How a Review Site Management Response is an Opportunity to Clarify Expectations With A Reader and Audience
June 05, 2014
David Morris and Brian Payea from TripAdvisor spoke at the 4th annual super marketing conference: building relationships to build business at Suffolk University Law School, sponsored by LOMAP. David was on the legal team, and Brian the marketing guy. While Their presentation was all about TripAdvisors, you can take their advice and insights into their online review site and apply it to any sort of online review site such as AVVO and Yelp, hence their presence at the conference.
Key Insights
- World's largest travel site.. 260 million unique monthly visitors & 100 new pieces of content added every day
- Mobile is important - 110 million visitors per month on mobile
- Making a decision - 80% read at lead 6-12 reviews
Management Response to Reviews; both positive & negative
- Reviewing process
- Management responses best practices
- Sign up for review notification emails
- Read our guidelines
- Respond promptly
- Say thank you
- Be original in reply
- Highlight positives
- Address specific complaints
- Be polite and professional
However, engagement of an attorney is unique. You’ll have fewer reviews, so it’s even more important to give a response. This impacts your ability to reply to the review, tricky line to walk... reviews much more complicated for lawyers than hotels.
What if someone is? How do you respond to negative or delusional reviewers? Maintain a positive tone, while you may be talking to the person who wrote the review, the audience is reading the same review, and how you respond will affect their perception of your company.
When you look at a review, it’s very informative, and if your response is short and curt it will not be as effective, it’s important to look at the places where you can add more description to your response; what was described, how can you add something to the conversation, and make it personal?
Your management response is an opportunity to clarify with the reader and the audience the expectations of what the process was originally designed to be. Make sure you address all of the points from the reviewer; both David and Brian said the readership on management responses is very high.
The management response is the basis for how customers decided to purchase services. If there's no response, it says something about your company, people draw conclusions on your lack of activity.
- Eliminating concerns, address a reviewers concerns.
- Reinforcing positives... support the review, and give the reader the opportunity to learn more about why it’s a good purchase.
- Personality comes through, the opportunity to convey the personality of the owner, the attorney, it’s more important to distinguish your reviews from other attorney's.