30 Jul Online Reviews Need To Be Monitored – Don’t Forget!

Online reviews are often neglected and we regularly see this being a problem when clients first come to us for help. I thought we could take a look at a real world example of a non-client to showcase why it’s good to listen to your customers.

 
Gotham Dream Cars is a great company and I’ve had the pleasure of getting behind the wheels of a few of their cars. While there are a good amount of bad reviews floating around for their New Jersey location, this of course doesn’t reflect the company at a whole. My point mainly is that when you do search for reviews, mostly the bad ones come up.

Another thing to keep in mind is that it’s too easy to write a bad review without anyone knowing if they’re legit or not. Regardless of that a brand should always speak up and respond to these negative reviews. It shows good character and a lot of the time, will restore faith in a company. We’ve personally seen converting leads come in from those reviews a hundred times over, so don’t get too discouraged.

While that saying may be cheesy, this is exactly what needs to be done. So when you search for review of Gotham Dream Cars you find a variety of sources.

How Could Gotham Turn It Around?

Let me state again that there are 90x more positive reviews about the company. If you look closely the majority of the bad reviews are for their New Jersey location, and it’s mostly by one person. So clearly someone was not satisfied with their service and went on a negative review rampage. Not only that, but these negative reviews are almost 5 years old now…talk about a lingering sore spot.

Gotham Dream Cars also has a variety of services including the dream car sprint and tours. The dream car sprint is an affordable and short trip around their setup autocross courses at each location. You don’t really get to open the cars up too much and I guess a lot of people expect to drive their supercars to the extreme.

 
So these bad reviews exist, what can a brand do to alleviate the problem? Let’s take a look at a few options that Gotham could implement and also your company if you’re in the same boat. It shouldn’t be too hard to showcase that your brand is out there listening and cares about making changes that customers aren’t happy with.

// Respond To Online Reviews

This is the best way to respond and if you are civilized and try and rectify, even if the person writing the review sounds like an idiot….and for most this seems to be the case for them. You could even go so far as having him back out for a dream car tour, film it and have him share that experience with all his friends. That may be a little extreme, but that’s the kind of thing that will grab some bonus social media buzz.

// Rank Your Own Reviews Page

Gotham is already ahead here and their testimonials page ranks usually in the top 5 positions which is great. However I’d want the number one spot over Yelp and especially RipOffReport.com. Those two sites won’t remove reviews easily and I actually think ROR is a terrible setup.

 
Gotham needs to implement rich snippets which would showcase a star and number rating in the organic search results, making them stand out a lot more. I would also like to think that your click-through-rate will be improved because of this as well your rankings should go up. There are also other creative ways Gotham could link to their page and make it rank better in short time.

// Rank Video Reviews

It’s no secret that youtube videos rank very well and if they had some real reviews from real people over video coming in, they would have those to help. While this could also work out negatively for them if a bad review were to rank well, however I doubt they would have this problem. Most people who leave reviews tend to be more on the cowardly side and most likely won’t put their face to it…especially not on video.

This could also turn into a PR stunt if they did it right. Perhaps if they grabbed random people off the street, let them have a taste of the cars and then recorded their thoughts and reviews afterwards. This is fun for all, not too costly in regard to your marketing budget and you even get more awesome content out of it.

Real Time Review Monitoring

There are tons of tools out there that let you monitor for brand mentions and reviews so you can respond literally in real time. There are enough free tools out there to do it and I will just mention two that we use here for Luxury Branded as well as for our clients.

Trackur

On The Web: http://www.trackur.com/
 
This is a great tool for a team or just one person to keep track of the entire web and social media landscape. It does cost money and the interface is basically what you’re paying for. We’ve had it setup for a number of clients although we can do the same amount of monitoring with the two free tools we mention below.

Topsy

On The Web: http://topsy.com/
 
This is my favorite tool as you can search yourself for free and create alerts for free to a certain point. There is a pro version which I highly recommend over anything you’re going to spend your money on. I’m not affiliated or paid to say this at all. I’ve just been a very happy users for a few years now and I couldn’t do without my Topsy.

Google Alerts

Google of course provides a free tool to monitor the web and social media for free..oh and you can monitor up to 1000 keywords. This is a no brainer and you get a daily, weekly or monthly option to send you alerts. You can start using it right now http://www.google.com/alerts.

Going From Here

Hopefully your company has positive reviews to back it up and make a balance, but if you don’t, why not? It might be time to start thinking about ways you can encourage customers to respond to online review services, even if they’re negative. I’m a big believer in all press is good press and if you handle your bad, you can still come out looking like an honest company. No one is perfect and admitting to your faults is the mature thing to do. Not only that, it can lead to you fixing an aspect of your service that is truly not so good.

If you find that a lot of your negative reviews might be from a competitor trying to slander you then you may be able to have those reviews removed. However, this will come at a fee as you will either need to pay sites like RipOffReport.com to investigate your case. It’s either that or hiring a lawyer and suing that reviewer for slander, which could really just lead to more bad press.

Need some help in the area of online reputation management? Give me a call and I’d be more than happy to discuss your options.