The Good, The Bad And The Ugly: How Brands Can Make The Most Of Online Reviews
Posted by meredith on 09-03-2009
The big takeaway and bolded subtitle on Trendwatching’s latest Trend Briefing: reviewing is the new advertising. In other words, brands shouldn’t just anticipate the deluge of feedback floating around on the web but embrace it.
The report doesn’t focus specifically on youth or break down numbers into age groups, but rather directs brands to consider the general picture of 1.6 billion online consumers and the massive volume of reviews, recommendations and disappointments shared in that space, not to mention reproduced on third-party review sites, aggregators, etc. Regardless, we know that Gen Y’ers, particularly college students who have proven to be receptive to this model with teacher review sites like RateMyProfessors.com and UGC college guides like Unigo, are active reviewers. Reviews give youth an opportunity to be heard and raise awareness of youth oriented issues in industries like travel, for example. For companies there is also an opportunity to promote positive reviews by enabling satisfied customers to share their experiences and rewarding those who prove themselves to be the most passionate voices in these communities (think Yelp’s elite rewards).
One point that particularly stuck out to me was the advice to “Actively respond to bad reviews either on your own site, or through syndication.” It reminded me of Anastasia’s post about Blyk’s bad breakup with its young customers and her reminder that the flip side to being open, accessible and relatively transparent when the going is good is to keep the conversation happening, even when the going gets tough, and you’ve disappointed them. To that point, for brands that offer services or products, if bad reviews point to a specific problem, write conversational blog posts that ask users for help or ideas.
The downside to reviewing being the new advertising is that it now falls on all of us as consumers to be able to decipher real reviews from PR flacks, crazy people with vendettas or friends of the professor/author/college, etc. — adding a new layer of information literacy youth must employ when analyzing reviews.
For more coverage of youth marketing, go to the Ypulse Youth Marketing Channel sponsored by Youth Marketing Connection.
Categorized under: Youth Marketing
September 16th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
[...] raise some of the issues around transparency engaging with your fans/consumers online that Meredith wrote about recently [...]