No Customer Behind Some Customer Reviews
If anything can derail social media's rise, it's a lack of authenticity. The power of social sites is the ability to connect people, but often those connections are anonymous. Many sites only require an authentic email address to create a profile; any information entered after that isn't verified. That's the way it should be; you shouldn't have to provide a social security number or a photo ID to post content online, but when people abuse the system it hurts everyone. That's just what a company did in a high-profile case before it was brought down by the NY Attorney General.
Lifestyle Lift wasn't happy with negative reviews that it thought were hurting its brand image, so it told employees to pose as happy customers and post on review websites about procedures that never occurred. I'm sure it's not an isolated incident; there are SEO companies that will tell you to illegitimately inflate rankings using similar techniques. In either case it's wrong, and in the case of Lifestyle Lift it was criminal.
Negative reviews are part of a social media strategy that companies need to deal with. Rather than see them as an inconvenience that should be done away with through deletions or falsifying positive counter-reviews, companies should see them as lessons. If a customer isn't happy with something you're doing, the answer isn't "they don't know what they're talking about and they're going to poison everyone else against us," the answer is "why are they saying that and what can we do to make sure no one else has the same poor experience?"
Until the latter becomes the only acceptable response, we should all look at reviews with a little more skepticism.
Related Entries
Great post Jeremy.
Negative reviews are more than just a part of a social media strategy. Negative reviews are a great opportunity!
Negative reviews add credibility to any collection of reviews and, based on several studies we have done, meaningfully increase conversion rates. Negative reviews are also a great opportunity to respond and "tell your side" of the story.
To turn a negative review into a great marketing opportunity just: (1) demonstrate that you hear what the reviewer's issue was and (2) assure the reviewer that you have taken steps to address the issue.
Here are some other suggestions: http://www.customerlobby.com/index/negative-reviews