How To Gain & Maintain a 5-Star Online Reputation (PART 12)

 

How To Gain & Maintain a 5-Star Online Reputation (PART 12)

TRANSCRIPT: Alright. We’ve gone through the 8 steps. Don’t leave me now because we’re going to do some best or worst practices here, but I’m just going to review the 8 steps. The bottom line is that these reviews, this stuff online, social reviews, whatever, those are called “User generated content,” and user generated content is not going to go away and it’s not going to become nice by itself. You have to be proactive and go after this. You have to do all 8 steps, you really do. You got to gauge the buzz, you got to determine if it’s true, like the voracity, you got to repair or replace, then you got to devise a strategy, so like in Heather’s case, they did repair and replace, now they need a strategy to generate 5 star reviews to put some of those 1 star reviews further down.

How are they going to do that? They’re going to do step 5, they’re going to identify their raving fans, right? 1.5% of the people will leave a review, so they’re going to enlist those raving fans into asking them for 5 star reviews then they’re going to continue to assess faithfully. I happen to know where Heather works so they’re probably going to assess at least 2 times a week, right? Then finally, they’re going to address anything as they assess, right? As they read a good or bad review, they’re going to address that as they go along, so let’s look at some best or worst practices. There’s the 8 steps. I probably should’ve thrown that up there. We’ll leave them up for you for just a second.

We talk about best and worst practices. One of the best practices is to brag about your great review. You need to proactively share your greatness. This is why you work so hard for them and it’s important because you might have a 5 star, a 4.9 star review on one site and a 4.2 star review on another site and your competitor’s at 4.6 on both sites. I want to share where I’m 4.9, right? I need to proactively do that. I need to proactively share my greatness as I move through, so this is a car dealer that I do business with. They got a 4.9 on Google, and guess what? At the bottom of each email, it says, “Google, see what our customers have to say.” When people click through, they’re taken right to a page that shows this dealership had 760 reviews on Google and a 4.9% rating. That’s perfect. They’re bragging.

Everybody who sends in a price quote request to this dealer, they get a chance to find out why this dealer’s so great. It’s important though when you’re sharing that you maintain the unbiased third party feel when this stuff is presented by you, so it’s not enough. You can’t put in the body of the email, “Hey, we’re 4.9 stars on Google with 760 reviews.” You have to send them over to Google. Let them see that it really Google, it really is this third party, trusted review site where you’re 4.9, so links at the bottom of prospect emails, that is a great place to start, but I want to be careful here. I changed the names on these so we wouldn’t embarrass anybody. It’s not my goal here.

I also found these links at the bottom of prospect emails from dealerships. The first one, “Read what others say about Steve’s Cars.” When I click through, it’s not really Steve’s Cars. When I click through, I got taken to their Yelp page where they have 1 review for 1 star. The other one in the middle, “Like us on Facebook,” right? Somebody’s asking a prospect, someone who’s never met them before to like them on Facebook. When they click through “Like us on Facebook,” guess what? They find out that that car dealer has seven 1 star reviews and three 5 star reviews. Yikes. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot.

Sorry, this is true. This was at the bottom of the prospect email from a car dealer that I do business with. It said, “Check out our YouTube videos,” and you’d click on the YouTube link and you got to a page on YouTube that actually says this. “This account has been terminated due to multiple or severe violations of YouTube’s policy against spam, gaming, misleading contact or other terms of service violations. Yeah. I want to brag about the great reviews and I don’t want to make it easy for someone to find out where we’ve had issues, right? You can also, you don’t have to just do it on emails, you can brag on your own website. This dealer, it’s a great dealer. This is one of the Berkshire dealers. They’re pulling in reviews from multiple sites and showing them on their website.

This is great. Website framing’s going to be a good thing provided that they appear unbiased, so these appear unbiased. There’s cars.com, there’s Edmund’s reviews, there’s Google Plus reviews on here, that’s great. This is actually better than sending the visitor to a third party because at least when they’re reading your reviews here, they’re not also looking at your competitors, but you have to avoid showing 1 star reviews. I don’t know why this happens but I went to this dealer’s site and the first review that shows up when I go to look at their reviews tab, it’s a 1 star review, no communication whatsoever, probably because it was the last review on the site and that’s how they’re setup to show. Don’t make it easy for consumers to find your 1 star reviews.

This isn’t good, right? I will tell you this. It’s better to have a 1 star review reside on your site than it is to have it reside on Google. This review is nowhere else, it’s just on this dealer’s site, but still, it’s not a good thing. Think, take a look at the way that you’re doing all these things, and remember, this is your site. Let’s not shoot ourselves in the foot with 1 star reviews or, like we saw in the last webcast, we’ll show it again in this one, this Mitsubishi dealer is doing business with reputation.com or they were. They’re no longer doing that yet they’re still framing in a page that says, “Read our reviews,” and it says, “Sorry, we don’t have a listing for that business,” because they’re no longer paying reputation.com so customers …

How about this poor dealer in Daphne Alabama, when you look at reviews for this store, they got 6 reviews, one and a half stars. That’s not so good. That shouldn’t be on your website, and by the way, it’s not just small dealers that make this mistake, big groups do it do. The stuff across the bottom, the 3 steps across the bottom, that’s from a large publicly traded dealer groups, a site for one of their dealers and under about the dealership, they have “Rate us,” so I click “Rate us” and there’s the Yelp button, it says, “Hey, click here to write Yelp review” and I clicked to write a Yelp review and I go to their Yelp page and sure enough, they got 1 and a half stars and 12 reviews.

Maybe they only have 1 and a half stars because they’re letting everybody go review them. This is a definite don’t. You don’t want a tab a page that people can jump from your site to go review you online that they can find on their own. These pages are fine for our website but we need to direct the customer to that page. It shouldn’t be that easy for the customer to find on their own, so think before you link. Remember, 1 negative review can reduce business by 22%, so sending a customer your Facebook page is great provided that your 1 star reviews don’t outnumber your 5 star reviews. Look at this. This dealer has got their Social Media and Reviews page, and right there at the Facebook logo and the Facebook link. I click on it and they have nineteen 1 star reviews and fifteen 5 star reviews. That’s not good.

I did tell you about the Subaru dealer in California. What do they do about hidden Yelp reviews? This is a do that I really like, right? These are do’s and don’ts, this is a do. This is a creative Subaru dealer in California that strikes back at Yelp by saying “These are the Yelp reviews you will never see. We don’t pay Yelp to unfilter our reviews,” of course no one does, but consumers don’t care, they read this. “We don’t pay Yelp to unfilter our reviews. Here are the Yelp reviews that you will never get to see. This page is dedicated to the unsung heroes of the Yelp community. Perfect. They’re able to take in the 5 star reviews and just regurgitate them on their own site. That’s absolutely perfect for them.