Posts Tagged ‘Reviews’

Making Social Media Easier

by on Monday, January 23rd, 2012

When we talk with local businesses about Social Media, the most frequent objection to becoming more socially engaged is time. Many local merchants believe that the time required to attend to Facebook and Twitter is better used for tasks more directly related to running the business. Rather than argue the importance of Social Media, we’d like to pass along a post on Mashable that introduces some tools that make it easier than ever for a small business to manage its Social Media presence and derive maximum value from this powerful marketing medium.

via Kevin Moore (Creative Commons)

Some of these tools are geared toward agencies or at least larger companies, but there are two that we have used successfully at Zavee: HootSuite and TweetDeck. Both applications live on the desktop although both have mobile versions. TweetDeck is free and HootSuite has a free version that should be fine for most businesses. Both apps let the user manage multiple streams (e.g., Facebook and Twitter) simultaneously, including posting the same content to several streams. Both apps make it easy to schedule posts, so an hour or two on the weekend can result in a week’s worth of posts.

It’s also easy to redirect content, so a link, image or other content that is found on Twitter can be shared out on Facebook (and vice versa). This can be especially valuable for Zavee merchants, because Zavee shoppers now can share merchant-related content on Social Media even more easily than before. So merchants that sees a good review or recommendation can increase its reach by putting that content in their own Social Media stream. Merchants also can push news announcements published on Zavee to their Facebook and Twitter streams. That gets their own content noticed by even more potential customers.

Social Media can’t be fully automated, any more than any other marketing tool. But these two apps (and others mentioned in the Mashable post) can make the time devoted to Social Media time well spent.

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Building Loyalty with Customer Reviews

by on Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011

Kevin Stirtz of Amazing Service Guy has an outstanding post in The Social Customer called, “10 Ways to Turn Online Reviews into More Loyal Customers”. Kevin’s advice is not just smart, it’s easy for any merchant to adopt. Things like, respond to every review; when you’re wrong, apologize; stay positive and consistent. Simple points, but they get at what makes a review platform like Zavee so powerful for local merchants.

I have only a few thoughts to add to Kevin’s. First, I absolutely agree with responding to every review, at least with a thank you. Depending on the platform, merchants can respond publicly (on the platform), privately (via direct message or email), or both. For example, I’ve seen public responses to reviews on TripAdvisor but not on Yelp. I’ve received private responses to reviews on Yelp. Zavee supports both public and private responses. Having access to both domains gives merchants a lot of flexibility but requires thought about how to use them. For example, a general statement of apology probably should always be public, but a promise of specific compensation might best be communicated privately.

Kevin doesn’t make the point explicitly, but underlying his comments is the notion that reviews can be shared socially. An inappropriate response can easily make the social rounds and do more damage than the review that the merchant was responding to. A gracious and informative response can be shared as well, but with the opposite effect. In other words, responses to reviews are marketing communications, and should be crafted as carefully as a news release or an ad.

Shout!

shout! (via Sandra Nahdi - Creative Commons)

Kevin rightly advises against writing fake positive reviews, calling them a distraction from the real work of improving the business. I agree that they are a distraction but I think another reason to avoid them is that they jeopardize the credibility of the review platform as a whole. Think of it as “Gresham’s Law” applied to content.

However, merchants frequently tell us they are more concerned about fake negative reviews, e.g., from a competitor or extremely dissatisfied customer. Merchants can never completely prevent malicious reviews but there are two things they can do to limit their impact: First, merchants should be extra vigilant about not rising to the bait and engaging in an online shouting match with the reviewer. Kevin makes this point about all negative reviews but it the more negative the review, the more important the merchant’s self-restraint. Second, merchants should trust their customers. They are pretty good about spotting outlier reviews, recognizing them for what they are and discounting their impact accordingly.

A more annoying problem for merchants is reviews that are stale. Restaurants that have changed chefs, hotels that have repainted their rooms, and stores that have changed suppliers have all been victimized by dated reviews. No one knows why anyone would wait months to describe a shopping, dining or travel experience they probably barely remember, but it is a common occurrence. Our attempt to limit the impact of both dated and false reviews is to permit shoppers to post a review only after making a purchase and within 30 days of that purchase.

The Zavee takeaway:

  • Respond to every review, if only to say “Thank you” or “I’m sorry”.
  • Treat every review as a marketing opportunity, to both new and existing customers.
  • Treat every response a marketing communication, one that may be shared well beyond merchant and customer.

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Big Brands Embrace Social Commerce. Are They Alone?

by on Tuesday, October 12th, 2010

Zavee CEO Alan Pleskow and I attended the inaugural Rise of Social Commerce conference last week in Palo Alto. Big brands (usually) adopt new technologies and strategies earlier than small to medium sized businesses, so the conference provided a fascinating peek at how some of the largest companies are planning for and deploying Social Commerce today.

Social Commerce was defined by the conference organizers as “the use of social technologies to connect, listen, understand, and engage to improve the shopping experience.” For most conference attendees, the goal was removing the the technological, economic and operational obstacles that add “friction” to the online commerce experience.

(via x-ray delta one - Creative Commons)

Does that mean that Social Commerce is only for brands that sell online? And only for enterprise level companies? Not at all. Much of the learning around how consumers interact with brands and each other applies equally to brands whose customers make shopping decisions online but actually buy in-store. And much of the same learning applies equally to SMBs, even if some of their challenges are unique. For example, while SMBs are more likely to ask “How can I find the time?” than “Which department owns this?” using technology to become more customer-centric is something every business can do.

The organizers developed a conceptual framework for Social Commerce that has four phases:

  1. Let’s Be Social
  2. Enlightened Engagement
  3. Store of the Community
  4. Frictionless Commerce

The first phase is where many SMBs are today: working out the basics of consumer engagement on social platforms. Very few business we meet through Zavee still believe that social media is irrelevant to their business. Their most common issues are the time commitment required and the loss of control over their business’ message. Depending on the size of the business the time issue can be a real concern, but small businesses can start small, and increase their investment in social media as they begin to see results. As for the control issue, a few minutes on Twitter should open the eyes of any business owner about how much control they really have.

The second phase should be the destination for most SMBs, and they should get there as quickly as possible. This phase involves adding social content to the shopping experience: reviews from consumers, information and suggestions from the business, even content sourced from third parties. Regardless of whether the actual transaction takes place in the online or offline domain, enriching the consumer’s shopping experience through social content can have a significant impact on businesses of any size. Consumers respond to timely, relevant, personalized content by trying new businesses, becoming loyal customers and sharing their experiences with the community.

The third and fourth phases are over the horizon for many enterprises, let alone SMBs. The third phase involves bringing consumers into the process by which businesses create, buy, stock and price products, and the fourth involves completely re-imagining the retail experience. Some of the examples from the conference, such as Kaboodle and ModCloth, are very impressive. Many of the companies at the conference are looking to leverage Facebook’s enhanced commerce capabilities to bring the online store to the consumer rather than force the consumer to leave Facebook for an e-commerce site. SMBs may not be able to do everything these companies have done, but the underlying insight – that consumers respond to being included in decisions that are made upstream of the purchase – is something SMBs should consider making part of their strategy.

With so much emphasis on the enterprise, why did Alan and I attend this conference? It’s because we believe that the definition quoted above also describes what Zavee does for our merchants and shoppers. Our platform helps merchants use social media to listen, understand and engage with consumers. More importantly, Zavee is a community that supports the shopper-to-shopper and merchant-to-shopper interactions that lead to an enhanced shopping experience and a stronger brand. Adopting a Social Commerce strategy can seem daunting for SMBs, but with Zavee they don’t have to do it alone.

The Zavee takeaway:

  • SMBs can learn a lot from what enterprises think and do, even if these learnings can’t be applied directly.
  • The insight that consumers respond favorably to content that is timely, relevant, personalized can be leveraged by businesses of any size.
  • SMBs need to get into the Social Commerce space, but Zavee can ensure that they don’t take the journey alone.

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4 Things to Consider About Negative Reviews

by on Wednesday, September 15th, 2010

Now that a New York court has dismissed claims against Yelp by a New York dentist based on a (very) negative review and on Yelp’s alleged removal of positive reviews, this might be a good time to think about what makes a review “negative” and what negative reviews mean to – and for – your business. You may think that negative reviews are just angry people taking shots at you. Here are four other ways to look at it:

via Marten Bjork (Creative Commons)

Readers recognize – and discount – outliers. Positive or negative, excessive emotions in a review diminish their credibility. It’s great to get an exceptional review for exceptional service. But if the glowing adjectives are out of proportion to a typical customer experience, readers are likely to apply the old saying: If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Same thing with negative reviews. The surest way to lose credibility IS TO WRITE IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS WITH LOTS OF PUNCTUATION!!! These are actually the best negative reviews you can get, because even if they are accurate, who will believe them? It’s true that some people write reviews to blow off steam, but readers know that, and respond accordingly.

Mixed reviews are not necessarily negative. Have you ever used Rotten Tomatoes to decide whether to see a movie? The site’s “Tomatometer” rating is based on whether published reviews were positive or negative. However, a review can only be either “fresh” (i.e., positive) or “rotten” (i.e., negative), no matter how mixed or qualified the review might be. For “Going the Distance” (51% rating), the fresh reviews include “solid but totally forgettable” and “hilarious in many individual scenes [but] less than the sum of its parts”. Rotten reviews included “funny but forgettable” and “The laughs kept me involved … but after I left the theater, it occurred to me that this slight comedy hadn’t gone very far at all.” Hmm. Many reviews – of anything – are mixed enough that it would be hard to give them either a thumbs up or thumbs down rating. So don’t consider every mixed review a thumbs down.

A mixed review is often more thoughtful, detailed and nuanced than an outright rave or pan. A customer who writes a review that contains some negative feedback isn’t venting, she’s helping. These are the reviews your customers will take seriously – and you should do the same. When you respond to reviews like these (easy to do on Zavee) you can use the review as the basis for an ongoing relationship. If you want a second chance at the customer and a more positive review the second time around, being proactive is the only way to get results.

Yes, competitors can try to hurt your business with fake reviews, but there are reasons you don’t hear about it happening very often. If you are running a good business deceitful reviews are unlikely to harm you, especially if you are actively communicating with your customers. Why? First, as discussed above readers will tend to discount rants whether or not they are malicious. Second, users of social shopping sites tend to be very skeptical of reviews that differ greatly from what most (real) customers experience. The unusual experience is another kind of outlier. On the other hand, negative reviews that go into detail about the experience and/or are written by a reviewer who has demonstrated credibility based on other reviews may well be taken seriously, but how many of your competitors are willing to invest that much effort just to undermine your business? If you are actively communicating with your customers you should be able to deflect even the most sophisticated malicious review. Finally, social shopping sites are trying to safeguard against malicious and fraudulent reviews. At Zavee, our system will reject a review unless the author has had a transaction at that merchant within 30 days of the review. Could a competitor jump through all those hoops just to hurt your business? Probably, but how many would bother?

A negative review is a positive experience. On the most basic level, a thoughtful review that recounts a negative experience provides valuable information for your business. You can’t be everywhere, and if a waiter or a sales associate didn’t behave appropriately, or if a product or service fell short of expectations, wouldn’t you want to know? Of course you would prefer to hear it privately, but in our increasingly social world these conversations are being held in the open. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. A negative review can be a positive experience because your handling of the situation – again, in public – gives you the chance to move the conversation forward: increasing customer engagement and loyalty, building your reputation and your brand, and even persuading non-customers to give you a try.

The Zavee takeaway:

  • Readers are smart, and they are good at recognizing which reviews to take seriously.
  • Negative reviews can hurt your business only if you ignore them or react passively. Especially on Zavee, where we make it so easy for merchants to interact with customers, make sure you respond to every review.
  • Always follow through on anything you promise – and don’t forget to talk about it.

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The Social “Ask”

by on Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

Remember Ask.com? Back before Google became almost synonymous with internet search (sorry, Yahoo!), Ask had users enter natural language questions rather than strings of keywords. Ask is about to relaunch with an interesting new structure. First, the search engine now returns natural language answers instead of links. Second, and even more interesting, users will be able to open their query to the user community for a crowd-sourced answer.

via Horia Varlan (Creative Commons 2.0)

Ask is hardly alone in making Q&A part of social search. A startup called Aardvark enables social Q&A by finding a person in the user’s network to answer a question. Aardvark may have been onto something, as it was recently acquired by Google. Other social search sites that have enabled social Q&A are Quora and Formspring. Quora considers itself a “continually improving collection” of user-generated questions and answers. Formspring is oriented toward “conversational Q&A [that] helps you express yourself”. Among the major social networks, Facebook is developing a Q&A application, which is currently in private beta. LinkedIn long has supported the ability to ask questions and hold threaded discussions within user groups, while Twitter can support Q&A but doesn’t have a specific application.

We think that Q&A is a natural extension of social search and will become a permanent part of the social media landscape. We think Q&A is particularly relevant to social shopping. The process that now begins with a shopper’s review or recommendation can just as easily begin with another shopper’s request for information. Like writing reviews, answering questions is a way for shoppers to provide value, demonstrate expertise and gain influence. Of course, we at Zavee are continuing to develop and refine our own social search capabilities, so you can look forward to exciting new features over the next several months.

The Zavee takeaway:

  • Social Q&A is suddenly hot, but that doesn’t make it a fad.
  • Q&A is a natural extension of the social shopping feature set.
  • Look for exciting new social search features coming soon from Zavee.

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Do You “Like” Me? Do You Really “Like” Me?

by on Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

Remember Sally Fields’ famous acceptance speech at the 1985 Oscars? “You like me! You really like me!”  But what if we didn’t mean it?

One of the recent changes to Facebook has been a great expansion of the “Like” concept which, among other things, replaces the “Fan” concept.  Yelp and other social networks have followed suit.  At least for now, Zavee is still inviting shoppers to become “Fans” of merchants they haven’t yet shopped at and not just “Like” them.  Why?  Because we think that, on some perhaps subtle level, being a “Fan” implies a higher degree of emotional engagement than merely “Liking” someone or something.  How substantial is that difference? It’s hard to tell.  If you follow sports you might agree that there is a difference between liking a team and being a fan.  If you follow the New York Mets or the Miami Dolphins you almost certainly do.  At Zavee we are considering changing the “Fan” concept to something completely different – something that retains a high level of engagement but provides greater flexibility.  More news to follow on that new feature.

One thing we didn’t think about when we were debating “Fan” versus “Like” was whether a lower level of engagement might make it easier for users to be less than candid about what they say they “Like”.  Would people really do this?  And why?

Starbucks Barista Badge from Foursquare (via pbende)

No less a social media authority than Robert Scoble says they would, and do.  In fact, he says that he has done that very thing.  Why?  Scoble says that it comes down to a fundamental truth about human nature: we present ourselves as we want others to see us.  Since the pages, users and merchants we “like” become part of our public social persona, we can change that persona by changing what we say we “like”.  If our tastes run to country bands and donut shops, but we’d rather be thought of as someone who prefers singer-songwriters and vegan restaurants, our “likes” can reflect that.


Is this a problem for smaller businesses? It might be. For one thing, advertisers tend to take us at our word.  Check in frequently enough at Starbucks and you can win a discount off your coffee.  Starbucks can’t tell whether you like the coffee, just how often you showed up.  Clicking the Like button on Yelp for a bunch of restaurants gives rise to inferences about your preferences and behavior, and advertisers will target you accordingly. Providing a misleading social persona is just a waste of time for both advertiser and user, unless it’s being done as a form of protest against behavioral targeting.

Like much about social media, behavioral targeting presents legitimate privacy issues, and they need to be worked out. However, if advertisers lose faith in the accuracy of consumers’ self-descriptions the effectiveness of social media for marketers is likely to decrease. For small marketers who are drawn to social media marketing by, among other things, its low cost and high effectiveness, this could be a very unfortunate result.

It’s probably true, as Scoble says, that advertisers have ways to verify, at least in part, the accuracy of the things we claim we like.  But the deeper point is that the value of social media as a communications tool for users in the network depends in large part on the credibility of other users.  A user who creates a false or misleading social persona may only lose personal credibility within the network, but if enough users do the same thing the credibility of the network as a whole may suffer. A recent paper about dating sites reports that deception in profiles is rampant. The paper suggests that one reason is that users understand what makes them desirable to potential mates, and create profiles to reflect those expectations. Dating sites like to advertise their successes, but they may have become just one more system to game.

Whether Zavee stays with “Fan”, changes to “Like” or goes in a different direction altogether, the principal means by which Zavee shoppers communicate the quality of their shopping experience is by writing reviews. It takes more effort (and commitment) to write a review than to click on a button, but that very fact gives proportionately more weight to the reviews and less to a simple “Fan” designation. One safeguard we put in place expressly to improve the accuracy, timeliness and fairness of reviews is for the system to accept a review of a merchant only if the reviewer has made a Zavee purchase at that merchant within 30 days.

We hope that social networks and their users develop means to limit the influence of false social personsas, not to protect advertisers but to protect the networks themselves and to permit them to continue to deliver valuable, relevant experiences to their users.

The Zavee takeaway:

  • Once it becomes trivially easy to create a social persona, that persona may itself become trivial. The problem is that those personas are taken seriously, both by advertisers and by other users.
  • It’s natural to present ourselves as we’d like to be seen, but invented personas can make the the network as a whole less valuable to users who rely on other users for timely and accurate information and opinions.
  • Local businesses will suffer disproportionately if social media marketing loses credibility, because it’s a particularly attractive tool for them in an environment where conventional alternatives aren’t nearly as cost-effective.

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The Positive Side of Negative Reviews

by on Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

Actor, author, shortstop or chef, no one likes a negative review. But when we were developing the Zavee business model we decided early on that we would have to include negative as well as positive reviews. The goal we set for ourselves was to create a framework for reviews that were accurate, timely and fair – and that meant including negative reviews.

Our commitment to getting reviews right stemmed from our insight that reviews were another form of Social Media and, as such, were going to be a vital component of the Zavee experience and value proposition. We also learned, based on research with merchants, that many business owners who expressed concern about potential harm from fraudulent, malicious or even accurate negative reviews also intuitively understood the benefit of hearing about issues directly from the customer affected.

As marketers are learning, people will say whatever they want to whomever they want, and merchants don’t have the power to control their customers’ conversations. They can, however, do two important things.

First, they can listen, learn and respond. Thanks to Social Media, including reviews, merchants can make necessary adjustments to their business almost in real time. This is something that every business should be doing, all the time, through every available channel. Twitter and Facebook are great listening posts, but reviews are a channel that exists solely to provide feedback about the customer experience.

Second, merchants can participate in the conversation. By actively engaging with their customers merchants can address problems quickly and publicly; they can provide perspective that helps customers evaluate reviews; and they can favorably shape perceptions about the business.

  • Responding quickly is important because unresolved issues tend to fester. Responding publicly is important because it gives the merchant the chance to address at one time a concern that may be shared by many customers.
  • Actively participating is the only sure way to get the merchant’s perspective into the conversation. Both the manner and the substance of the merchant’s response can help customers determine how much weight to give a negative review, while the absence of a response does nothing but add credence to the reviewer’s complaints. A measured, factual response may not erase the impact of a negative review, but at a minimum the merchant will have extended the relationship with the customer and demonstrated both interest and respect.
  • Simply committing the time and effort to engage customers in conversation sends a positive message to all customers and can go a long way toward shaping perceptions of the customer experience. This can reinforce the positive experiences of current customers and build loyalty, but it also can lead non-customers to have a favorable impression of what it would be like to be a customer. In other words, an impressive response to a negative review can actually bring in new business.
Creative Commons 2.0

Reviews (via fengergold)

In benchmarking Zavee against other sites that feature reviews we observed a wide disparity in the treatment of key issues. Some sites filter reviews while others list them all chronologically. At least one site that uses filtering algorithms has had to defend itself against allegations that it improperly manipulated the placement of reviews. We decided not to filter or change the placement of reviews, because we believed that the less we intervened in the substance of reviews, the more confidence shoppers would have in them and, ultimately, in the Zavee brand.

We also observed that some sites permitted reviews (both positive and negative) that described experiences that had occurred long before the review was written. We thought reviews that were dated were so likely to be inaccurate that it would be unfair to both merchants and shoppers to have them on our site. We also were concerned, as many merchants seemed to be, that on some review sites there there were insufficient safeguards against fake reviews or even fake merchants.

We addressed these problems by requiring that any shopper who wanted to review a merchant had to have made a purchase from that merchant within the previous 30 days and by permitting only one review per purchase. Zavee solicits a review after every transaction, and the shopper’s My Zavee page lists recent transactions and the time remaining to submit a review. Zavee automatically rejects reviews that do not meet these rules.

We also were concerned about reviews that, while perhaps not fraudulent, seemed hostile or malicious. We initially considered moderating reviews, the way we moderate comments on Zavee Thinking, but we decided not to. There is nothing wrong with having editorial standards for reviews – we are, after all, responsible for the content on our site – but we thought the better way to deal with potential problems was to let shoppers and merchants have their say but remove reviews that violated our Terms of Use.

Because we passionately believe that reviews should be a dialogue, we also made it easy for merchants to post responses to shopper reviews. Merchants are automatically notified whenever they are reviewed and have 7 days to post a response. Responses appear with the original reviews and always show up together in a search. Shoppers can respond the the merchant’s response, and the entire conversation is threaded so it can be seen by everyone who sees the original review.

The Zavee takeaway:

  • You can’t control what your customers say, but you can listen, learn and respond to concerns – almost in real time.
  • Use negative reviews as a conversation-starter, not a relationship-ender.
  • How you handle unfavorable reviews can shape perceptions about your business, for future as well as current customers. Treat reviews as an opportunity to be impressive – you may be surprised by the results.

Update (4/14/10): MediaPost’s Marketing Daily reports that S.C. Johnson has been receiving substantial negative feedback, including reviews, about a new pet care product – and tells Marketing Daily that it is bringing the feedback to its product development team for consideration.

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