Exploring the Power of Customer Reviews with Ted Paff of Customer Lobby

Well, greetings everybody. Welcome to the Wednesday, March 18th, 2015 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook, and I'm with WSI Internet Consulting. And we work with businesses and organizations in helping them better understand and leverage the power of the internet as a strategic business tool. You can learn more about me and WSI online at www.poweredbywsi.com. With me this week is my good friend and Free Webinar Wednesday partner, although we are not sitting together this time, but he is joining me from his home and I am in my home, Mr. Jeff Simpkins. Jeff, say hello to everybody out there in Free Webinar Wednesday world. Hello everybody, this is Jeff Simpkins.

I am with Community Bank Consulting, Inc., and you can learn more about me and my company online at www.communitybankconsulting.com.

Excellent. So we had to take last week off because of some travels and some other client requirements. You know how those things can get in the way sometimes. But the last time we had our show, Jeff and I were actually together with our guest speaker. That is not happening today because our guest speaker is joining us from California. As much as I think Jeff and I would love to hop on a plane and And fly out and be with Ted, that's going to have to wait until maybe some other day. But we're very excited to have Ted join us today. He's been a guest on Free Webinar Wednesdays before and did a great job. And I don't think that the importance of local reviews and ratings have gone anywhere but up in the importance spectrum. So we're really excited to get a refresh on how that's going and some statistics and and some of that great info. But before we get started, just want to remind everybody today's session and all sessions on Free Webinar Wednesdays are recorded and made available at freewebinarwednesdays.com. So if you hop over to the website, you can scroll down, just show you the example of the All In to Fight Cancer session that we did with my friend Stephen Medeo. That session is there as are other sessions, so you can check those out.

Okay.

And we also encourage and appreciate questions and comments and interaction from the audience. Of course, if you're listening to the recording, that's going to be kind of hard to do. But if you're visiting with us live, feel free to use the chat feature and send us a note or a question or a comment. And when Ted takes a breath in his presentation, we'll see if we can sneak it in for you. So it looks almost like we may have— Oh, hey Mikey, we do have a comment. It's not really a question, but it is a comment. So Mikey is here and welcome.

We're excited to have you with us as well.

So get the little chat icon that comes up. So see how that works? We pay attention. So, well, with that housekeeping out of the way, and Jeff, I just took a quick look and it looks like most everybody is using voice over IP, although would you like to give our disclosure for those that have joined via telephone?

I would.

I see 2 people on phone.

Kia is one.

Just a reminder, the default phone number on GoToWebinar is Toronto, Canada. If you do not have a calling plan that allows you to call Toronto, Canada, Inexpensively or free, you're going to want to hang up and click on the additional phone number icon and look up the number for the US or whatever local number you wish to dial in from.

Good, good, good, good.

We at Free Webinar Wednesdays don't want the free part of Webinar Wednesdays to turn into a $40 long-distance bill, so make sure that you do check the number options. Good deal. Well, I think with that housekeeping out of the way, I'm going to start working my little magic here, and I am going to send presentation controls over to our guest. And while he is getting his screen ready, it's my pleasure to welcome back to Free Webinar Wednesdays Ted Pfaff, who is the president, CEO, founder, and probably chief bottle washer and all things else over at Customer Lobby, which is a company that we use personally and I've got clients that are using them as well, for the management and creation of local reviews and why that is important. Ted has been in the industry for a long time, does a lot of speaking, and is probably one of the most knowledgeable people on the importance and relevance of things like local reviews. In today's social world where anybody can go online and basically get on their own little bully pulpit and say whatever they want, You know, local reviews can be a double-edged sword and we're going to talk a little bit about that. So Ted, just quick audio check, are you there and welcome?

I am here. How's my— does my screen look okay?

Excellent, screen looks good. So if anybody's having problems seeing the screen, by all means type in the chat, but looks like we are all set. So without further ado, Ted, welcome back to Free Webinar Wednesdays. The mic is yours.

Delightful, thank you, Eric, thank you, Jeff.

Cool.

And thanks for having me back, Free Webinar Wednesday group. My name is, as Eric mentioned, my name is Ted Paff. I am the president and founder of Customer Lobby, and yes, I've been in the reviews industry for a long time. What I want to talk about, what I want to share with folks today is around the topic of reviews and using reviews as part of reputation marketing. To do that, I want to start first by introducing Fred. Although Fred is an entirely mythical character, he is someone who might be familiar to some of the folks who are on the call today. Hi, Fred. So Fred's been in business a long time. He's successful. He's seen a lot come and go. He remembers back in the days when his principal marketing spend was when the Yellow Pages ad exec or a couple of them would show up in his office and they would sit down and negotiate for how much a half page, quarter page, or full page was going to cost them in this year's Yellow Pages. And then he remembers when everybody waved their hands and said, well, you know, you've got to be on Google or you've got to be on Facebook. And he's seen a lot come and go in marketing and so he approaches marketing through that lens, particularly online marketing. And so anytime someone says, hey, you've got to pay attention to blank online, whatever fill in the blank is, He approaches it with this notion of, you know, I'll wait, I'll sit back for a little bit. Now Fred runs a good business, he knows he does, he knows that his customers are basically happy, he knows that his employees are treated fairly, he knows that he's doing basically good work. So a few years ago, somebody happened to mention to him, hey, I saw that review you got on Yelp, and he was busy doing something else. with his business, and he intended to go back to his office and actually look up whatever it was that this person had mentioned, but he kind of spaced and just went on with his life. And then about 6 months later, someone else walked in and said, you know, I didn't think what that person wrote about you on Google was very fair. And presto, they had his attention. So then he went back to his office right after that conversation, and he looked up Looked up his company on Google and on Yelp, and sure enough, there were a couple of reviews out there. But they struck him as a bit strange. One of the reviews was from somebody who— it wasn't even his employee. It was actually the ex-wife of a former employee of his who was ranting and raving about the fact that this company employs people who are no-good louts. And another was a person who came in and was going to do business with him but actually didn't wind up using him. And a third, oh yeah, he remembers that third one, and that one was a real customer and it was a pretty good review. But he looked at the overall experience and he thought, wait, this thing is kind of wrong and unfair that anybody gets to go online and write anything they want, even if it's completely off topic or totally untrue. My competitors might be on here. I've got ex-wives of former employees. This whole thing feels like a rigged game. And so he put it down and he walked away. And what I'm here to tell you today is a couple of key things. First, and I'll share more data on this in a moment, but reviews matter. And the idea of putting it down and walking away is gonna cost you a fair amount. It's gonna cost you in 2 really fundamental ways, but before I tell you that, I do want to give you one— I'm gonna give you a couple of key takeaways from this conversation. The very first one is this: if you leave your reviews alone, in other words, if you're not doing anything to proactively manage the process of reviews, getting reviews, managing them, taking care of them, if you do nothing but just let them happen organically, They will skew negative over time. Let me explain that again. They will— if you leave your reviews alone, they're gonna skew negative over time. I don't mean that you're gonna get all negative reviews. What I mean is that they will be more negative than if you were otherwise engaged in working the process. Well, so what? You say, okay, so I'm gonna have some negative reviews out there, so what? Well, if you have more negative reviews out there, 2 bad things are going to happen. First, and you're probably okay with this relatively speaking, is it's going to erode some of your revenue, right? Because there are going to be some customers who are simply going to say, hey, I'm not going to do business with those guys, because they read some negative stuff about your company. So okay, that hurts a little bit. But, you know, you've— if you've been in business long enough, you feel like, alright, I've lost revenue before, I can, you know, I'm not going to get them all anyway. But that's not the part that's really going to sting, and this is actually the part that I want to— this next piece is another one of those hidden gems in this conversation that's a real takeaway for you. If you run a local business, if you're in charge of managing and monetizing the value of your hard work. At some point, you're likely, or your boss is likely, to want to sell your company or want to do something with it. It could be raise money, could be get bank financing, could be do a whole lot of other stuff. Anything where outsiders are going to be looking at the overall total value of your business is going to take a serious and dramatic hit with a negative reputation. Why? Well, reputations are now part of the entire process of considering the valuation of a business, because put yourself into the ultimate buyer of a business's shoes. Why would you buy a business with a crappy reputation? You're walking into a giant problem. When everything else is equal, you're always going to look for something that has a more positive online reputation. That points to this very important part. Your reputation is a digital asset or a digital liability. It's your choice, but it will— it absolutely lands on one side of the balance sheet or the other. And if you do nothing with it over time, it's going to land on the liability side of your balance sheet. So that's what today's presentation is about. It's really about helping people go from the process of completely ignoring their reputation all the way through the process of learning how to engage with their customers, respond to online reviews, build a digital asset, and then market that reputation over time. Okay, so when we last left Fred, he was at this process, at this stage. He was completely ignoring his reputation. Why? Because he largely felt confused and powerless with the overall process. In other words, he looked out at the reviews universe and he thought, man, this is kind of a rigged game and I don't necessarily want to engage with it because I don't really understand how I can impact it. And that's where we want to start with, with in really exploring that universe, the reviews universe a little bit, and then figuring out how to engage with it. So as we explore the universe, I want to do a few things. First, I want to talk about who the reviewers actually are. Who are these people who are actually taking their time out of their day to go online and write about your business. Next, I want to talk, I want to share, once you understand who the reviewers are, I've got another one of those hidden gems for you that will really help you in shaping your online reputation, but you have to understand who the reviewers are to be able to do that. And then I want to explain where the different, how different players in the reviews business really work and let you actually look at it a little bit from one of the companies that's hosting reviews, a little inside baseball. So let's dive into the reviews universe. Now I'm going to profile 4 different types of reviewers today. The very first one is what I'm going to call the communicator. The communicator, and here it's depicted as a woman, and they skew predominantly female. These are very powerful people and they know it. There aren't many of these people. These are people who have a, who post a lot online. When you can find folks like this, when you find someone who is a heavy online communicator, sometimes in Yelp they'll be the Yelp Elite Reviewers, in Google there'll be a city, boy, whatever they call it, whatever Google's most recent iteration of their city program is, but there'll be a community manager or a city City Manager on Google, these are people who are actively writing about businesses. When you find one of these people, my suggestion is that you treat them differently. I know that's kind of stinky to say like, gosh, I want to treat one of my customers with extra kid gloves even if they don't necessarily deserve it, but my strong suggestion is that you do exactly that. Treat them differently. Give them extra perks. Do something a little— they're very, very service-focused people, provide slightly better service to them. By and large, you're not going to get lampooned by these people, they're not going to rip you, they're going to generally write 2 to 5 star reviews, but they do have an extra powerful voice in the online world. The next group I want to describe are the status seekers. These are people, and you're going to know these reviews when you see them because they are very detailed. They tend to be long reviews. The good news is they tend to be kind of middle-of-the-road reviews. They're 2 to 4 star reviews. They're very detailed. These people are trying to earn status on a lot of networks, on review networks, and so they're going to write extra long reviews on Yelp. They're going to try to get reviews that people will vote as helpful or funny. You don't need to do a lot with these folks. Honestly, I just point them out to say they're gonna come, they're gonna go, they're gonna by and large write middle-of-the-road reviews for you. Just let them be, they're fine, no extra care required. Unfortunately, the third group is one you're gonna run into, the 1-star assassins, and the name kinda tells it like it is. These are folks who by and large write 1-star reviews. One of the painful things you're gonna find if you find 1-star reviews out there just for kicks If you click on the name of the person in almost all review systems, you can actually see the other reviews that that person will have written on that network. What you'll find is a lot of 1-star reviewers, people who leave 1-star reviews, they write a lot of 1-star reviews. They view the reviews universe as a place of retribution. So what I can tell you about the 1-star assassins is you have to treat them almost like the flu. It sucks when you get one, I completely understand, but you're gonna get it. And there's not much you can do except for stay generally healthy. And the way that you stay healthy is that you recognize that these— that you're gonna sometimes be exposed to the flu And you immunize yourself, and the way that you immunize yourself is with these people, and the name kind of says it all, the Silent Happy Majority. Now I'm going to go out on a limb and guess for the folks who are attending this call, for those of you who currently run a local business, my guess is you've been in business for a number of years. If you're brand spanking new, then your reputation is something you're probably very actively engaged in building online, but I'm guessing you've been in business for a while, and I'm gonna further guess the fact that you, by and large, the vast majority of your customers are happy with the service or product that they're getting from you. But I'm also gonna guess that they're basically silent about it. What I mean by that is, unless you run an experiential business, a business where people are coming in to have some type of experience, and that experience might be positive, might be one that they actively want to share with their friends. So if you run a very hip new restaurant, generating reviews isn't really a problem because people are going to want to go on and write reviews to say, hey, I've been at the hip new restaurant. But short of that, you're likely to have a lot of customers who are basically happy with you but don't feel motivated to go online to write a review. So what do you do? Well, we'll talk about that in a moment, but before that, I want you to just look at the relative proportion of the size of the images I have in front of you. This is left, left to their own devices. In other words, without you being engaged with it at all, this is roughly the proportion of reviews you should expect from these people. And in fact, here's the data for it, and this is data that we did for a large international manufacturer. This is a study that we ran for a large international manufacturer where they looked at a lot of local distributors who had, who were doing nothing to manage their overall reputation. This was just what was out there with them solicit— without soliciting reviews at all. But importantly, with just a couple of months, I think we did it for like 2 and a half months, we were able to substantially almost more than double the star rating from just over 2 to just over 4 stars by simply asking customers proactively to write a review. And here you see, this is, and this is the hidden gem, another one of those hidden gems for you in the conversation today. If you proactively ask all of your customers to write a review, because the vast majority of your customers are happy, your reviews are going to skew positive. So one of the biggest takeaways of today's conversation is create a process to proactively ask your customers to write reviews. Even if you're not, and if you want to try to cherry-pick customers, great, go ahead, but my advice is you don't even need to cherry-pick customers. The reviews will skew overwhelmingly positive all by themselves. Okay, now I want to talk a little bit about where people go to actually write reviews, and there are essentially 5 different categories of reviews on this page. First, starting in the upper left-hand corner, I'd call these rich content directories. These are all ad sales based businesses. These are businesses that are in the business of getting content on their sites and then getting a viewer to come to their site and click around to multiple pages. These can all be very powerful reviews destinations for your business. However, you should be very conscious of the fact that the incentives of these businesses are for you to click around to lots of them. And so, for example, with Yelp, Yelp is economically incentivized to have a review reader go from one page to another page to another, so be mindful about building all of your eggs in any basket, and actually that's going to go for this entire page, but be mindful about building too many eggs in any one of these baskets because these folks are going to get better and better and better over time at steering your customers to other potential competitor sites. In the upper right-hand corner, these are obviously the social pages, and on this page, really on the entire page, Facebook is the true sleeping giant. Although in our industry there really aren't good statistics that are publicly released, it's the best guess of the insiders of the trade that Facebook has roughly double the number of reviews of all the other companies on this page combined. So Facebook, and they haven't yet started to really monetize this content, but be mindful of the fact it's coming and it's coming in spades. Facebook's monetization efforts will be all about trying to get, to essentially, well, today they're about trying to get you to run ads to people in your local area largely, or to your targeted group of customers, targeting whatever it is you like. Expect to see more of that in the future. It will be another ad-based business, but impression-based as opposed to the desire to get people to click around to multiple pages. So in a sense, safer as a review destination. The lower right-hand side is maybe the biggest the biggest one in the industry because Google represents not just a review destination, but they are really a gateway for many, many other review destinations, and we'll talk about that in a moment when we talk about how reviews are used in part of the buying funnel. The lower left-hand side, these are the directory businesses. These are impression-based ad sales businesses. They're essentially they're not really getting people to try to click around. They're great for search engine optimization. Honestly, they're not going to result in that much traffic back to your business. The last group is the group in the center. Obviously, Customer Lobby is one, and being the founder of Customer Lobby, I put us there. We're really in the business of syndicating and soliciting reviews. Yes, we do host reviews and take reviews onto our site, But you can think of our business as really being about helping companies solicit reviews to multiple different sites and then push reviews to other sites, and I'll profile that in just a minute. But before doing that, I want to talk about what your goal as a business should be vis-à-vis this page, and to do that, I want to use one illustration, and that is things change. Things change in this universe very fast. This is a highly dynamic market. For example, if we were doing this page, if we were having this conversation 18 months ago, we also would have included Yahoo on this page. Today Yahoo is really out of the reviews business. So as I say to many people, if Yahoo is capable of getting out of the reviews business, Any of the companies on this page are capable of getting out of this reviews business. I happen to know that 2, at least 2 companies on this page in the last 18 months have been for sale and have not sold successfully. A bunch of the people on this page are active, are losing money. So, not us, by the way, in either of those 2 former categories, but I can tell you that what that means is, look, this is not a stable universe. So the best solution for every business is to think about putting their reviews eggs across the web. Don't trust the, the reviews hosting companies on this page, diversify your efforts. Okay, so having explored some of the reviews universe, I now want to jump into how to engage in the reviews universe, and before doing that, I first want to talk about why engage. As I mentioned a moment ago, I'd share some data with you, and there are literally hundreds of statistics like these, and I don't need to read these off to you. You can do this yourself. But with a simple, you know, why reviews matter or the impact of customer reviews, you can read literally on any given day there are 2 or 3 new articles that are written and studies done. But suffice to say, reviews have fundamentally changed the way commerce is now done. Why? Because reviews are a relatively new phenomenon, just the last few years, that was made possible by the impact of consumers being able to publish their views from a one-to-many environment. Historically, businesses were the only ones with the mouthpiece, so to speak, and consumers, now that they found that mouthpiece, the ability to actually broadcast their views, have taken to it like ducks to water, and it's become part of the commerce fabric. And so it's fundamentally changed the way really all commerce is done. To that end, let's look at how reviews are actually used as part of a classic buying funnel. So if you think about— this is just the classic buying funnel, you've seen these things like this 100 times before. So a customer, a potential customer of yours develops some type of awareness or an idea that they may need your good or service. They do a little bit of research or some basic, you know, some kind of consideration of the process. They develop some interest around a particular brand or product. They do a little bit more research on that at that point oftentimes, then they move to a purchase and then hopefully to repurchase. Okay, so how can we digitally impact using each of those phases of the buying funnel using reviews and which brands are relevant. At the very top of the funnel, this is kind of the classic place where social, Twitter, Facebook, broad-based type advertisements, so oftentimes display advertising is useful here, or kind of classic lead generation services, so companies like Facebook or or Houzz, depending on the industry that you're in, are examples of really broad-based generation where reviews can be impactful. Once a consumer gets to what I call the research or consideration phase, they typically engage in what in the trade we would call non-branded search. So an example would be if I'm looking for a plumber, I would, I might type in, and I'm in San Francisco, California, I might type in plumbing San Francisco or plumber San Francisco. So by non-branded search, I mean there's no name attached to it. I haven't decided yet. I haven't actually developed affinity for a particular brand or company I'm likely to use. I'm just doing some basic research. At that phase, Google is my bread and butter, and to impact things, you're going to want to actually build a research presence with Google, which is obviously basic search engine optimization. For what it's worth, Yelp is also for now a real impactor at this stage, although that is likely to change. For many reasons, including something that Google released yesterday or 2 days ago that's potentially a seismic shift about the way that they're going to treat the indexing of some of Yelp's pages. But suffice to say, basic Google presence and search engine optimization are your friend at a non-branded search level. Once people move to branded search, companies like Customer Lobby or Yelp or even Google Reviews are important. So that would be an An example would be, okay, I started off looking for plumber in San Francisco, then I decided I wanted to look— oh, I see Ted's Plumbing showing up a bunch of times, so I'll do research around Ted's Plumbing. And in this case, I'll type in Ted's Plumbing San Francisco, and I'll look to see what people say online about it. And again, that's where you would actually use branded— those branded search destinations. Repurchase marketing is really largely a one-to-one as opposed to a one-to-many marketing, which means things like postcards or emails or even Facebook, although I didn't put it in, I probably should have included Facebook here. So Facebook would be another example of a great place to do target marketing because when you have your customers' email addresses, you can actually target them directly in Facebook with purchasing messages. But maybe the most important information on this slide is now at the very bottom there. This was a study done not long ago by Google across a series of industries, and they found that before making a purchase decision, consumers on average are going to look for and consume over 10 different sources of information. What does that mean for you? That means that you're in the business of creating breadcrumbs around the web. The days of I just have a website and it's just, that's it and I'm done, those are kind of gone. I mean, yes, that's going to work, but that's essentially like saying I'm only going to have one road to my doorstep. Sure, some people are going to come into that on that road, But if you want more people coming to your doorsteps, you're going to need to add more roads, which in this case, to push the metaphor back to reality, is really about creating a digital presence and building digital assets around the web. Okay, as I mentioned, I would briefly explain what Customer Lobby does as part of this, just so you can explain or just so you can understand where our take is on building a reputation. We start by interfacing directly with the backend billing system that our clients use mostly. We do have manual ways of working with us, but we find that automation actually generates a lot more reviews for reasons I'm happy to discuss if that's interesting in the Q&A. So we integrate back with the basic invoicing systems, and when somebody completes a transaction, we pull that information out And then we send them an invitation to write a review. We do that in lots of ways, and our system enables people to request reviews either through emails. We also do phone-based reviews. We have kiosks and mobile web and social and lots of other ways of asking people for reviews. And whether you use a company like Customer Lobby or do it yourself, I highly recommend creating a variety of different ways for people to write you a review. When people are asked to write a review, we ask them to write a review wherever they have an account. So if they have an account on Yelp and Google or Angie's List or Facebook, and if they're a regular reviewer in one of those locations, go there. And if they don't, we take the review at Customer Lobby and then we push each review that comes into Customer Lobby, which is about 70% of the overall reviews, About 30% of people have accounts in one of those other places, but about 70% will come to Customer Lobby, write a review, and then we will push the review through syndication agreements we have with those different companies to multiple sites around the web. Okay, now I want to move on to how to respond to reviews. So the very first question is always, should you respond? Well, there are two very different types of reviews. First, let's talk about positive reviews. My suggestion for responding to positive reviews is only do it when you feel like you have something extra to add to the conversation. Specifically, it's a complete waste of space to simply respond to a review. Try that one ten times. Respond to a review. Saying, hey, thanks for the great review. It's kind of, it goes in the category of, gee, it's not that helpful, it's just wasted real estate. Instead, if you have a positive review, respond to it with information that's not necessarily in the review but is helpful to customers. This is probably one of your best and unused sources of marketing on the web. Let me give you an example. Let's say, again I'm gonna go back to plumber for a second because I was using that example earlier. Let's say that I'm a plumber and somebody just said, hey, Ted came to the house and did really great work and I really appreciate it. Something as simple as, thanks for your review, All of our plumbers are regularly certified by blah blah blah blah blah, or are trained in this way, and he'll be glad to hear that. So what I'm doing is is advertising the fact that all of our plumbers are certified. It's relevant to the review, but I'm using it as a piece of additional marketing and not wasting that space. What about these folks? Well, before talking about how to respond to reviewers and when to respond to— sorry, how to respond to negative reviews and when to respond to negative reviews, I want to talk about something that sets the stage, and that is when you write a response to a negative review, this is not the person you're addressing. They are. What I mean by that is, it is highly unlikely that the person who wrote a negative review is ever going to read your response, but it's very likely that the people who read the response are going to be all these folks. It doesn't mean that you should talk about that person in the third— your response should be talking in the third person. No, you should actually say, You can address them by name and address them directly, but as you write, you should really be thinking about the fact that this is really me talking to my prospects, not me talking to a past angry customer. So with that in mind, what should the anatomy of a response be? I'm going to give you 3 different parts of a— the anatomy of a response to a negative review. But what I want to tell you is, before you engage in it, if you can't do part 1 and part 2 100%, then do not respond. Let me say that again. So part 1 and part 2 are not optional, and if you can't do them, don't respond. It is oftentimes better to not respond to a negative review than to respond poorly. And there are at this point literally dozens of businesses that have responded poorly to a negative review and it has literally shut down their company. It has cost them their business. And these, these companies are now at this point kind of becoming legend on the web, but they're literally examples where people respond poorly to a review and they blow up their entire business. Kind of hard to believe that you can have a 30-year career And wreck it in 5 minutes, but it's absolutely doable. So, part 1, again, non-optional: own it. What I mean by own it is regardless of what was— what you're accused of doing, you have to agree. If you can't agree, don't respond. This is not the time or place to say, you're wrong, I didn't do it. You're wrong, you didn't see it that— that didn't happen that way. That's not the time or place. There are lots of examples where it goes very poorly for people who dispute the facts that are coming in. Second, and this is the most important, explain the process you've put in place or something that you have changed since then so that this will not happen to others in the future. In truth, this is what people who read negative reviews mostly want to hear. They don't want to hear necessarily that you made it right or that you made it better. They mostly want to hear that you've heard that there was a problem and you've created a process in place to fix it. So what's nice is sometimes you're gonna get a negative review about yourself that's total fiction, that somebody just made up some fictional problem. The honest truth is You can write a fictional fix right on the back of it, but this is the key piece of responding to a negative review. Interestingly, this last part, voting with your feet, I like to think of it as, the offer to fix it, it's okay, great, sure, say, you know, please get in touch with me and we're happy to take care of you, super. You can do that, but it's certainly not critical. And, and it is nowhere near as important as numbers 1 and 2. And maybe the single best piece of advice I can give you when you're responding to a review is this: simply be brief. Be brief. My suggestion is 4 sentences, no more. Try to keep it to sub-4. If you've gotta go to a 5th sentence, do it grudgingly, but it should be very, very brief. The intent is if you can't, if somebody can't read it in about 10 or 15 seconds, it's not going to get read. 10 or 15 seconds at the absolute longest because the truth is, and there's a ton of statistics out there on the web, people by and large don't read much on the web, they browse. So they let their eyes kind of float over stuff and they'll pick things up but they're not going to engage in really reading the subtlety of a message that takes more than about 4 sentences. Okay, so now that you've done all those things, we've covered a little bit of the reviews universe, who the reviews are, where they go, positively impacting your reviews by regularly— your reputation by regularly asking for reviews, how reviews are used in the buying cycle, where to respond to reviews and how to respond to reviews, you built yourself a digital asset. You started to curate for yourself something that's a durable asset that you'll be able to use for a long time and grow and build the value of your business. It's time to market with it, and by marketing I mean a couple things. This is an example, I was giving a speech recently so I pulled up some of these for this type of business, for a flooring business. Put your reviews all over your website. Create opportunities for people to stumble across them directly in the buying process. If you have a Facebook page, link your reviews back into your Facebook page. Make sure that folks are finding it online. Continue to use it as part of your marketing. If you have— this is Customer Lobby recently rolled out a service where we do repeat customer marketing. And we've done some tests with including reviews on postcards for repeat customer marketing, and the impact, even for repeat customers, of including reviews in other parts of your marketing versus not is huge. It almost doubles the response rate in a couple of our tests now. So include it in your postcards and also in your emails. We do email marketing for folks as well. Okay, so where does that leave us? We've now covered through, we brought you from completely that feeling of confused powerlessness to not really understanding the reviews universe, explored the market, learned how to engage with customers as part of the buying cycle, respond to the reviews, looked at how to use reviews as part of your marketing, I have some action steps for you. So, where do you— how do you take this information and go forward? The very first part is to monitor your reputation, and there are a lot of ways to do this, and honestly, it depends on the type of industry that you're in. If you're in a business that gets a lot of reviews, so by that I mean, let's say you're getting 10 or more reviews a month, then look for reviews monitoring services. There are a few of them online. You can talk with Jeff or Eric to make suggestions. For you, but there are a couple of different ways to monitor reviews if you get a lot of them. If you're getting sub-10 reviews a month, my suggestion is create some Google Alerts on your company name. You should have these anyway. In other words, go online, go to google.com/alerts, A-L-E-R-T-S, and type in, set up an alert so that anytime somebody writes something with the full name of your company, that, that information will get shot back to you, and Google will send you a posting once a month, once a day, once a week, whatever frequency you choose, to let you know what new has been written about your company. It's a great way to monitor what's being said. Secondly, ask for reviews. Create a process to become diligent about asking all customers for reviews. That's going to skew your entire review base positive by getting more of the happy silent majority to actually write, because the only way the silent majority is going to be active is if they sense that you're really asking and pushing hard. Thirdly, automate the process if you possibly can. Companies like CustomerLob have built solutions that we can tie in back with your system to help you automate the entire reviews process. Do whatever you can to try to automate it, because what I found by literally working— we've worked with tens of thousands of customers now, and what I can tell you is that across North America, by and large, people will get focused on their reviews for a little while, but 80% of businesses are just going to be too busy after a little while to keep remembering to do this. So if you can find a way to automate the process, it will last year in, year out, and you will build and manage that digital asset for yourself. Fourth, respond where appropriate using the metrics that I already described for both positive and negative reviews. And then lastly, once you've created that digital asset, market with it. Use it as part of your ongoing marketing in other parts of your marketing, whatever else you're doing to reach customers. Be proud of the asset and the reputation that you've built. and use it for marketing. Okay, with that, Jeff, Eric, I'm going to pause and again thank you for having me. I'm Ted Pfaff, President of Customer Lobby. I'd be delighted to take any questions.

Good stuff.

I loved the—

and Ted shared the presentation with me, I'll say briefly, hahaha, But we didn't get a chance to talk about the Mighty Whities, and I was like, where is he going with this? But I'm glad that I had this on mute because that made me chuckle actually literally out loud.

Okay, good. Well, look, for those of us who strapped on a pair of tighty-whities, you instantly know what those are, right?

Exactly.

What a better way to remember, be brief.

Yeah, that was great stuff.

Go ahead. The reason that I put that out there, Eric, is that one of the interestingly, and we've all seen it, right? I mean, one of the roughest things to actually read as a potential consumer is to read a business who's being defensive in response to a review. It's honestly, it's almost more painful to read it than to read the negative review. When someone goes on for three paragraphs about gosh, what a bad customer you are, or oh, you didn't see it the right way. This is really what happened. Let me explain and set the record straight. This is you know that they're almost painful to read, and it's just a lose-lose situation. And that's why, as ridiculous as it sounds, sometimes when people make up a fiction, and it happens all the time. Someone will make up a fictional bad review. The good news is for those, it's honestly pretty easy to make up a fictional response about what you've already, you know, what you've done, what the process you've put in place so that it's never going to happen to someone again. And you come out with the high road, you get to defend the high road, And you really, it becomes in a sense one of your best digital assets because people then get to look up and say, wow, these guys are really responsive and they're totally on top of it.

Cool.

Good.

Jeff, I know we've got some questions in the queue, but I didn't know if you had any thoughts or questions on your part that you would like to share, or if we want to start working through the questions in the question box. Well, my first thought is I don't think anybody knows local reviews better than Ted.

Pretty firm there, big guy.

You don't want to know, man.

If you do the same thing for about 8 years, you do develop some subject matter expertise. Yeah. I have to agree with you on the way businesses respond to negative reviews.

In the last few months, I was looking at one of the travel sites and I was reading the review of a place in Palm Springs. And the, the owners of this local resort, they had a number of negative reviews. And every time there was a negative review, it was as if they were defending themselves.

And I just drew the conclusion as someone that was thinking of staying there. I don't want to stay at a place like this if, if they have this kind of relationship with their customers.

I noticed the same thing with a restaurant a while back. I was looking at a review and there was this back and forth of how they were right and the person that had an issue with them was wrong.

And in both cases, I thought they would have done much better if they just said, we're sorry you had a bad experience, or something kind of brief like that. Sure, sorry you had a bad experience, we've changed blank and we're going to get better. And I think that to your point about, you know, an endless litany, and there is one piece of bad news I think honestly that comes out of all this, and that is the honest truth is it could be that resort in Palm Springs that you were looking at, they may just be a bad business.

Right.

But the one bad, you know, the one rough part about reviews is if you're bad at your business, I honestly think it's going to be tough to be in business for any serious period of time. So I think that as digital marketers, we can't help you with that. If you suck, you're going to go out of business, it's going to hurt and you're eventually going to get drummed out. What reviews are really forcing everybody to do is just to raise their game a little bit.

The comedian Ron White, he's one of the Blue Collar 4 and he has a famous quote that you can't fix stupid. So if a business is bad, they may have been able to hide in the weeds, but with social media and reviews and the voice of the internet, you're absolutely right. You're not going to be able to hide that for very much longer. We do have a couple of quick questions. I know there was one question specifically regarding Google's new initiative called Google My Business. And while you were talking about the different places where businesses can go and, you know, put up a presence or hang a flag, the Google My Business service where you can claim a listing, how does that fit in? And I think it was part of that funnel discussion where you had businesses at the top all the way down to the bottom with the one-to-one product marketing. Do you remember?

Sure.

Yeah, no, I do.

And so Google My Business is the latest iteration of— it's actually just simply a branding shift. So Google My Business is now Google's way of aggregating a lot of other services that they have had for a while into just a new branding part. There's nothing new to it per se. What it really is, is a place for you to claim your listing, and for anybody on this call, either they should either claim their listing or they should engage a professional to claim their listing, and they should do it immediately. There's a really funny story of a State Farm representative. This was— I mean, I guess it's funny to everybody except this guy. A State Farm representative in upstate New York a couple years ago who did not claim his Google listing, and an angry customer claimed it on his behalf and uploaded a picture of the business of a steaming pile of poo. And so that when you Google this person's company, they went on and actually claimed— the claimed listing had a bunch of terrible information about this company as well as a large picture of poop. And the whole reason was that this person was furious about the service they had, and it took this guy almost 6 months to claim their listing. And for 6 months, that was their presence online on Google. So it's, in a sense, there's actually a kind of a business security risk by not claiming your Google My Business listing. So as I said, if you don't, if you haven't claimed it, You don't know how, contact a professional and get on it immediately. Google My Business is now simply a place where you can go to read your reviews as well as reviews around the web, although that service is really dodgy right now still. But the one great thing about Google My Business is after you've claimed your listing, you can have Google send— there's an option for Google to send you an email every time you get a new review on Google. So it is a— it's a great service, it's an absolutely core part of the funnel, it's a core part of local businesses' overall search engine optimization, and is a high priority on the list of things to do.

Cool, okay. One question came in with regards to Customer Lobby specifically. Are your services available just in the United States or are they available in Canada and other countries?

So US and Canada today. We will be expanding actually, we'll be expanding to a few other English-speaking countries next year, but US and Canada today.

Gotcha. I knew the answer to that, although I didn't know what future plans there were, but I figured I'd give you an opportunity. Full disclosure, Customer Lobby is a very nice and big partner of WSI, so I'm pretty familiar with the service and Ted. And like I said, I do use the service personally and enjoy meeting Ted at least once a year at our global conventions. So, so we'll make sure that's out on the table. So we talked about dealing with negative reviews. I've seen some people talk about the legitimacy of if you have a business and all you have are 5-star reviews, which I think ultimately everybody would like, but is there a certain area of legitimacy when you get maybe a 1 or a 2-star so that it doesn't look like you've astroturfed and only had the really, really good customers? Because nobody's perfect. You want to maybe talk a little bit about that?

Sure, it's one of those really tough things to advocate for because I think at an intellectual level, I think everyone knows exactly, they know the truth of what you're saying, right, that gosh, it just smells, because we all, what's funny is when we talk about reviews, all of us are review consumers. It's honestly hard to find someone who's not a review consumer, and my guess is This audience is self-selected to listen to this conversation because they're interested in reviews, and if you're not, you're probably literally just— never dawned on you to click. But we are all readers of reviews, and we all know at some level, if I see all 5 stars, it depends on how many I'm looking at. If I'm looking at 200 5s, interestingly, there's kind of an inflection point. If I'm looking at at 3, 4, 5, 7 5-star reviews, I think, well, okay, I mean, that's all great stuff. If I'm looking at 30 or 40 reviews and they're all 5-star, I start to say, hmm, you know, maybe that's AstroTurf. If I'm looking at 500 5-star reviews and they're all 5-star, interestingly I start to go the other way and I say, wow, this company may in fact be amazing, so long as they all look legit. And there are lots of ways, and I'll spare you the diatribe as to how to be able to spot fake reviews, but there are lots of ways that you can— that people spot fake reviews. Interestingly, they're not as good at it as they think. There have been some studies done on that as well, but The simple answer to the question is yes. Reviews, a review corpus, a review body, body of reviews is a better way to say it, where there is at least a, you know, there's stuff in there that's less than perfect, it's going to improve the overall believability of reviews. And I can't remember if the stats I shared included one of those, but there are lots of stats out there that say, you know, the existence of some negative reviews improves the believability of the entire review process. So yes is the simple answer to that question. However, try telling someone who runs a local business to go out and get a negative review, and I think the answer is people are going to—

Yeah.

At a conceptual level, that sounds great, but the reality is, as business managers and And, you know, people who run companies, reviews are a little bit of a report card. And I'd be the first one to tell you, it stings when we get a negative review. And I have hundreds of reviews on our company around the web, but it stings. It absolutely does, and it does every time. And so, and every one feels personal somehow.

Yeah.

Every single one. And so yes, it helps, but man, it doesn't make it any easier. It never gets easier to get it, even though yes, it's better for you.

I know we're at the top of the hour and some folks may have to drop off. I think we've got maybe one more question, so if you're able to sit on, Ted, hopefully you've got just a couple more minutes. If you have to drop off, certainly check the recording out to the Free Webinar Wednesday site. And we'll get that out there as well. But it often comes up to, you know, I've got negative reviews, how do I get them removed? How do I delete them from the system? And our experience, and I think you'll talk a little bit about this, is— and then why it's so important— is you can't really get a negative review removed. You just have to bury it with good stuff. And that, I think, further reinforces why I don't know if you've got any other commentary on that or other strategic advice about if you have a negative one out there, making it go away or become less relevant or less visible.

So the best advice is— I don't know if you ever heard this— I had somebody a long, long time ago, kind of a career mentor, one time say to me, you know, and I think it's advice that's given to a lot of people: never do anything that you're not willing to see written on the front page of the New York Times. It's just a— it's a good way to think about how you conduct yourself. There are— the reason I give that as a preface— there are some what are in the trade we call black hat, in other words, less than honest ways of trying to get Reviews removed. And if people are particularly interested in them, I can comment further, but there are, there are some ways of getting some negative reviews removed. They are all— they all involve lying and cheating, unfortunately. But But there are ways, and there are probably companies out there that'll say, hey, we'll do this for you. My advice would be, be very careful with the company that you keep. So that although there may be some ways of getting reviews removed, it goes in the category of be careful what you do. You may not want to be associated with some of those companies, and you never completely bury your fingerprints online. So the best, the most honest, and by far best strategy to employ is simply don't sweat the 1-star assassin who shows up every once in a while. They're gonna show up. Don't let that be your trigger event to go out and get reviews. Your goal as a business is to just proactively and aggressively keep asking everybody to write you a review. And so the answer is yes, you wind up— one way of saying it is you bury it with good content, but that's an outcome of a process that is really all about just asking a lot of people to write reviews for you. And so that process is actually relatively straightforward, it's just being really aggressive about asking. So although there may be some kind of less than ethical ways of getting reviews removed, the right answer is, hey, just go out there and be, you know, be super active about getting your happy customers to talk about you, and then don't sweat the other ones. They're going to come, they're going to go, don't worry about it. To your earlier point about that, you know, it actually improving the overall veracity, believability of your entire review base. Yes, that's true, but just as much as that, it's also going to be— they're gonna skew vastly positive over time. Just go out and get a lot of reviews, and yeah, the bad ones will just be viewed in context. Gotcha.

We did get a few more in. If you've got just a couple more minutes, or we can go ahead and take care of these by email, if that's okay. Okay, the difference between a review on LinkedIn versus Customer Lobby or maybe one of the other services, any idea which would have more value?

Sure, very different parts of the funnel and they are different use cases, so it depends on the industry that the person is in. My general view again with relationship to reviews is Be asking for them everywhere. They're all breadcrumbs. There is no killer, there's no killer app for reviews, there's no killer place, because literally next month LinkedIn may decide they're not in the business of hosting company-based reviews. It's completely ancillary to their current service and their current business. Most companies that host reviews think they're a giant pain in the ass, and they are. I promise you, I run a reviews company, it's a giant pain in the ass, but it is a— the business isn't a pain in the ass, but what happens with reviewers and the unbelievable anger that sometimes reviews generate, most people who run companies in the trade, they would love to find ways to get out of it. That's— I know for the folks who run Google Reviews, that's absolutely their sentiment.

Yeah.

And Yelp is in the middle of trying to reposition its business to be more transaction-centric. People don't trust LinkedIn or anyone to be the holder of all of your review base. LinkedIn reviews are awesome in the right industry at the right place at the right time, but keep building review content in multiple places so that if and when someone ever shuts it off, you've got a Yep.

Speaking of Yelp, have you heard anything? There's a question regarding Yelp and Google making an announcement.

Does that trigger anything in your heart? Well, first off, there's constant speculation about— I mean, I'm assuming the questioner is suggesting something about the two of them merging. As you probably know, Yelp spurned a merger attempt by Google famously years ago. It certainly is possible that they would eventually do that, and, you know, my guess is the shareholders of Yelp are kind of holding out for that. So yeah, I don't know, my guess is you could actually look at the— because Yelp is public, you could look at the stock price of Yelp and determine what people are speculating on, but the merger MergerARP guys are going to be all over it if that's the case. So look and see whether or not there's some type of a pop. They regularly— so Yelp and Google have been at each other's throats for years on a variety of different fronts, and the relationship has been almost entirely antagonistic for years. Oh, I think I may actually know— well, there is one recent announcement that was 2 days ago. I alluded to that. And that is that Google is changing its search algorithm around displaying gateway reviews. This is—

Yeah, the gateway page update.

Yes, is that— do you think that's what this is referencing?

Yeah, that might be it. So I think that—

Whoever asked this question, this is real inside baseball stuff, but I'll give you my take. To Jeff's point the other moment ago, you know, if you live Look, there are 15, maybe 20 reviews companies in the United States. I run one of them, so of course I'm conscious of it, but this is an interesting shift, right? So Google has decided that Yelp was essentially building its site based around a lot of Google search algorithm, and it was generating a substantial amount of traffic when you typed in plumber San Francisco, 3 listings on page 1 would be Yelp listings, and Yelp had actually architected its site and its results around exactly that. So Google, what, 2 days ago announced that they were going to change gateway listings. In other words, they were going to say, okay, we're going to view Yelp as a gateway, and if it ranks, we're going to change the ranking around so that it only displays one page. So that will— there were some people who were speculating that that's a great time to open up, that that will spell the beginning of a substantial decline in traffic via search engines to Yelp, and that it may be time to short some of Yelp stock. So I don't know, I'm not advocating shorting their stock. What I do know is that some part of Yelp's traffic comes through search, which is dominated by Google, and any attempt to restrict the landing pages of companies like Yelp will have an impact on their revenue. So yeah, that's certainly the case. If there are other If there are other announcements that are pending, I don't know. There's constant speculation in the industry about different things, but by and large, those 2 companies are not friends. Okay.

Yeah, yeah, I think that was it. I think that was the issue. So, well, listen, Jeff, I know I've been doing a lot of talking.

Anything you want to say at the last little round before we wrap up?

No, I'm good.

This is cool, really, really interesting.

Ted, awesome stuff. I know we talked a little bit— again, full disclosure, WSI is a partner of Customer Lobby, and we've got an opportunity to provide a complimentary trial account if anybody wants to kick the tires just to see how it works. You can actually get some real reviews and see how easy it is to invite people. So if you hop over to our website the Powered by WSI, and then under Services and Search, there's a Local Reviews section here. You can go ahead and visit that. There's a little video that further comically and very short— it's less than an hour— goes through what Customer Lobby does. And then a quick little survey that you can go ahead, or form you can fill out, and then we can get a trial account set up for you. And we've got the ability to save actually $50 on a setup fee if you're So inclined to move forward with a paid plan and take Ted's service to task and use it for your business, which I think any small business that's interested in now taking what you've shared and moving forward with it should take advantage of. So a little plug there, but it can save some money. And if nothing else, you get to play with it for 30 days and see for yourself how cool it is. So Ted, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate you sticking over 15 minutes. And those of you that are still on, thanks for hanging out with us for a little bit. We'll get the recording up online and make sure you all have an opportunity to take it out or take a look at it, share it with others. And we'll look forward to seeing you next Wednesday. And I say most every Wednesday at freewebinarwednesdays.com. Thanks everybody.

Super. Thanks.