Reputation management spam
Consumers love consumer-generated product reviews. According to the latest Deloitte study, over 60 percent of consumers read them, 82 percent say the reviews affected their purchasing decisions.
Pat Conroy from Deloitte & Touche explains the impact of greater transparency
“In the past, clever marketers and advertisers shaped brands, but now consumers are increasingly empowered, everyone has a voice, and information and opinions are instantly dispersed. Consumer product companies need to determine how best to capitalize on this new landscape. Clearly, there will be consequences for those who don’t.”
An important choice of words here: capitalize. Some firms get this very wrong and think it's about exploiting or abusing review driven sites. At RealSelf we've encountered those who think exploitation is the path to success, generating fake comments or reviews.
Abusing review sites is a dangerous game, because, like the greedy drug dealer who can't give up the cash flow, the company will eventually get caught. And social media sites have a lot of authority; so negative commentary about the company is likely to get prominent display on Google.
The cost of recovering from the sin of fake reviews is hard to quantify. I recall in my marketing 101 class that it was something like 6 times more costly to turn a negative customer into positive, than a neutral person into positive. Those customer acquisition metrics simply don't apply to the social media driven online world. It's a lot worse because faking online reputation leaves prospective customers to conclude the company is unethical and hiding the truth from them. Then they go blog about it and get this negative sentiment distributed to deep into the internet.
We've been asked, what can a company do about negative product reviews on RealSelf. My first response is to start by saying what not to do. First, don't generate fake reviews, and secondly, don't hire a "reputation management" firm to do your dirty work.
These reputation management firms have cropped up everywhere offering tall promises to repair and protect reputations. They speak of things like "client education" as in "We improve your company's online reputation by increasing the number of positive reviews through client education" (Luna Vista). Or promise to "Manage the buzz" (Chatter Guard). Worse yet, there are firms like Reputation Hawk that portend to manipulate search results in the favor of a client:
"Generate more positive publicity about you or your company on the net. Build the "authority" of that publicity and convince the search engines that the positive sites are more valid than the negative sites"
Others like defendmyname suggest they can remove, suppress, and replace negative comments with positive ones.
Another recommendation I offer to the company concerned about comments on RealSelf relates to capitalizing on the fact that consumers are interested in unique insights. Consumers generally respond positively to a company that's proactive and offers consumers this information. To this end, we let companies set up accounts that identify their affiliation so that they can respond to comments and join discussions. We also help companies get visibility to official company responses to reviews. See an example. In other cases, like a product company, they can build trust with members by answering their questions much like Ava Wilder has done for Earthwise Beauty.
My hope is that beauty brands, personal care firms, and the aesthetics industry takes the right path here for consumers and keeps it clean, fair, and untainted by reputation management spam.
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