One of the potent weapons that can change or sustain public opinion are review sites. Whenever there is a new movie or new product coming up, people turn to review sites. There are so many movies which have taken a beating at the box-office and there are so many products which have not even been tried, purely thanks to damaging reviews. Nothing can be done much about reviews; you can’t stop them from happening, neither can you stop people from reading them and passing judgments.
They say if you can’t beat them, join them. This is exactly how review sites can work for online reputation management. Find out people who have genuinely liked your product or service. In this generation of web 2.0, you do not have the need to spend money on market research to scout for your fans. You can find people who patronize your product quite easily in the comments/testimonial section of your website, the social networking website, blogs and message boards.
At any given day, there will be more negative posts than positive posts even though your product may be the best in the world. This is bound to be because people generally talk (or write) about things which go bad or sour rather than things which work well. You have to find out people genuinely like your product/service and do not mind penning down their views on features they liked or the ways in which your product/service added value to their life. This is one of the best moves in online reputation management.
Contact people who are appreciative about your product to spare some good words or write a short review about how the product made a difference in their lives. This method of online reputation management costs your hardly anything but can help you a lot in terms of business and client acquisition. You can also indulge in viral marketing whereby you can give a freebie or some discounts on the purchase, so that customer satisfaction on your brand is restored.
If you don’t have the time or the right people to write reviews for your product or service, you can ask proffesional bloggers to write for your product. You can get them from specialized websites like Reviewme or Pay per post. But the best bet for writing reviews for your product (as they call from the horse’s mouth) are your satisfied customers. Provide them with a link that leads to a web-based platform, where they can write and upload their views. You can also screen the reviews and include the best ones by highlighting the catchy phrases or words that can strike a chord with your readers. If need be, you can also substitute certain words with keywords or keyphrases that can bring the name of your business or brand on the first two pages of the search results page.
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