Choosing the wrong type of review system can open the floodgates to negative reviews, misleading consumers and damaging your brand.
Passive review systems make no effort to solicit reviews from customers, instead relying on site visitors to leave reviews, without checking if they actually are customers. These systems rely on customers being sufficiently motivated post-purchase to spontaneously return to your website to write a review. Anger and disappointment are great motivators, so unhappy customers are far more likely to write reviews in passive systems than happy customers.
Guy Kawasaki’s Enchantment is already one of this year’s most talked about business books. There are few people better qualified to talk about enchanting consumers than Kawasaki, who cut his teeth as a marketer for Apple, a company with a real knack for turning customers into fierce, loyal brand advocates.
A comedy subculture has grown up around Amazon’s open, unverified review system, in which people compete to write the strangest, funniest fake reviews of the more unusual products sold on the site.
The funny fake review meme isn't restricted to Amazon, but is possible on any site using open, passive review collection: open systems allow anyone to write a review without verification that they own the product, and a passive system means the trend can easily go viral.
The recent launch of Samsung’s new generation of tablet computer has been overshadowed by accusations of astroturfing.
The controversy centres around video testimonials of the "true-life stories" of average people who test drove the Galaxy Tab tablet PC. The video reviews struck a lot of watchers as wooden and, with very little digging, it was soon discovered that the people in the video are actors, not the journalists or CEOs they’re claimed to be.
The most talked about social media trend of 2011 is Question and Answer websites, with big names like Quora and TED Conversations getting huge amounts of attention. Google recently acquired Aadvark, a service which finds the perfect person from your social network to answer any question you could ask. The big question for marketers is how brands can make this newest aspect of the social web work for them.
You don’t have to look far to find consistent evidence that good quality images can improve the appearance, and ultimately the success, of your email campaigns. Many would say it’s just common sense. But here at Reevoo, we wanted to find out if including review scores in product images would boost consumer engagement with our email newsletters.
Shopping has become social and multi-channel. Consumers are more likely to be influenced by customer reviews or opinions on social networks than offline conversations with their friends and family. And they aren’t just looking on retailer or brand websites: a recent IBM study shows that nearly 50% of consumers now use multiple channels during the shopping process, up from 14% last year.
Marketing lore used to say that a happy customer would tell one friend, but an unhappy customer would tell ten. In the era of social media, that unhappy customer is more likely to tell everyone they know.
Agile commerce is the new ecommerce strategy being hailed as the successor to multi-channel. The term, agile commerce, was coined by Brian Walker, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, who defines it as
An approach to commerce that enables businesses to optimize their people, processes, and technology to serve customers across all touchpoints.
In all the discussion around the newest ASA code regulating the promotional use of social media and user generated content, we’ve been surprised that so few people have brought up the existing regulations in this area.