Wisdom of the Crowd
By Joe Dysart

While Web marketers have long been tracking the growing influence of online consumer reviews, a new study (http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS117426+24-Jun-2008+BW200...) from Opinion Research reveals the influence of these reviews has reached a tipping point. Specifically, the study found an eye-opening 83% of all online consumers responding said that the evaluations and reviews they find on the Web are now influencing their decisions on who gets their business. Moreover, another 32% said they had personally posted feedback or a review on the Web after an experience with a product or service.

"Businesses today exist in an era in which it's nearly impossible to escape the likelihood of being evaluated—there's nowhere to hide," says Linda Shea, a senior vice president at Opinion Research, which also does national polling for CNN. "Even a single negative review, when posted in a very public forum, can have a significant impact on a prospective buyer's decision.”

The good news with this trend is that virtually any home business with a web site can cash in on this trend by creating a reviews domain where satisfied customers can post their thoughts. House painters and similar home businesses, for example, need only take a page form Crestwood Painting, which imports positive customer reviews from Yahoo! and Angie's List (http://www.crestwoodpainting.com/reviews.html).

Indeed, the influence of these online reviews is so pervasive now, you need not be an Internet business to be impacted. Even goods and services providers that have no web site can still find themselves reviewed on search engines like Google and Yahoo!, which enable users to now review virtually every business.

For example, Ken’s Tree & Stump Removal in Saddle Brook, New Jersey, a decidedly low tech enterprise, has already been reviewed on Yahoo! Local (http://local.yahoo.com/info-10809379-ken-s-tree-stump-removal-saddle-brook). And VIP Babysitting Service has found a place on the Web where it can be reviewed—the popular shopping/review site caboodle (http://www.kaboodle.com/reviews/vip-babysitting-service — so-much-more-than-babysitting).

Unfortunately, there is also a downside to the online reviewing craze. Businesses that rely only on reviews posted on other sites—essentially relinquishing their business image to a third party—can be in for a rude awakening. Interestingly, the bravest of the pioneers on online view domains—including heavyweight online retailers Amazon, eMusic and eBay—are not only unafraid of these reviews. They embrace them, posting both positive and negative feedback on their sites.

Essentially, these companies buying into the Brave New Web theory that a company demonstrating complete “transparency” on the Internet earns the greatest respect—and the most repeat business—from today’s most sophisticated online shoppers. But others are hedging their bets, convinced that by posting only glowing reviews of goods and services, they’ll be able to look trendy while bringing in more business to boot.

Bringing Reviews to Your Web Site
Either way, if you’re looking to take control of the review frenzy that has seized the Web—a frenzy that could negatively impact your home business with just a few, well-placed, unflattering reviews—you may want to consider creating a review domain on your site.

Such domains can be overseen, guided, and edited by you or your staff. And while these review domains cannot erase a negative review posted elsewhere on the Web, you can at least control public opinion where it matters most: on your web site, where customers do business with you.

Observes Paul Gillin, author of “The New Influencers: A Marketer’s Guide to the New Social Media:” “Blogs, discussion boards, and other forms of interactive media are the most cost-effective customer feedback mechanism ever invented. You won’t get a representative sampling of your customers. But you will get your most passionate customers.”

Don Philabaum, CEO of Internet Strategies Group (http://www.internetstrategiesgroup.com), agrees: “It’s a good time to become a niche online community and do it right. You have millions of people who have learned the value of being a part of an online community, and they’ll bring experience, enthusiasm, content—and their network—to your online community.”

Generally, these online review communities break out into three categories. Most popular are simple social hang-outs, which offer a review domain component. These communities borrow from the MySpace and Facebook model, and attempt to offer as many community features as possible to attract as many visitors as possible.

A second breed of online review communities are completely private, invitation-only affairs. While these are generally much smaller than the public sites, many businesses have discovered there’s a big pay-off when they pick-and-choose who will belong to their review community.

The reason? Reviewers chosen in this fashion tend to be highly valued customers who can offer dependable insights, and they can be counted on to post more often and more regularly than those participating in public review networks. Indeed, review and discussion threads from these reviewers can last for years, and become a market research goldmine.

Meanwhile, a third genre of review community exists solely to solicit reviews from extremely happy customers, and post those reviews on company web sites. Many of these communities are driven by highly sophisticated review software packages, which walk visitors through every step of the review process and find all sorts of ways to encourage them to expound upon a company and its goods and/or services.

Going the MySpace Route
If you’re interested in going with the MySpace clone, which includes a review domain component, Web marketers say you’ll only be able to achieve that look and feel by offering a full array of community fostering amenities, including discussion boards, chat rooms, instant messaging, blogs, photo, audio and video posting, and similar community building services. You’ll also want to jump-start the community’s nerve center—the discussion board—by posting commentary on a dozen or so topics, and then encouraging visitors to offer their own reactions and opinions to the discussions you’ve started.

With just a little luck and perseverance, these discussion boards will take on a life of their own, with community visitors and reviewers coming up with their own follow-up topics, and others volunteering to moderate special interest groups relating to various facets of your company’s business. Some members—who tend to view these communities as much as theirs as yours—will even volunteer to guard your forums for the occasional visitor who just shows up to make mischief.

Fully realized review communities of this type also sometimes bring in professional moderators—experts in various subject areas—who assume responsibility for moderating and managing their own forums on your site. These experts may or may not individually generate review fodder for your site, but they generally bring in more visitors, some of whom will mostly likely contribute to your review section.

Service providers who specialize in creating MySpace-type communities include Affinitive (http://www.beaffinitive.com), Webcrossing ((http://www.webcrossing.com) and Capable Networks ((http://www.capablenetworks.com).

Affinitive’s “Enclave” solution, for example, essentially replicates the functionality, look and feel of a MySpace or Facebook. WebCrossing’s Neighbors, rivals the MySpace/Facebook model, and comes complete with special interest groups, personal user spaces, blogs, file and photo sharing, search and user access controls. With Capable Networks, yet another provider in this space, you’ll get the same MySpace/FaceBook type model, as well as content-creating help from Capable’s staff. There is a caveat, however. In exchange for the help from Capable’s editors and moderators, the company includes a rider in its contract stating that it owns and operates your community as a separate entity.

Opting for Invitation-Only Communities
Meanwhile, the second breed of online review communities—small, private, invitation only affairs—are the type preferred by Communispace, an online community service provider that specializes in designing and helping companies run private meeting places.

“When a few hundred members are participating on a regular basis, the quantity and quality of the content is deeper and richer than from large public sites,” says Katrina Lerman, co-author of the Communispace white paper “The Fifth P of Marketing: Participation.” “For companies that truly want to connect with their customers, smaller may in fact be better.” Under the Communispace model, private customer communities are generally branded, password-protected sites where an intimate group of members spends months—and sometimes years—together brainstorming ideas for a company, essentially playing a pivotal role shaping the company’s future. “Several facilitators guide the conversation and help bridge the gap between customer and company,” Lerman says.

The intimacy and invitation-only factor in these groups also tends to result in greater numbers of members participating in the ongoing discussions. “When members contribute, they participate at a high rate—an average of 3.9 contributions per week,” say Lerman, citing an in-house study of 66 online communities created by Communispace.

The firm also says its own in-house study of 20 Communispace communities found that 82% of community members said they were more likely to recommend the sponsoring company’s products since joining the community. And 76% said the felt more positively about the company after joining its community.

Focusing on a Reviews Only Format
The third genre of industry review communities—sites that limit all activity to pubic reviewing of a company’s products and services—are being used by some of the biggest names in business, including Dell, Macy’s, Petco, Sears, Charles Schwab, and PepsiCo, as well as the smallest of businesses. One of the leading service providers in this space, Bazaarvoice (http://www.bazaarvoice.com), is one of the review community builders that urges companies to go the transparency route. Its flagship product, “Ratings & Reviews” module, is designed to solicit unvarnished reviews about a firm’s performance, which are published on the company’s web site—although still subject to company approval.

If you’re still skittish about the concept of publishing bad reviews about your product or service on your own web site, you’ll probably be more interested in a solution like Genuosity’s (http://www.genuosity.com) KudosWorks. Essentially, this is a glowing-testimonials-only approach, through which extremely enthusiastic customers offer accolade-filled write-ups on a company. Another service provider offering the keep-it-positive route is Zuberance (http://www.zuberance.com).

Safeguarding Your Reputation on Other Sites
If you’re not ready for any of these choices, but still want to monitor what’s being said about your business on review sites, blogs, and the like, there are plenty of monitoring firms that can provide that kind of business intelligence. The importance of such reputation monitoring, according to Bruce Arnold, founder of Caslon Analytics http://www.caslon.com.au), a Web marketing firm that counsels clients on managing company reputations online, cannot be underestimated.

As many firms have learned the hard way, one or more negative Web posts about your company on the Web can quickly multiply across the globe in a matter of hours—whether or not those posts happen to be accurate, Arnold says. Essentially, without vigilant monitoring, a negative post expertly placed on the Web can mushroom into a major headache for your business—one that can take months, or even years, to repair.

"Some posts are little more than a repository for juvenile humor: graffiti, comments that "X" is the devil, animations of creatures urinating on the corporate logo," Arnold says. "Others feature detailed and sometimes persuasive critiques, including "insider" documentation, and are associated with newsgroups.”

One of the easiest ways to secure a general idea about what’s being said about your business on the Web is to monitor the major online communities, mailing lists and blogs—all places where those looking to shape public opinion tend to congregate. The key newsgroups to monitor include MSN Groups (http://groups.msn.com); Yahoo! Groups (http://groups.yahoo.com); and AOL Groups (http://groups.google.com). Using your company’s name, you can search through each of these online community aggregators for any posts about your firm, and determine if you’ll need to take additional action.

You’ll also want to perform similar searches of talk about your company with a free blog tracking service like Technorati (http://technorati.com). If you find multiple mentions of your firm in certain blogs, you can also use a free RSS reader, such as Omea Reader (http://www.jetbrains.com/omea/reader), to subscribe to blogs maligning your business, and have all such posts automatically sent to your PC desktop via the Omea software.

It’s also a good idea to keep tabs on anything that may be cropping up about your firm on podcasts—or grassroots radio-show type productions that are beginning to crop up on the Web. PodcastAlley (http://www.podcastalley.com) offers an excellent overview of what’s going on in the world of podcasts.

If assaults on your business become a major factor, there are a number of service providers who will monitor your reputation for you, including Factiva Insight:

•    Reputation Intelligence (http://www.factiva.com/factivainsight/reputation),
•    Nielsen BuzzMetrics (http://www.nielsenbuzzmetrics.com),
•    BlobSquirrel (http://www.cyberalert.com/blogmonitoring.html) and
•    WebClipping.com (http://www.webclipping.com).

Joe Dysart is an Internet speaker and business consultant based in Manhattan. Voice: (646) 233-4089. Email: joe@joedysart.com. Web: http://www.joedysart.com.

Previously published in the December 2008 issue of HOME BUSINESS® Magazine, an international publication for the growing and dynamic home-based market. Available on newsstands, in bookstores and chain stores, and via subscriptions ($15.00 for 1 year, six issues). Visit www.homebusinessmag.com