5 Ways to Get Positive Online Reviews for Your Brand

Positive Reviews as you may know are the ideal outcome marketers covet as a result of customer engagement with a brand’s product or service. With today’s online social community, Positive Reviews are gold and can mean the difference in your business making or losing money.

Positive Reviews are Like Gold

Why Positive Reviews Matter:

• 90% of people trust recommendations from people they know
• 44% of purchases are influenced by consumer reviews
• 87% of people think the CEO’s reputation matters
• 78% of people research a product/service online before purchasing it

These five secrets will help you protect your brand and build bridges to your next customers.

1.   Pay attention to the reviews you already have.

You can’t generate good reviews unless you have real customers to write them. Start by making sure to resolve any current complaints from your customers.

2.   Engage your customers on Facebook and Twitter

Create a Facebook group and Twitter account for your business. Younger customers in particular will share their thoughts here without any prompting.

3.   Respond quickly to bad reviews.

If a bad online review is warranted, thank the customer for their feedback and apologize   for the bad experience. Respond quickly and you turn a negative into a positive.

4.   Remember it’s a numbers game.

Even if you are providing the best product or service you can, some people will tend to     complain. The more reviews you get, the more likely you are to get one or more bad reviews so your goal should be a large number of mostly good reviews.

5.   Make reviewing as easy as possible.

Give customers easy ways to provide reviews and feedback on your website and on your social profile pages. If you are a bricks & mortar retailer-consider using mobile devices and QR Codes to gather reviews.

Enjoy and Prosper!

Steve Emory, co-author DM Deja vu

President, Managing Partner Emory Digital

Related articles

• How to Use Social Media to Establish Trust (smallbiztrends.com)
• Use Online Reviews to Grow Your Business (boom360.com)
• Yelp and Others Change the Way Small Businesses Do Business (prweb.com)

User-generated Content is Still King

User- generated content continues to power Social Media but it also is critical to driving sales for your business-both online and offline.

More than 80% of Gen Y, the largest consumer group in history is influenced by user-generated content when considering a purchase. In fact, 51% of them actually rate user-generated content more important than the opinions of friends and family!

Think about your own purchasing behavior when its time to buy a new car, book travel, buy electronics or purchase insurance. Do you do research online and read other (user-generated) consumer reviews before you buy? Answer this question honestly and you know how important Social Media is to your business.

If you are looking to boost your business now and the rest of this year, spend more time on your Website, Blogging, Twitter and be sure to try the new kids on the block Pinterest and Google+.

Consider it a gift to know that your own purchasing behavior is a guide to helping you attract more traffic and sales for your business.

Enjoy and prosper!

Steve Emory, co-author DM Deja vu

President, Managing Partner Emory Digital

Quantifying Social Media

Everyday more companies and more consumers are joining the social media fray.  What does the increased noise level mean? Can you actually measure whether the investment has any impact on results?

Extent of Company Social Media Today

In June 2012 a two-day conference was held in New York City to share and discuss the State of Social Media. The conference served as a forum to discuss the results of data produced by a survey conducted by Useful Social Media from 650 participating corporations.

71% of the survey respondents said that they were responsible for developing and executing the company social media activity using a team of between 2 and 4 team staff members on a part-time basis.

Not surprisingly, 90% of respondents use Facebook for their company and 89% have a Twitter presence. These two are the unrivalled leaders for companies – and an incredible proportion of

businesses have taken the plunge and set up accounts on these two sites. YouTube and LinkedIn were also popular with 75% acknowledging regular participation. Also, 49% disclosed that they have created and promote their own blog.

Measuring Return On Investment in Social Media

Less than a third of respondents feel that they are accurately measuring the impact of their social media activity, and only 40% of respondents say they measure social media ROI (with only 23% confident they’re getting this measurement correct). Early measurement shows:

1. Activity/Engagement 14%

2. Conversion to leads or sales of those engaged 6 to 7%

3. Development of recommendations or customer testimonials from evangelists 2%

What is Next in Social Media?

The most popular replies from survey respondents about what to expect next year are:

1. 200% more companies will use social media to develop better products

2. A third more companies will offer customer service delivery through social media

3. 95% more companies expect to use social media for market research in determining future offerings.

What would participants like to be able to measure in the future? The answer is activity, growth in followers, increase in web traffic, translation to leads, and conversion to sales.

 

You can download a free copy of the full survey report @ www.usefulsocialmedia.com

Top Five Small Company Sales Shortcomings and How to Fix Them

The more opportunities I have had to provide freelance help to small owner-operated businesses, the more I recognize the differences in their approach and the similarities in their sales and marketing shortcomings.

1. Disappointing and inconsistent sales performance

*invest more time to manage and participate in your sales effort

*improve the consistency of your sales effort with a modestly priced CRM program like  SalesForce, Eloqua, or NetSuite to formalize your calling, emails, sales calls, tracking and reporting no matter how small your sales staff.

*Change your sales compensation to include commission based incentive.

*Eliminate sales staff members who have nor performed over a twelve month period.

Ninety Percent of All Data Created in the Last Two Years!

An IBM web page describes the company’s big data offerings by stating that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created daily now and as a result 90% of the data in the world has been created in the last two years.

 I never claimed to be a math major but if I understand the data progression correctly, it goes something like this:

1 Byte is made up of 8 bits

1 Kilobyte           KB          10³          (or 1,000 bytes)

1 Megabyte        MB         10⁶

1 Gigabyte           GB          10⁹

1 Terabyte           TB           10¹²

1 Petabyte           PB           10¹⁵

1 Exabyte            EB           10¹⁸

 One Exabyte is equal to one quintillion bytes. To put this staggering amount of storage in some perspective, the world’s technological capacity to store information grew from 2.6 exabytes in 1986 to 15.8 in 1993, over 54.5 in 2000, and to 295 exabytes in 2007. This is equivalent to less than one 730-MB CD-ROM per person in 1986 (539 MB per person), roughly 4 CD-ROM per person in 1993, 12 CD-ROM per person in the year 2000, and almost 61 CD-ROM per person in 2007.

 Another way to begin to grasp the explosion is to realize that we are creating data at a daily rate of all the data that existed in 1986.

Why Unpaid Internships Should Be Banned

A recent post on Craigslist read:

“Film company has one opening for an editor. Must be creative, dependable, and have personality. Great opportunity for college student or graduate. This is an INTERNSHIP, please do not ask for or expect compensation.”

 In 2012 there appear to be three types of internship options for companies and college students:

internships for no compensation, internships for college credit in lieu of pay and Internships that provide modest compensation.

Is This the End of the Movie Theater?

On Monday, May 20, 2012 a Chinese conglomerate announced it will buy major U.S. cinema chain, AMC Entertainment Holdings, for $2.6 billion in China’s biggest takeover of an American company to date. Dalian Wanda Group Co.’s purchase will create the world’s biggest movie theater operator. The Beijing-based company said it will invest an additional $500 million to fund AMC’s development. AMC operates 346 cinemas, mostly in the United States and Canada, and says it has 23 of the 50 highest-grossing U.S. outlets.

 “We support AMC becoming bigger, not only in the United States but in the global market,” said Wanda chairman Wang Jianlin at a signing ceremony for the acquisition. Wanda said AMC’s American management will remain in place and the headquarters will stay in the Kansas City area. It said staff numbers were not expected to be affected. The company employs some 18,500 people. AMC has reported losses for the past three years.

Back in 1959, Mary Pickford, who was a Hollywood star and also cofounded studio giant United Artists and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science), claimed that cable TV would kill theaters. Then, of course, Jack Valenti famously said the VCR would be the “Boston strangler” to the movie business.

Yet, now, with home theaters, video on demand, streaming services and infringement, the theaters are once again insisting that this time theaters are really in trouble.

So You Want To Open a Restaurant

How many times have you heard a family member or friend tell you they secretly wanted to own their own restaurant?

It may seem glamorous to those on the outside, but those in the know realize that it’s not. You will require an all-consuming passion for the restaurant and the patience of a saint. You will be open six or seven days a week. You will definitely start earlier than you thought and have later nights than you bargained for. It is relentless day in and day out with no sign of a break.

The strongest advice I can give is to work in a restaurant before you buy one. The most successful owners have waited tables, tended bar, worked in the kitchen and managed front of house and operations before investing.

Chances of Success

Restaurants fail at a 57 to 61 percent rate with the highest failure rate of 26 percent during the first year, 19 percent in year 2 and 14 percent in the third year. According to H.G Parsa, author of a study on restaurant failures and associate professor of hospitality management at Ohio State many restaurants close not because they couldn’t succeed financially, but because of personal reasons involving the owner(s) such as divorce, poor health or simply a desire to retire. “The successful owners were either very good at balancing their family and work lives or single or divorced.”

10 Important Things I Learned From Yogi Berra

To celebrate his 87^th birthday, I thought I would share 10 important things I learned from New York Yankee catcher and manager, Yogi Berra.

1.  Reciprocity:  “Always go to other people’s funerals; otherwise they won’t go to yours.”

2.  Forward progress:“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

3.  On observation: “You can observe a lot by watching.”

4.  Miscalculation: “Ninety percent of the time the game is half mental.”

5.  Telling it like it is: “If you ask me a question I don’t know, I’m not going to answer.”

Fire A Client Today!

I took me a good ten years in business to muster the courage to fire my first client.

Since I am not Donald Trump, my early reluctance was based on a modest bank account, coupled with the lack of confidence that I would be able to replace them with a better client.

I am quite sure if you examine your customer list you can identify a few who are exceptionally demanding of your time, are very slow to pay for your service, who undervalue your contribution and are constantly looking for a discount. I have found that 10% of my worst clients (call them the bottom feeders) take up to 50% of my time and provide me with less than 2% of my professional satisfaction or sense of accomplishment.