demand. Customers should know that there is no pressure to write a review, but their honest review would be much appreciated.
Timed Well Customers should be contacted quickly so that your transaction is fresh on their minds, but not before they’ve had the chance to receive a product or judge a service.
In Keeping with Your Image The way you ask for reviews should be consistent with your brand personality and marketing message. Don’t rely on boilerplate messages from third-party services. Your requests should be customizable so you control what is said to your customers.
Ongoing Many review venues and prospective customers give more weight to recent reviews. For businesses like hotels and restaurants, current reviews are a must.
Measurable Whatever you try, be sure that you can measure whether it works and adjust accordingly.
If you are already asking for reviews, we applaud you. Read the information here to improve your requests so they can bring you even more online love.
If you’re not asking for reviews, let us pull you aside for a quick heart-to-heart:
Pssst…. You know we love you. But if you’ve been holding back on asking for reviews because you feel shy or it seems weird or pushy, you really need to get over it. Try to think of the last time you were turned off or appalled by a business asking you for a review. What? That’s never happened to you? Yep. That’s the same for almost everyone else, too. Your customers can handle it, and so can you.
There are many ways to ask for reviews and to provide a path for review completion. Here, we’ve assembled a list of techniques and tools that we’ve seen businesses use. We hope you’ll read these with an eye toward the criteria listed earlier. Could any of them work for your business?
Personal Request This technique is well suited to contractors, auto mechanics, professionals, authors, and just about any service provider who offers work with a personal or face-to-face element. Here’s an example: Not long ago, Jennifer had some work done on her house. After the service was complete, the contractor shook her hand, looked her in the eye, and told her it would be a big help if she could write an online review. Hours later, Jennifer had joined the 70 or so other folks who had written this company a review on Angie’s List. The business owner took a fabulous first step by asking for the review. He even bolstered his position, appealing to Jennifer’s good nature and desire to help others by saying how important her review would be to him.
Sometimes asking for and receiving a review really is that simple, but sometimes it takes a bit more finesse. Here are some things to keep in mind when asking for a review in person:
- Ask for the review after the service or transaction is completed.
- Let your customer know the importance of online reviews to the success of your business and to you personally. Many reviewers are motivated by a desire to reciprocate when businesses have served them well.
- You know which venues are most important to you from the exercise you performed in Chapter 4, “Monitoring and Learning from Your Reviews.” Tell your customer the specific venue where you would prefer to be reviewed—but make it clear you’d be happy with a review anywhere.
- If you are seeking Yelp or Google+ Local reviews, it will be more fruitful to direct your requests to active reviewers on those sites. First-time reviewers who post on your behalf have a higher chance of being filtered out.
- If you make follow-up calls to check on customer satisfaction, that’s a perfect time to ask for a review.
- People forget! Don’t be afraid to ask more than once. Follow up your face-to-face request with reminders to complete the review. You can follow up via phone or email a few days after your initial request or use a physical reminder. See more about physical reminders later in this chapter.
- Don’t assume your customers know how to use online review tools. If you suspect that your clientele is not comfortable in the digital world, you can offer them clear instructions on how to write a review. Some businesses take this further: We spoke with a carpet cleaning company that tried a variety of ways to ask for reviews and found they were getting nowhere. Finally, the cleaning staff began gently offering to stand by and help customers through the review creation process. Don’t get the wrong idea; this was tech support, not coercion. Their approach paid off, and using this method they have been able to develop a solid stack of reviews.
You’re human, which means you’re probably tempted to request reviews from only your happiest customers. Sure, you can leave out the tiny percentage of impossible-to-please customers and vindictive extremists, but we suggest you broaden the net wide enough to include a representative sample of your customers. As hard as it may be to hear it, your less-satisfied customers have valuable information to share, and as you learned in Chapter 3, studies show that having some negative reviews can help, not hurt, your business. If you’re worried about your outreach resulting in negative reviews for your business, be sure your email also includes an option to contact you directly with concerns or complaints.
A Successful New Approach for an Old-School Business
Like many old-school businesspeople, Maryland mortgage broker Michael Mandis avoided Internet-based marketing for a long time. He runs a successful business that has, in his words, “always done the right thing for my customers for 20 years.” Simply put, Michael is an old-fashioned businessman in an old-fashioned business, built on his honor and his handshake.
Michael may not have a lot of experience in online marketing, but his business wouldn’t have succeeded for all these years if he didn’t know how to focus on his clients and give them a top-notch experience. “I’m available evenings, weekends. I go the extra mile.”
Recently, Michael decided to throw his hat into the online marketing ring, to translate his clients’ excellent offline experience into an improved online presence.
What works for Michael? “Persistence is one of the main things. People intend to do it and then they forget.” Michael asks for reviews from his clients after the home sale has closed. Here are some ways he helps them along:
- If a client has a Yahoo! email address, Michael asks for a review on Yahoo!. If they have a Gmail address, he asks for a Google+ Local review. “I’m looking for the path of least resistance.”
- He always follows up. “A lot of times people leave reviews using screen names. Sometimes I can’t tell who is leaving them. I say ‘Thank you if you did, and if you didn’t, here is the link again.’”
- Whenever Michael receives a referral, he sends a custom printed gift card that includes a QR code for Angie’s List, Yahoo!, or Google+ Local. “I’m not bribing them for a review. It’s a thank you for the recommendation, and just by virtue of the fact that you recommended me to someone, don’t keep it a secret.”
Michael’s review cultivation strategies, combined with his business’s commitment to impeccable customer service, have had fantastic results. “I can attribute $100,000 in additional revenue to leads that have been generated organically through my reviews in roughly the last year.” Even better, the clients who are coming to him after looking at reviews are the kinds of clients he wants, “not rate-seekers. I’m attracting people who want someone they can trust.” Michael also uses his reviews as a sales tool. On the phone with a prospective client, he’ll encourage them to Google his name plus “reviews” and do the same for a competitor. “Ten minutes later they’ll call me back and say, let’s get started.”
For Michael, his online reviews journey has been rewarding, not only financially but also emotionally: “It’s an honor to be reviewed, and it’s humbling, and it’s touching.”
Because he has embraced online reviews in an old-fashioned business niche, Michael is now well ahead of his competitors. With a year of effort and many reviews collected, Michael compares himself to his competitors who have not embraced online marketing: “I feel like I’m halfway through the marathon and they’re just tying their shoelaces.”
Post-Transaction Email to Review a Product If your business includes an e-commerce component and you have product reviews on your site, sending post-transaction emails is a great way to increase the number of reviews on your site. According to Bazaarvoice, clients who use what it calls a post interaction program “typically see more than 80% of their ratings & reviews volume generated through [post interaction emails].”
If you’ve been putting more time and attention into perfecting your email newsletters than you have into your transactional emails such as purchase confirmations, shipping notifications, or review requests, consider flipping this strategy on its head. Studies consistently show that transactional emails are much more likely to be opened than bulk emails. As a bonus, several case studies have noted that a surprising number—14% in one example—of customers who clicked back to the site from a review-request email went on to make another purchase.
Amazon is an example of an e-commerce retailer with a thoughtful and effective process in place. After a customer makes a purchase, the system waits a predetermined amount of time and then sends out an email, like the one seen in Figure 5-1, requesting a product review.
Figure 5-1: Amazon.com post-transaction email offers a convenient link to review the product.
Amazon’s post-purchase emails are brief and focused, with a prominent link to make it easy for customers to review the product. The email from Sierra Trading Post shown in Figure 5-2 goes a step further by offering to enter reviewers into a $1,000 giveaway contest as an incentive for writing a review.
Figure 5-2: Post-transaction email from Sierra Trading Company
Chewy.com combines Bazaarvoice-supplied boilerplate text with its own messaging to ask for reviews and encourage photo uploads. See Figure 5-3.
Figure 5-3: Post-transaction email from Chewy.com
Although they may seem ubiquitous, post-transaction emails requesting reviews are considered an underutilized tactic by many marketers. Implementing a post-transaction email request could be a great way for you to differentiate yourself from the competition. Here are some ways you can get a program like this off the ground:
- Consider using a social commerce platform that incorporates post-transaction emails as an integral part of the system, such as Bazaarvoice or Reevoo.
- Post-transaction emails may be a feature available in your e-commerce system. For example, Volusion allows you to send a customized email requesting a review a specified number of days after a product is shipped. WooCommerce has extensions called “Follow-up Emails” and “Review for Discount” that can be combined to create this capability. Look into the offerings of your e-commerce system by speaking to an account rep or searching its name plus <transactional email>.
- Many email service providers offer triggered email messages. Tools such as Constant Contact, VerticalResponse, Silverpop, and HubSpot can be set up to send fully customized post-transaction emails.
- If you have a small number of transactions, getting in touch via a personal email may be a viable option for you. Follow the guidelines listed previously under “Personal Request.”
Experiment with your email content and timing to see what permutation gets the best results for your business.
Post-Transaction Email to Review a Business Automating the collection of business reviews is a well-established practice. Plenty of options are available for online merchants, and a growing number of options are available for brick-and-mortar establishments. For e-commerce sites and some service providers, tools such as ResellerRatings, Shopper Approved, Customer Lobby, and Demandforce can be configured to automate the process of sending emails to request reviews after an interaction with a customer or client or at other customer touchpoints. Amazon merchants can send a post-transaction email asking for customer reviews.
Shopping comparison sites such as Bizrate, online travel agents such as Booking.com, and restaurant reservation tools such as OpenTable also send post-transaction emails inviting reviews.
Figure 5-4 shows an example of a ResellerRatings email seeking reviews for a travel insurance company.
Figure 5-4: ResellerRatings post-transaction email
According to ResellerRatings, these emails are very successful, generating an average rating of 9.7 out of 10 for the business.
UK e-commerce site Appliances Online uses humor and a visual to engage reviewers with their post-transaction email, shown in Figure 5-5.
Figure 5-5: Appliances Online uses humor to engage potential reviewers.
Here are some things to keep in mind when writing post-transaction emails or considering a tool to generate them:
- The guidelines described in “Personal Request” also apply here. Give your email a personality and give the recipient a reason to take action.
- Many review-generation tools’ outgoing emails only invite customers to review the business on their own venue: Demandforce on the Demandforce site, ResellerRatings on the ResellerRatings site, and so on. If you are considering investing in a review collection tool, first consider whether the reviews it collects will reside on—or feed into—the top review venues you identified in Chapter 4. If not, you should know that reviews on these sites may not be the most helpful for your business. Be sure to monitor, measure, and adjust if necessary.
- If you are in the habit of sending a “how did we do” email, find out if the survey responses can be published on a review venue. See “Integration of Surveys with Online Review Sites.”
- To avoid confusion, provide separate links for product reviews and business reviews, or solicit product reviews and business reviews in separate emails.
- Don’t expect a high response rate. As a point of reference, Bazaarvoice Express notes that “On average, retailers see almost 7% of their email recipients complete a review” with its email solicitation tool. A lighting business in a Google+ Local forum described a similar response rate: “Even though our customers have the best intentions to give us a review, out of 50 [requests] you may get 2 or 3.” If your initial response is paltry, don’t give up! Send more than one request if necessary. Try variations until your results improve, and use the exercise in this chapter to get an eye for the most effective emails.
Day-to-Day Correspondence There’s no telling when a longstanding customer will decide to cross over into advocacy territory, so adding review links as a permanent feature of your routine customer communications is a smart strategy. In Figure 5-6, Demandforce’s appointment reminder serves double duty as a review request.
Figure 5-6: This dental appointment reminder generated by Demandforce contains a review link.
Links to your review profiles can also be part of your business’s email signature. These low-maintenance, always-on methods help ensure that every connection with your customers provides an easy opportunity for them to lay down their two cents.
Physical Reminder People are busy and forgetful. Any business owner can surely relate! It may not be enough to provide an emotional incentive or a perfectly timed email for people to leave reviews. You may also need to provide physical reminders.
Here are some examples of physical reminders:
- Shipping insert. Be sure your insert makes the case: Don’t just say “Review Us.” Explain why your customer should take the time to do it. And don’t forget to provide a URL or instructions for finding your profile on the review site. Here’s a good example of a shipping insert:
www.smallbusinesssem.com/good-example-how-to-ask-for-a-review/7370
- Signs at your location. Figure 5-7 shows a sign in a wifi-enabled waiting room. Yelp, with its stance against asking for reviews, would rather the sign say “Find us on Yelp” and leave off the “Review us” part. Read about Yelp’s review solicitation policies in Chapter 6, “Review Venues: Need-to-Know Tips for Your Action Plan,” and later in this chapter.
Figure 5-7: A sign is a convenient reminder, especially if it is in a location with wifi.
- A reminder printed on your receipts, bags, napkins, menus, hotel binder, or anything else that your customer makes contact with.
- On-site kiosk. Presto Reviews is an example of a company that offers on-site electronic review stations. However, Google+ Local has specifically warned against this practice and it may put you at risk of having your reviews filtered.
- Printed take-home sheet with detailed instructions on how to leave a review.
- Some review venues offer free or low-cost printed reminders for businesses to use with their customers, including review forms, reminder stickers, and tear pads.
Calls to Action on Your Website If you are hoping to accumulate more reviews on a particular review site, consider grabbing one of the review site’s widgets for your own website. A widget is a simple piece of code that you can embed on your website if you want to create an eye-catching link to your business profile on a review site. They can also display reviews that you already have; we’ll talk more about that in Chapter 8, “Showing Off and Being Found.” Many review sites offer customized widgets for free. TripAdvisor’s widgets come in several variations, ranging from small, linked graphics to a form that allows the site visitor to start writing the review without leaving your site (see Figure 5-8).
Figure 5-8: TripAdvisor widget displayed on the Earl Grey Lodge site
If you’re not keen on widgets, or your favorite service doesn’t offer a widget, you can create your own link. Some sites create a page dedicated to review requests; others keep things minimal with a small “Review us” text link. Figure 5-9 shows a call to action from a catering company’s home page that we like because it’s simple and visually compelling.
Figure 5-9: Home page call to action
Before you incorporate any widget or link onto your site, keep in mind that this link will take visitors away from your site. Be sure you want reviews badly enough that you’re willing to risk having your visitor forget whatever it was that they came to your site for in the first place. This approach is less of a concern if your company’s profile on the review site is more compelling or useful than your own website.
Rewards Programs Some loyalty reward services, such as Royalty Rewards (www.royaltyrewards.com) and Rewards Network (www.rewardsnetwork.com), send out emails after a visit to your establishment, asking for customer reviews. Rewards Network, which administers rewards for dining in participating restaurants, displays reviews on its own site at www.idine.com, whereas other services may link to the business’s profile on Yelp or Google+ Local. A business can even offer loyalty points as a reward for writing a review. Rewards programs can be used by restaurants as well as local merchants and service providers.
Product Giveaway Some marketers use giveaways or discounts to seek reviews from targeted individuals. There are myriad ways to formulate a product giveaway to encourage reviews; here are a few examples:
- E-retailer Battery World offers discounted prices to members of a “product review team,” an invited list of past customers who agree to leave honest product reviews on its site.
- The Amazon Vine program allows businesses to give free products to trusted reviewers. (Some examples include free review samples of the Disney video game Pure and the Rosetta Stone Italian software.) In exchange, the reviewers agree to review 80% of the products they receive. Amazon marks these reviews with an icon and discloses the freebies.
- Business strategist Mike Michalowicz gives away free book copies to gain Amazon reviews. Here’s the process he describes in his blog: First, he looks at a competing book on Amazon and lists the most recent reviewers. By looking at the reviewer’s profies, it’s often easy for him to find their website, Facebook page, or Twitter account and determine a way to contact them. Mike reaches out and offers a free book to each reviewer, with no obligation to write a review. Using this method, he receives roughly one review for every two free books he sends out.
This approach may push the boundaries of your comfort zone, but many of the top reviewers on Amazon do welcome freebies. See the sidebar “Amazon—Tips for Authors” for more approaches. If you want to pursue this idea on other review venues, be sure to consult their rules first. And keep your politeness dial turned to 11 if you ever choose to send unsolicited emails so that you minimize the potential to annoy or offend anyone.
- Yelp community event giveaways can be an avenue for outreach to Yelpers (people who write Yelp reviews). Learn more about this in Chapter 6.
Integration of Surveys with Online Review Sites Customer satisfaction surveys and comment cards have traditionally been used to generate information that remains private—a confidential conversation between a company and those whom it serves. But recent innovations are changing that. We spoke with Mike Waite, VP Marketing at Market Metrix, about his company’s customer-feedback survey system for hotels. Originally a tool that collected feedback for internal use only, Market Metrix is currently piloting a feature that allows hotels to embed a TripAdvisor form within their guest surveys. Results have been huge: According to Mike, a typical property can get 10 to 25 times as many guest reviews using this system as they would otherwise receive on TripAdvisor. In a similar vein, Revinate’s inGuest surveys, seen in Figure 5-10, can be published to TripAdvisor, Facebook, and Twitter.
Figure 5-10: Using inGuest surveys from Revinate, hotel marketing staff can publish survey information to TripAdvisor, Twitter, and Facebook.
GetFiveStars offers a survey and review management system geared toward small businesses and brick-and-mortars.
We love the idea of getting your customers to shout from the rooftops rather than murmuring into their collars! If you’re using a survey or comment card system, look into whether your vendor provides integration with online review venues.
Watch out for ethical slips in this area. We’ve seen some survey and feedback-gathering tools that funnel unsatisfied customers into a private dispute process, whereas satisfied customers can be asked to submit a public review online. This system has the potential for abuse, so pay attention to where these curated reviews are published and how they are labeled. Any site that misrepresents its curated positive reviews by implying that they are a complete or objective body of reviews is crossing the line.
Don’t Ask, Don’t Yelp
Yelp strongly discourages business owners from asking for reviews. In its FAQ, Yelp argues that it’s a “slippery slope” from a happy customer’s spontaneous review to a less-than-genuine positive review resulting from an incentive. According to Yelp, when businesses encourage reviews, a long-term bias results in the review landscape. The consequences of asking for Yelp reviews are laid out clearly: “Don’t be surprised, then, if your solicited reviews get filtered by Yelp’s automated review filter.” Read more here: https://biz.yelp.com/support/common_questions.
We don’t think asking for reviews is unethical, and we join the throngs of marketers and business owners who think Yelp’s position is wrong-headed. But businesses need to spend their time on efforts that are going to pay off, and right now, we don’t think asking a broad swath of your customers for Yelp reviews is likely to work well for you.
Here’s Yelp’s advice: Rather than trying to get more of your customers to write Yelp reviews, get more Yelpers to become your customers. To do this, you’ll need to increase your visibility in Yelp overall. Options include advertising, Yelp deals, Yelp check-in offers, icons on your site and reminders in your physical location, and, if you’re well connected or lucky, getting involved in community events. We’ll walk you through all of these options in our close-up look at Yelp in Chapter 6.
Review Site Tools and Services Some review sites, such as TripAdvisor and Angie’s List, are fans of businesses encouraging their customers to post reviews—and they even provide tools to help. Angie’s List is a standout, offering business aids such as the printed handout shown in Figure 5-11.
Figure 5-11: Angie’s List has helpful tools for businesses to encourage reviews.
Angie’s List representatives will even call your customers to collect feedback for you as part of a free service called Fetch.
TripAdvisor’s Review Express tool lets you build templated review emails and send them out to up to 1,000 of your guests or customers. An example can be seen in Figure 5-12.
Figure 5-12: TripAdvisor generated this review request email with its Review Express tool.
Paper is also an option at TripAdvisor, with printed flyers and customizable reminder cards available free or cheap, as seen in Figure 5-13.
Figure 5-13: TripAdvisor offers a paper reminder flyer.
Healthgrades.com is another example of a review site that offers printed materials: Doctors can request customized postcards to hand out to patients.
We’ll visit Yelp, Angie’s List, and TripAdvisor again in Chapter 6, with more details and tips.
Paid Review Collection Services The idea is simple: Write a check, and someone else will make the calls, send the emails, and write the letters that bring you the online reviews you need. In practice, hiring a review collection service can land a business in complex territory. Services like ResellerRatings, Demandforce, and Shopper Approved, that only seek reviews on their own platforms, are in the safety zone. Reputation management services that reach out to your customers to ask for reviews on the venue of your preference deserve more scrutiny. Are you comfortable with them getting their eyes on your client list? How will your customers feel about being contacted by a third party? And are they scrupulously careful about complying with the review sites’ terms of service, with no shenanigans like posting reviews on behalf of others?
Reviews from Friends Many businesses ask friends and family for reviews, especially when the business is just starting out or launching a new product or creative work. If this sounds like you, be sure to read the “Authenticity and Ethics” section later in this chapter to make sure you’re avoiding any ethical, legal, or terms-of-service landmines when requesting reviews from people you know.
We may have overloaded you with options! Where to start? By all means, go with the review solicitation method that’s most practical for you right now. But don’t stop there. Be sure to vary your methods until you hit on one that produces results. Every business we know with a successful approach to review cultivation has evolved its practices over time and keeps an open mind about trying new ideas.
Cultivating a Word-of-Mouth Mentality
The steps described in the previous section will go a long way, but you can do even more. Many companies embrace word-of-mouth as a foundational element of their business culture, incorporating feedback opportunities into every customer interaction. If you’re ready to take a more social, holistic approach to gaining online reviews, here are some ideas to get you started:
Social Media Conversations Are you looking for ideas to fill out your company’s Twitter patter or Facebook fraternization? Why not ask for feedback? Any time can be a good time to ask, but a great time to ask is when you’ve gained new followers or have just had a good sales run (see Figures 5-14 and 5-15).
Figure 5-14: Rise Records reaches out to its new Twitter followers for feedback.
Figure 5-15: NerdFashions solicits reviews for its Etsy shop (and doesn’t forget the link!).
User-Generated Content If you’ve got a product that’s great for show-and-tell, you could carve out a spot on your website where your customers can connect and share their love. Ducati North America (www.ducatiusa.com) has an active community called the Ducatisti that posts pics and Twitter-style comments such as this one:
With its hip Customer Action Shots feature, ThinkGeek (www.thinkgeek.com) gets customers excited about uploading fun photos of its products—even products as mundane as office supplies. Social media sharing widgets accompany every photo.
If your offerings are complex or your customers tend to research before they buy, providing a forum can be just the ticket to more credibility and sales. One example is Amazon’s Customer Discussions, forums that reside on product pages (including the Kindle Store) so that customers can, in Amazon’s words, “read what others are saying about hot products, get knowledgeable answers, check out product comparisons, and swap comments.” You can harness the power of customer advocacy on your own site inexpensively by adding an “Ask an Owner” section to your website’s forum and inviting your customers to participate. Or you can pay to get the conversation started: Some review platforms such as Bazaarvoice can reach out to verified purchasers to request that they answer prospective customers’ questions.
VideoGenie is a service that allows businesses to collect and display consumer-generated videos for a monthly fee (see Figure 5-16). Your more outgoing customers may jump at the chance to showcase their comments in these short, entertaining videos that you can add to your website or Facebook page.
Figure 5-16: VideoGenie testimonial video for ShoeDazzle
Social Profiles Look at the social media properties that you control to see if there’s a prime spot to incorporate a review request. Possibilities include your YouTube channel, your Twitter bio, or your Pinterest profile. For B2Bs especially: If your company is on LinkedIn, make sure to fill out your Products & Services page as seen in Figure 5-17. It’s the only way your clients and colleagues can get to the “Recommend” link.
Figure 5-17: The LinkedIn Products & Services page of Bosch Security Systems contains a Recommend link.
Review and Feedback Apps Facebook apps such as Smash It Social’s Fan Reviews app (www.smashitsocial.com), UserVoice (www.uservoice.com), and Get Satisfaction for Facebook (https://getsatisfaction.com/corp/product/integrations/facebook/) publish reviews and customer feedback directly to your Facebook business page. See Figure 5-18 for a peek at the Fan Reviews app.
Figure 5-18: Fan Reviews app from Smash It Social
Give Them the Hook-Up If your business thrives on in-the-moment social media advocacy such as Foursquare tips or Facebook check-ins, consider offering free wifi on your premises to make these tasks easier for your customers. If you’re thinking this only applies to coffee shops, think again. Free wifi can be provided in hotels, bars, book stores, salon waiting areas, doctors’ offices, health clubs, theaters, schools, or just about anywhere else.
Reviews at the Social/Local/Mobile Intersection
How would reviews management and customer acquisition be different without social, locally aware, and mobile technology? Simpler, certainly. You would not have to worry about friends-of-friends seeing comments like this one:
Fortunately, this technology can also be used to expand your opportunities to find, attract, and engage customers. Let’s take a look at some of the unique considerations of reviews at the intersection of Social, Local, and Mobile, or in marketing slang, SoLoMo.
The SoLoMo Prospect
Smartphone users are purchasers. An eMarketer Mobile commerce forecast estimated that in 2013 mobile shoppers would contribute roughly 15% of e-commerce sales in the US. They also consume reviews: According to the Adobe 2013 Mobile Consumer Survey, 41% of mobile users felt that customer ratings and reviews were the most important feature when purchasing on a mobile website or app, and Nielsen reported in its Q1 2013 Mobile Shopping Report that 46% of tablet users and 39% of smartphone users read reviews of recent or future purchases.
SoLoMo prospects include people who are both passively and actively consuming information about your business. Passively, they are bombarded with word-of-mouth, friend-aware advertising and location-aware offers. Actively, they may be seeking out offerings like yours on mobile apps, and they are often factoring review data into their decisions even if they only fired up an app to look for basic location information, as seen in these search results for <comics> on the Google Maps app:
The SoLoMo Customer
For those who venture into your brick-and-mortar business, the mobile customer experience is often intertwined with the in-store shopping experience. Studies show that over 70% of smartphone owners use their phone while shopping, and retailers are eager to engage and convert mobile consumers.
Mobile devices are also unquestionably part of the post-purchase reviewing process. Nielsen reports that 20% of tablet users and 19% of smartphone users post comments on a purchase in social media.
Customers who broadcast their feedback from the SoLoMo space do it in myriad ways. They may upload sepia-toned Instagram photos of your hipsterrific marquee, or publish Facebook check-in commentary about the long lines or luscious rose bushes outside your establishment. Or, they may tap out reviews like this one.
The Savvy Business and SoLoMo
According to Boston Retail Partners’ 14th Annual POS Benchmarking Survey, more than one-third of retailers offer mobile tools for interacting with customers in-store, such as mobile coupons, specials, and personalized promotions. Here are some ways you can work the SoLoMo angle for your business:
- Design your mobile app or website so that reviews are easy to find.
- Think of ideas for providing a social experience for in-store shoppers, for example, by creating opportunities to share a purchase on social media or tap into discussions and tips on what they’re looking for.
- Make offers available on your Facebook page or other social channels, and make sure that the offers you promote can be easily accessed and redeemed by mobile users.
- Consider testing mobile incentives offered by review sites, such as check-in offers or coupons.
- Focus your advertising on prospects that make geographic sense for your business. Geo-fencing is the practice of displaying ads only to viewers who are within a specified radius; look for this capability if you’re placing mobile ads or promoted Tweets.
You do not need to wrangle an app developer or become a full-fledged social media marketer to engage your SoLoMo customers. Even if all you have is a printer, you can encourage customers to check in, as seen in this example.
Here are some resources to keep your finger on the SoLoMo pulse:
- The blog maintained by location analytics company Placed: http://www.placed.com/blog/
- News and insights from Greg Sterling, a local and mobile marketing expert: http://screenwerk.com/
- Mobile marketing industry news and opinions: http://www.mobilemarketer.com/
Just like your smartphone-toting prospective customers, SoLoMo marketing is constantly in motion. Mobile device adoption will continue to grow, and increasingly these devices are an integral part of how we live, learn, shop, and communicate. Make sure your marketing strategy keeps up the pace!
An Enabled Team of Advocates Many businesses and organizations have the opportunity to draw on a loyal group of advocates for help with online reviews. Schools and churches naturally fall into this category, but many nonprofits, destinations, and special-interest businesses can as well.
Here’s an example of a team of advocates at work: A small private elementary school we know suffered a drop in enrollment after tough economic times. Hungry for new families, the volunteer-run marketing team considered expensive print advertising options. Instead, they decided on a two-pronged grassroots approach: First, they sent an email blast to current families requesting reviews on GreatSchools.net. The email explained the importance of reviews in helping families who research online, and it requested honest and detailed reviews of the school. A solid collection of new reviews resulted from this request. Best of all, this tactic could easily be repeated with new families each year. (GreatSchools.net did not appear to find the sudden influx of reviews suspicious; other review sites, particularly Google+ Local, TripAdvisor, and Yelp, might.)
Digging deeper, this school also began to monitor local neighborhood forums for advice requests. It’s common for users of local forums and neighborhood-based social networks like Nextdoor to post requests for recommendations on local products and services, as seen in Figure 5-19.
Figure 5-19: This request for school recommendations provides an opportunity for parent-advocates to spread some positive information about their favorite school.
With a dedicated team keeping an eye on local neighborhood forums, this school is now much better represented in these conversations.
Word-of-mouth marketing finds its stride when businesses give customers a reason to spontaneously speak among themselves. There’s a vibrant marketing subculture built around creating the “Wow!” moments, such as clever promotions, charitable activities, or out-of-the-ordinary customer service, that get people talking. For inspiration and ideas, visit www.womma.org or sign up for the excellent “Damn, I Wish I’d Thought of That” newsletter at www.wordofmouth.org.
Exercise: Compare Post-Transaction Emails
To get results and stay out of the trash folder, a post-interaction email must strike the perfect balance of brevity, clarity, and convenience. Here’s an exercise for you: Read the following sample emails and give each of them a score of 0–3. Look for these characteristics:
- The email is personalized, pleasant, and brief. +1 point
- The email provides a convincing reason for recipients to create a review. +1 point
- The email makes it easy for the recipient to complete the review. +1 point
The first sample email is from online travel agent, Orbitz:
We give a 3 to this email. It’s personalized and brief, and it gives a clear incentive to write a review.
Here’s how TripAdvisor handled a review request for the same traveler:
Another 3 score! In fact, we like this one better than the Orbitz email. TripAdvisor is not only more succinct, it seems to understand the emotions that trigger a review. A desire to repay a debt can be even more compelling than a 5% discount.
The next example comes from Amazon merchant PetFusion.
We’ll give this email a 2. It feels personal and explains why a review is important to this small business. But the email is too long, thanks to the product instructions that are tacked on at the end. We’d trim it after “Thanks for your patronage!” and keep the focus on the review.
Now let’s look at a review request email from eBay:
We’ll give this email a 2. It’s succinct and easy to understand, but neglects to tell us why the review would help. Also, notice that the review link is overshadowed by the “resolve a problem” link. This indicates to us that getting a review is a secondary goal for this email.
Our final example is a personal email request.
This email gets a 1. It did a good job of making the case for customers to write a review. But here are a few things it got wrong:
- This email was copied to a large group. Mass mailings are not only impersonal; they also may increase the chances of reviews getting filtered out by the review site. A large number of reviews coming in at the same time will make some review sites suspicious.
- The email was sent ages after the service actually took place. An email like this should be sent when the work is fresh in the customer’s mind.
- The email links to Yelp and Google+ profiles, but those work best for active Yelpers and Google+ users. Since this is a home services business, an Angie’s List link could have been a good addition.
- The Google link doesn’t point to the specific URL for the business. Always link directly to the page where people can write reviews. See Chapter 6 for more details about Google+ Local.
Now that you’ve scoped out a few other businesses’ emails, turn the spotlight on yourself. If your business already has an outreach email like these, take a look at it and give it a 0–3 score now. Then show it to someone else and get their opinion as well. If this type of email is something you haven’t yet developed, you’ve got a lot of examples at your fingertips; try sketching up your own version now!
Authenticity and Ethics
As you work to increase and improve your online reviews, it may not be obvious when you’re crossing the line between proactive marketing and unacceptable techniques. Some tactics, if detected, can cause a review to be removed or result in public accusations that can tarnish your business’s reputation. Read on for some guidance on avoiding common pitfalls.
Staying Outside the Spam Filter
Review spam algorithms level the playing field by removing false negative reviews and, more commonly, by removing false positive reviews from businesses that do not deserve them. But the filters are not just out to catch fakes. They also attempt to remove reviews that contain unacceptable advertising or promotion, or that were achieved via unacceptable methods, even if the reviews are real and written by actual customers.
When it works, a filter is great. Filtering out fake, misleading, or inappropriately promotional reviews benefits the consumer and enhances the credibility of the review venue. Review venues take a number of actions to identify and wipe out spam, including using software to perform behavioral analysis of reviewers, monitoring by quality control teams, responding to community flags and feedback, and even setting up sting operations to catch companies that attempt to hire writers for fake reviews.
The filtering methods are far from perfect, and the review venues are not pretending otherwise. Yelp and Google+ Local admit that legitimate reviews sometimes get caught in their filters. These venues don’t actually claim to filter out only inappropriate reviews, either. Yelp uses words like “less trustworthy,” and “real but suspicious” to describe some of the reviews that it filters, and as the algorithms change or an individual reviewer’s behavior changes over time, some filtered reviews can be released from their filter purgatory to do all the things that liberated reviews do, such as be seen by the public and factor into a business’s overall review star count.
In most cases, the practice of filtering reviews benefits the review venue and the consumer more than it does the business stakeholder, so you’re more likely to encounter an overzealous review filter than a lax one. On its blog, Yelp states that a whopping 20% of reviews posted the site are filtered out.
Solicit Safely
Maybe, during the course of reading this book, you slapped your forehead and said, “I’ve been missing out on too many opportunities to get reviews; I’d better make up for lost time!” If so, we want you to be particularly careful when jump-starting review solicitation, because getting too many reviews in too short a time period can look suspicious. Here are some scenarios to consider.
See a Customer, Ask a Customer Our assessment: Safe
Create an environment in which everyone is encouraged to write a review as they encounter your offerings, with reminders on your menu, signs in your waiting room, post-purchase prompts, and so on. Any method that casts a net for all of your customers is more likely to cause the kind of review creation profile that appears natural to an algorithm.
Email Blast to Your Past Customers Our assessment: Risky
Sending out a single email to all of your past customers asking them to review you is risky—especially if you or your reviewers have just created a profile on a review site. This can backfire spectacularly on Yelp, with honest customers’ glowing reviews getting filtered. It’s a logical guess that a number of new reviews hitting at the same time from reviewers with a paltry reviewing history are going to raise some algorithmic eyebrows. Avoid this approach for Google+ Local, Yelp, and TripAdvisor. Less finicky review sites, like GreatSchools, Citysearch, and Insider Pages, or sites that validate reviewers, may not have a problem with it.
Using a Review-Collection Service That Makes Big Promises Our assessment: Risky
Be cautious about jumping on board with any company that promises a sudden and dramatic change in your online reputation, especially if their process is not completely clear to you. Some of these services may take steps that put your business at risk of being removed from review venues or make you look bad to potential customers. No reputation management service should ever pose as customers or place inauthentic favorable content on your own site or anywhere else. And Google frowns on some of the quick-and-dirty methods we’ve seen for rapidly building and promoting reviews on your own site, such as scraping content from other sites, abusing rich snippets, and stuffing keywords into the text.
Review-from-My-Computer Party Our assessment: Don’t bother
If you were considering bringing your laptop to church one Sunday and asking all of your customers or acquaintances to use it to log into Yelp to review your barbershop, don’t do it. The same goes for setting up a review station in your waiting area. This will stack you up with a list of reviews that all came from the same IP address—a sure red flag. Google+ Local, which is more tolerant of the practice of asking for reviews than Yelp, explicitly warns against the practice of collecting multiple reviews on a single device.
Avoid Manipulative Tactics
It’s hard work getting new reviews, and we don’t want your efforts to be wasted! We always try to keep things positive, but here is a rare list of “do nots.” We warn because we care, and we hope you’ll take these admonitions to heart.
Don’t write reviews for your own business. Channel your self-promotional comments into more acceptable venues, such as public responses to reviews or private communications with reviewers.
Don’t write text and provide it to your customers to use in their reviews. We know how tempting it is, especially for those of you with marketing flair, to want to craft perfect verbiage to help your online reputation. But as you learned in Chapter 3, consumers are looking for helpful reviews, not marketing copy. The review venue’s quality control teams are reading the text and processing it intelligently, and so are your prospective customers! Don’t underestimate them by prefabricating your own review text. If you must micro-manage your customers’ reviews, toss out some possible talking points instead, for example, “We like to think we have the friendliest bartenders and the tastiest cocktails in Highland Park. Whatever you think, we hope you’ll take a moment to review us.”
Don’t ask your customers to publish identical reviews in more than one place. This is against the terms of service for many review venues, some of which claim ownership of review text once it is posted to their site. Google+ Local has suggested that review duplication is one of the reasons it removes reviews from display.
Don’t provide compensation for positive reviews or for modifying reviews. Paying for positive sentiment is always a bad idea. Learn more about the compensation and the FTC guidelines in the section “Staying on the Right Side of the Law,” later in this chapter.
Don’t solicit reviews from e-commerce customers before they have received their order. This is not only an ethically questionable approach, but it’s also likely to be fruitless. Verified-customer review venues can see both the order date and the review date for any transaction. Collecting reviews before the customer has had a chance to receive the shipment will get the reviews removed, and the review venue can take further actions, such as warnings or public notifications.
These activities are unethical and might be caught by review venues. Worse, by asking a customer to play along in any kind of review manipulation, you’re taking the risk of lowering your current and potential future customers’ opinion of your business.
Amazon—Tips for Authors
No discussion of customer reviews would be complete without a nod to Amazon.com, the world’s largest Internet retailer and arguably the site that paved the way for the prominence of customer reviews online.
You don’t need us to tell you that customer product reviews are displayed prominently throughout the Amazon shopping experience and that gaining a large number of mostly positive reviews is important for brands, manufacturers, and authors.
As authors ourselves, we’ve taken a relatively laissez-faire approach to encouraging Amazon reviews, sticking to requesting reviews via email anytime a reader sends us a question or compliment. Here’s the gist of it:
“Would you be willing to post a review of our book on Amazon? We would love for you to share your opinion with others. Here’s the link: [link goes here] Thanks!”
In addition to personally requesting reviews, here are some other tactics for authors to gain Amazon reviews:
- One of the more easily negotiable items in publishers’ contracts is the number of free book copies that are sent to the author. We recommend maxing this number out (if they offer you 10, ask for 40!) and sending these books to people who you think will read and review them.
- Include an Amazon link anywhere you think a potential reviewer might see it, for example, on your website or blog, in your email signature, or as a feature in your email blasts.
- Services such as BookRooster allow authors to send out free review copies in exchange for the promise of reviews. If you go this route, or any other route that involves giving a free book away, be sure the reviewer discloses it. As Amazon states: “If you received a free product in exchange for your review, please clearly and conspicuously disclose that you received the product free of charge.”
- Amazon lists its top 10,000 reviewers at www.amazon.com/review/top-reviewers. Many of these reviewers are amenable to receiving review copies of books and other products. Just be sure to read their profiles, where they often describe their interests:
- Amazon’s Meet Our Authors forum allows authors to shamelessly promote their books and request reviews:
- If you think Amazon has removed a review they shouldn’t have, you can send an email to [email protected] and request an appeal.
For Amazon’s author-specific help, including tips on working with customer reviews and managing editorial reviews, visit https://authorcentral.amazon.com.
Staying on the Right Side of the Law
If you take a few minutes to get the gist of a government document called the “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising,” you may come to a fuller understanding of the reasoning behind the cranky terms and conditions that exist on most review venues. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued these guides to help advertisers stay in compliance with the Federal Trade Commission Act. The document is lousy with legalese, but the main ideas amount to common sense. Paraphrasing no doubt to the point of irresponsibility, we can boil the Guides down to the following main topics:
1. Endorsements must be truthful.
2. Advertisers must convey typical product experiences appropriately.
3. Advertiser–endorser relationships must be disclosed in some cases.
Don’t take our word for it. (Seriously, don’t. We’re not lawyers.) You can read the full document here:
www.ftc.gov/os/2009/10/091005revisedendorsementguides.pdf
In 2009, the FTC updated these Guides for the first time in almost 30 years to explain the requirement for transparency on blogs and social media. One section in particular, which covers the relationship between advertisers and endorsers, caused a bit of hand-wringing for online advertisers and marketers. From the Guides,
When there exists a connection between the endorser and the seller of the advertised product that might materially affect the weight or credibility of the endorsement (i.e., the connection is not reasonably expected by the audience), such connection must be fully disclosed.
Questions swirl around this statement, including “How can I cram appropriate disclosure into a tweet?” and “What if the giveaway is just a dollar-off coupon? Does that need to be disclosed?” and “Does a check-in count as an endorsement?” You can use your noggin on this one. If you wouldn’t want your potential customers knowing the truth behind how a review was generated, then you’re probably running afoul of the Guides in some way. We can’t venture into any legal advice, but here are some thoughts on commonsense honesty and disclosure as it pertains to the FTC’s endorsement guidelines and online reviews:
What’s at Stake? The FTC’s Guides are not laws; they are interpretations of laws, written to help people understand and abide by the Federal Trade Commission Act. As such, the FTC cannot issue fines for noncompliance of the Guides, but the FTC has investigated, warned, and made complaints against companies that it believes to have violated the Federal Trade Commission Act, resulting in some expensive settlements for the offending businesses.
When to Disclose a Relationship If your business has a relationship with a reviewer in which you provide them with products or services with the expectation that they will provide a review, this relationship should be disclosed in the review. The FTC provides an example of a videogame company that sends a free game to a blogger known for reviewing videogames. In this case, the free game was sent with an expectation of receiving a review, so the blogger should “clearly and conspicuously” disclose in his review that he received the game for free. Similarly, if your restaurant gives away a free meal to a known restaurant critic, her review should contain a disclosure about the freebie. What about if your store gives away coupons or free samples to all of your walk-in customers? In that scenario, your store probably has no expectation of receiving reviews in exchange for the giveaways, and disclosure is therefore probably not necessary. On the other hand, the value of the free item matters, so if you give away a valuable free item, for example, a car, any resulting review should disclose the relationship.
How to Disclose As a business stakeholder, not an endorser or reviewer, you may be wondering why you need to care about the specifics of disclosure. Some of the most talked-about examples of FTC investigations and settlements involved retailers whose bloggers or affiliates failed to appropriately disclose their relationship with the retailer. When speaking about a $250,000 settlement involving a company called Legacy Learning Systems Inc., David Vladeck, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said, “Advertisers using affiliate marketers to promote their products would be wise to put in place a reasonable monitoring program to verify that those affiliates follow the principles of truth in advertising.”
There is no specific mandated method of disclosure, such as an approved paragraph, a badge, or a hashtag to use when disclosing an advertiser–endorser relationship. In its document “.com Disclosures: How to Make Effective Disclosures in Digital Advertising,” the FTC says, “The ultimate test is not the size of the font or the location of the disclosure, although they are important considerations; the ultimate test is whether the information intended to be disclosed is actually conveyed to consumers.” This document offers considerations, including proximity, placement, and language, for evaluating whether disclosures are clear and conspicuous. It also describes scenarios to avoid, for example, hiding disclosures away in a website’s terms of use, or linking to disclosures using general language such as “details below.”
To get interpretations and examples directly from the source, take a look at the FTC’s helpful advice at
http://www.ftc.gov/os/2013/03/130312dotcomdisclosures.pdf
Complying with Terms of Service
Every review venue has its own terms and conditions that apply to participating businesses and reviewers. We advise you to find them and read them for any venue that you are targeting for your review gathering efforts. Understanding the particulars of the terms and conditions is the safest method of avoiding spam filters, warnings, public notices calling your business’s ethics into question, or even being reported to the authorities. Many review venues have policies that mirror the FTC guidelines, requiring honest, uncompensated reviews. But other terms and conditions are not as intuitive. When in doubt, ask for assistance or clarification from the review venue’s support staff. Table 5-1 provides links to rules and excerpts from popular review venues.
Table 5-1: Review site terms and conditions
| Site | Rules and related pages | Notable quotation |
| TripAdvisor | Review Moderation and Fraud Detection FAQ: www.tripadvisor.com/vpages/review_mod_fraud_detect.html Guidelines for Traveler Reviews: www.tripadvisor.com/help/postingandediting Management Response Guidelines: www.tripadvisor.com/help/management_response_guidelines | “Any attempt to mislead, influence or impersonate a traveler is considered fraudulent and will be subject to penalty.” |
| ResellerRatings | Trust & Ethics Policy www.resellerratings.com/trust-and-ethics | “We do not allow retailers to pay for positive reviews, or to solicit reviews from customers the same day the order is placed (a common tactic—asking a customer to write a review while taking their phone order). We receive tips about this activity daily and we remove affected reviews and warn the retailer—plus, our system automatically detects these same-day reviews.” |
| Reevoo | The Reevoo Manifesto: www.reevoo.com/why-reevoo/the-reevoo-brand/reevoo-manifesto Terms and Conditions of Posting: http://reviews.reevoo.com/review/terms_and_conditions?locale=en-GB | “We do not tolerate anyone editing or removing negative reviews or showing only the reviews they like.” |
| Google+ Local | Policies and Guidelines Regarding Removals of Google Places Reviews: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=187622 Google Places Quality Guidelines: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528 | “Don’t use reviews for advertising or post the same or similar reviews across multiple places, don’t post fake reviews intended to boost or lower ratings, and don’t include links to other websites. For certain types of businesses that are prone to spam, we also reserve the right to prevent reviews from publicly appearing across Google.” |
| Amazon | General Review Creation Guidelines: www.amazon.com/gp/community-help/customer-reviews-guidelines Customer Review Guidelines Frequently Asked Questions: www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?ie=UTF8&nodeId=201077870 | “We do not allow any compensation for a customer review other than a free copy of the product (provided up front). If we find evidence that a customer was paid for a review, we will remove it.” Special warning for authors and artists: “If you have a direct or indirect financial interest in a product, or perceived to have a close personal relationship with its author or artist, we will likely remove your review.” |
| Shopper Approved | Terms and Conditions: www.shopperapproved.com/terms.php | “[A]ll ratings and reviews collected by Shopper Approved immediately become the sole property of Shopper Approved. In order to protect the integrity of the Shopper Approved brand for everyone, we cannot allow you or any other third party to host or display any ratings collected by Shopper Approved without our direct consent.” |
| Booking.com | Terms and Conditions: https://admin.bookings.org/hotelreg/terms-and-conditions.html | “Booking.com will not enter into any discussion, negotiation or correspondence with the Accommodation in respect of (the content of, or consequences of the publication or distribution of) the Guest reviews.” |
| Shopzilla/BizRate | Merchant Ratings FAQ: http://about.shopzilla.com/store-ratings Merchant Program Agreement: http://merchant.shopzilla.com/oa/general/t_and_c.xpml | “Eight of the fifteen quality ratings are determined at the point-of-sale or ‘checkout.’ These are collected by asking a store’s customers to evaluate their purchase experiences immediately after completing the online transaction. The remaining 7 quality ratings are determined after the product is expected to have been delivered.” |
| Yelp | Content Guidelines: www.yelp.com/guidelines Support Center - Common Questions: https://biz.yelp.com/support/common_questions | “You can use the ‘About This Business’ tab to tell people a little something special about your business. Please keep it relevant: don’t use this feature to attack your competitors, reviewers, or Yelp, and don’t use it to seed keywords or post special offers or promotions—we’ll remove them if we see them.” |
| Bazaarvoice | Client Agreements: www.bazaarvoice.com/legal/clientagreements/#.UbKewCtgZW8 Bazaarvoice Express Terms and Conditions: www.bazaarvoiceexpress.com/expressminisite/termsandconditions.jsp | “You shall…require that any Product Review or portion thereof written on Your behalf (e.g., by contractor, employee, or third party with or without compensation) shall be identified by the Staff Reviews Badge through the Bazaarvoice Dashboard.” |
| Angie’s List | FAQ: Reviews and Your Listing: http://support.business.angieslist.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/105/~/reviews-and-your-listing Service Provider’s Business Agreement: http://business.angieslist.com/visitor/useragreement.aspx | “Keep in mind, Angie’s List maintains a strict policy against self-reporting. Angie’s List policy also prohibits businesses from submitting review forms on behalf of their customers—doing so is considered self-reporting.” |
Having trouble finding the rules for a site that’s not listed in the table? Some venues list reviewer guidelines in their general website terms and conditions, whereas others have separate pages for ethics statements, business guidelines, and reviewer guidelines. If you can’t find them easily, try going through the initial steps of composing a review, and you’ll likely uncover links to the rules.
Yelp’s Controversial Filter
Scroll down to the bottom of many Yelp profiles and you’ll find a teeny, tiny link to the filtered reviews for that business. Clicking through often reveals a mix of positive and negative reviews. Sometimes, a business’s Yelp filter contains a generous list of genuine reviews that have been filtered out.
Some business stakeholders believe something sinister is afoot, with one common accusation being that Yelp spitefully applies its filter, either reordering or refiltering reviews when a business refuses to buy advertising or stops paying for advertising.
Our own Ask the Experts Blog (www.yourseoplan.com/blog) contains a collection of angry chatter from commenters who believe that this practice is real:
- “It seems no matter what someone writes, if it is a positive review for us, YELP will not let it post. This is a[n] evil scheme and small business owners NEED TO UNITE and show politicians and this one company the power of many, we are the engine of the economy!”
- “I cannot believe how they should be in the business of destroying the core of America…Pay me or I will bring you down.”
- “It’s about hard-working small business owners being literally held hostage on the Yelp system.”
We spoke with a Yelp account executive who weighed in on the issue. This employee, who wished to remain anonymous, has heard plenty of complaints and rumors about Yelp’s sales tactics and filtering mechanism. He feels that there may sometimes be a connection between turning down Yelp advertising and an increase in filtered reviews, but not the kind of connection that the conspiracy theorists have in mind. His take: “After people get a Yelp sales call, they decide to go ask for a bunch of reviews. But they are solicited reviews, so they get filtered.” He adds that Yelp’s advertising department operates independently from the department that handles the review filter.
We’re not Yelp insiders by any stretch of the imagination, but we don’t think Yelp sics its filter on businesses that turn down its advertising advances. Lawsuits that made similar claims have gotten nowhere. But it does seem entirely possible that rogue Yelp salespeople have, at times, led businesses astray, either by making false claims or by walking the path of ambiguity, allowing businesses to retain a misconception that advertising on Yelp would be their ticket to review salvation. Yelp addresses some of these concerns in its Myths about Yelp page at www.yelp.com/myths. This page answers some common concerns head on and describes steps that Yelp takes to prevent its employees from gaming the system, for example, “Yelp salespeople don’t have back-end administrative privileges that would allow them to alter the Yelp review database.”
There is no customer support department for free listings at Yelp, and we think this contributes to a climate in which businesses tend to draw their own conclusions and rant publicly. Aggressive sales practices also raise the hackles of many business owners. Yelp could go a long way toward repairing its relations with businesses by offering more support to nonpaying businesses, a reconsideration process for filtered reviews, and mediation services for negative reviews.
Whether you consider yourself rule-bound or rebellious, it’s important to know where the lines are drawn so that you can make informed decisions about your review solicitation efforts. We hope that understanding the potential traps and tripwires of your reviewscape will save you from headaches and lost reviews.
With the ideas you’ve gained from this chapter, you’ve planted the seeds of smart, sustainable review cultivation. Next up, we’ll help you blossom into an online review expert as we examine some important review venues in detail.
..................Content has been hidden....................
You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.