Review Marketing: how to use the Internet’s social structure to emphasize your products’ strong points

In new media marketing they tell you just about every week that companies are still afraid to support product reviews on their sites. We think this is rather exaggerated: these fears hardly exist any more, since it is by now understood that every product that was ever sold has already been reviewed at least 40 times on eBay, amazon, kelkoo or any of the other thousands of vendor and review sites. As most companies have come to realize this, they will ultimately consider starting a review section in their own web sites. And rightly so: having control over a review section can be a great thing.

We don’t recommend companies offering a review section so that they can edit or delete bad comments – insert bad joke about communism here – but to engage in an honest conversation with their customers. Thankfully, marketing is becoming more and more about providing the right information to the right people and much less about providing wrong information to as many people as possible.

Visitors of your site are interested in your product, so they want to know what others think of it. If they see that most reviews are positive or very positive – which they generally are, according to eMarketer (see also graph) – it will be a recommendation for the things you sell. For CMO’s that have nightmares involving bad comments: you can personally handle these by dealing with the complaints yourself. What is more, you can do this for the whole world to see in public comments. If you put a bit of effort into this, it will show your dedicated side.

If you truly support what you sell, you will not have any problems with an online public feedback forum. Au contraire, it will provide a low-cost social advertising platform for your most dedicated customers, who will even spread the word beyond the Internet. And having such a platform under your own control is so much better than having it depend on a third party. If you have faith in your product or service, you should express this by personally giving your customers a voice. It doesn’t need to be elaborate, just make sure you put a dedicated customer relations person – you do have one of those, don’t you? – on the case. A few simple web pages will teach you more about your clients, your products, and the Internet than you could possible imagine.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 1:33 am and is filed under Social Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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