Andrew Grinaker | Digital, SEO and Social Media Strategist Blog | Seattle, WA

The State of Reputation Management

In a world of fake reviews, spamming competitors and hounding customers for testimonials, there is never a dull moment in the world of reputation management. After spending the past 90 days leading a team focused on reputation management and social media services on the review sites, I have gained an infinite amount of knowledge.

I wanted to touch on the three biggest revelations when it comes to reputation management and the review based social media industry.

Before I touch on these three, I wanted to state briefly on one common misconception in the industry. In 99% of instances, you cannot get a review removed. Don’t sign up with a vendor that promises this can be done. It is incorrect and they are providing unethical services.

1)    Customers Reviews need to be an Organic Process.
In my opinion, the voice of authority in the Google Places and reviews world is Mike Blumenthal (insert link). We had a recent Twitter and email discussion around how to generate reviews on Google Places. He touched on three key points when trying to generate reviews, ethically.

-Don’t pressure the customer for a review
-Don’t incentivize the customer (coupon for a review)
-Don’t have them write a review on the property of the reviewing business.

Starts to limit some of your strategies right? Not if you are focused on a long term strategy instead of a quick fix. You can certainly ask the customer for a review and even share a link to your Google Places or Yelp page but just stay away from giving something away in return for a review. It creates ethical concerns and will be viewed negatively if someone states, “loved your business, thanks for the coupon for the Google review.”

How is writing reviews on the property wrong if the customer is doing it? IP address conflicts come into play. If you are flagged by generating reviews from a single IP address, you could get your local listing blacklisted. Share marketing materials to help get them find your page….when they get home.

2)    Use Reviews to Create Actionable Items
Reviews can be quite enlightening if you take the personal side out of them. Yes, you received a 1 star rating on your Yelp page. Get over it and learn from it. Why did they have a bad customer experience? Can something be done about it?
Give your employees feedback regarding the review and ask about how you can improve the situation for the next set of customers. Don’t take the review for granted as a “one off” scenario but leverage the opportunity to improve your business.

3)    Understanding the Major Players in the Review Industry
My take, based on customer feedback and review activity, goes something like this. CitySearch is dying, Google is gaining momentum, Yelp is getting greedy and the rest are struggling to gain any traction.

At one point CitySearch was at the forefront of the review industry but over time they have lost significance, search engine visibility and overall visitor traffic. Our customers have shown little interest in driving reviews to their site.

Google is gaining momentum mostly for their visibility when someone does a company or product search on Google.com. They have positioned their reviews on the Google Places page to show up near the top page 1 search results, adding instant credibility. They have also recently removed third party reviews from their review aggregate and are only pulling in Google Places reviews.

The “greedy” line regarding Yelp above comes from their filtered review technology. They have a process to filter reviews for what is being perceived as either new Yelp users, infrequent Yelp users and/or other factors unknown to the industry. My issue is that if you can confirm the reviewer as doing business with this company, why wouldn’t you want to share that experience with the general public? In the end, I think this will push more people and more importantly businesses away. Businesses will simply get tired of sending confirmed customers to their profile page only to be eventually filtered.