Link to Podcast Episode - http://jamesmartell.com/tips-techniques/top-10-hottest-internet-marketing-strategies/
James Martell: Number 2.
Jay Berkowitz: Okay number 2 is the trend we identified called Reviews and Recommendations. And people had been seeing reviews and recommendations as a part of websites now for quite some time and for the first couple of years I think a lot of times you’d go to travel site there might be one review or 2 reviews. But a number of leaders have emerged in different spaces. So for example in travel, there’s a site called Trip Advisor. And Trip Advisor now is use so frequently and relied on by so many people that you really get a great set of reviews when you go their site. So for example I was recently planning a trip to Boston and the hotel I was looking at there was – somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 to 80 reviews for the hotel so you really get a good feel for what’s happening on – what that hotel is like. It’s not like there’s only 4 or 5 reviews and you know 2 or 3 of them were done by hotel management.
James Martell: (Laughs) right.
Jay Berkowitz: Another site emerged in the restaurant space and it’s called Yelp like a dog with yelp. And it became the number one for restaurant reviews. A woman by the name of Angie formed Angie’s list and she’s reviewing home service companies. You know home specialist, people would come work in your home. And giving a little power back to the homeowners and it is a subscription site so there’s a revenue model for Angie’s List. And another amazing site that I think the power of ratings and reviews is the site called Threadless. And Threadless is a t-shirt design company and they don’t have any designers on staff. All of the designs are done by members of the Threadless community and each week they put the new designs up. The membership votes on which t-shirt they’d like to buy. Threadless produces 3-4-500 shirt and they sell it almost every week, an incredibly profitable business model. You know they don’t have any designers. They produce the shirts that they already know are pre-research, their audience loved them.
James Martell: Yes.
Jay Berkowitz: And then the community votes on the ones they love, you know live virtual ratings and reviews. And the final story I want to share is a company by the name of, sorry I’m blanking on the name of the company.
James Martell: What do they do?
Jay Berkowitz: It’s a ratings and review site, very, very powerful. And what they do is they put the reviews on your site. And the reason this is so powerful is because in, sorry Bazzarvoice, I just blank on the name for a minute. The amazing thing about putting ratings and reviews for product reviews on the website is according to Brett Hurt who’s a CEO of Bazzarvoice, backing increased sales up to 15% just putting product reviews. And the amazing thing is the Bazzarvoice will not work with you if you don’t put up negative reviews as well as positive reviews because in their experience the negative reviews actually increase sales. Can you imagine how that would work?
James Martell: Yeah that’s just thinking of applications as you speak for my own sites. And this would tie beautifully back into the affiliate model as well. And affiliates typically don’t go that extra level to actually ask for feedback in a lot of cases from the visitors they’re sending off to the merchants. And for an affiliate to come up with a way to do that and to publish real, legitimate reviews. You know one thing I’ve noticed, you can usually tell, you mentioned it about a minute ago about the restaurants or the thing about the hotels were – the hotel staff probably posted 3 out of 5.
Jay Berkowitz: Exactly.
James Martell: When you go to a website and you see the reviews and they’re too good or they’re too well crafted, you can usually smell a rat a mile away. And I’m sure the visitors can take it off to –
Jay Berkowitz: And so that’s where the negative reviews come therefore. So if a hotel has overall 80% positive reviews and a few have been negative reviewers, you can tell that someone just run into one bad customer service person or someone was there and the weather was bad and they happen to get a leak or something. You know something a little bit extraordinary. You can read through that and sometimes you read the reviews and it’s like, “The rooms are very nice but the hotel and restaurant left a lot to be desired.” Well if you’re on a business trip and you’re just going to be going in sleeping and leaving and you know you’ve got a dinner meeting that night and an early flight the next morning, you know that you’re not going to be using the restaurant, you’re not going to be using the lobby, you want a great room at a great price. And the reviews allow you to craft exactly what you’re looking for in the experience. And the final lesson I’ll share from Bazzarvoice was the story of Apple iPod sales. And the negative reviews, a lot of people we’re saying that the iPod scratch a lot and when they put the negative reviews up about the iPod scratching, it actually increase the sales of iPod accessories. So lot more people bought cases and significantly decrease the number of returns. And so people now they knew, “Okay this is a great product I just need to buy a little case. They bought the cases and increased the accessories which were probably very profitable for Apple and it significantly decrease the customer dissatisfaction and the returns. So those reviews really you know became a critical part of not only converting to more sales but also making the whole overall experience more positive and more profitable.
James Martell: So what you’re saying is if you own a website are you recommending that the person comes up with a way to actually get the feedback from their customers, positive or negative and just have that available to visitors of the site?
Jay Berkowitz: Exactly. Just creating that community aspect and obviously for your e-commerce or your selling something add to review component from the perspective of– it’s probably going to increase your sales maybe as much as 50% and possibly have that kind of profitability experience, that Apple experience.
James Martell: I know you mentioned Threadless and you talked about them not having any designers in their t-shirts, are pretty much I guess for the most part voted on and pre-sold prior to productions so already know they’ve got a hot product.
Jay Berkowitz: What a concept huh?
James Martell: I know that – yeah what a concept (laughs). We’ve been talking for years and I know the media has been talking about it a long time ago, early on when they’re predicting where the web was going that it would be a lot more interactive, a lot more user friendly, a lot more – I don’t know if they use the word social but I remember them talking about us having the ability to customize our searches, organize our desktop and I think we’re probably well past that already where the users and the visitors and us in general who are using the internet are now starting to really use it. You know it kind of fall back to Elance a lot and it kind of ties into this a little bit because of this ability to just to communicate with other people online and I remember the early days that really wasn’t happening so much where it was more of a static webpage, you could go surf around, looking around but there really was no communication between people really online other than looking at the page. Today as these examples that you’ve given truly show how far we have come.
Jay Berkowitz: Exactly.
James Martell: Okay so number 1 you said was Micro Communications. Number 2 was Reviews and Ratings. How about number 3?
Jay Berkowitz: Number 3 we called Customer Service is the new marketing department. And with the ability of people to give ratings and reviews (laughs) you better be on your game when it comes to customer service. And the critical aspect of performing when it comes to dealing with customer issues responding and I think the other thing that you have an opportunity to do as a company today is to really monitor what’s happening on the online environment. And you can monitor what people are saying on Twitter and blogs and even on websites informs and what not.
So Customer Service becomes an absolute critical component to responding and quickly dealing with issues. And there was a couple of case that I use in the presentation, do you want me to just go right into those James?
James Martell: Yeah please do.
Jay Berkowitz: So one of the ones that became sort of a part of internet folklore was a gentleman was waiting for his access, his internet access and his cable access to be repaired by a company called Comcast and Comcast is a regional cable carrier, very, very major company. And while the gentleman finally showed up after cancelling a couple of appointments and not showing up the repair guy showed up and he was on hold for over one hour with Comcast trying to get some assistance to repair this customer’s cable and internet access. And while he was on hold for so long he actually fell asleep on the couch of the customer he was calling on to repair his cable. So this customer is particularly entrepreneurial and he video tape this technician sleeping on his couch and put it on YouTube and on the screen showed have had 1.265 million viewers.
James Martell: (Laughing)
Jay Berkowitz: And he created a video and he explained, “To Comcast, thanks Comcast for a week long internet audits and thanks Comcast for promising to call back and then not calling, thanks CotCast for 3 missed appointments.” So that became a real disaster for the Comcast brand. And then a gentleman by the name of Frank Liaison was hired and he got very active in the social media communities. And Frank goes under the brand Comcast Cares at Twitter. So Twitter.com/Comcastcares. And now Frank and the customer service team are extremely proactive in monitoring Twitter comments and of course if your internet’s down one of the first thing you might do is go to your cellphone and send out a little Twitter tweet like, “Oh Comcast is down again.” A nd what Frank and the team do is they immediately monitor that and they look for people complaining and issues like that and they jump on it really, really quickly.
Another great example comes from a blogger, a very prominent blogger by the name of Jeff Jarvis. And Jeff Jarvis went through what he called Dell Hell. And he had actually purchased from Dell in home customer service and it was expensive. And when Dell showed up they’re like, “We can’t fix that.” And I think they miss some appointments and showed up late. You know there was really very negative customer service experience and then they had to send this computer out and it came back and it wasn’t working. So for 2 weeks he was blogging about Dell Hell and the following grew even to a point where I believe it got pick up on – he was interviewed by national media outlets and he even affected the Dell Stock price because his Dell Hell became so prominent and got so much media coverage. And it really became one of the first chinks in the Dell Armor if you will of customer service and customer experience.
And so Dell also got very, very proactive and a gentleman by the name of Richard Binhamer goes by the brand Richard@Dell and he’s very active as his other members in the Dell customer service team on Twitter and on monitoring Twitter and monitoring blogs and they’re very, very quick to turn things around. And Dell recently had a recently positive turn around experience, if you remember probably about 6 month to a year ago when the laptops where catching on fire. And they were in fact Dell Laptops.
James Martell: That’s a problem.
Jay Berkowitz: Yeah. And again there was a video and what not. But very quickly the customer service at Dell was able to communicate. These are not Dell Batteries that are catching on fire. These are Sony batteries that are catching on fire. They just happened to be on Dell computers and they were able to reach out to the people who were sharing these experiences and the media what not and very quickly make it a Sony issue and not a Dell issue and you know which was fair and an accurate communication. And now the team at Dell was very, very effective, as a matter of fact I had a Dell issue with a product we are waiting for. Richard was able to turn that around quickly and I was aware of him because of how active he is in the social media community. So it’s really a 2-part thing, it’s a pro-activity where you can reach out and sort of help build your company’s brand and secondarily to monitoring, the capability of monitoring your brand. You absolutely want to be monitoring what people are saying about you at Twitter, you can do that through a Twitter search on the Twitter and there’s some number of other applications people have built. You can do that through monitoring what’s happening in the blog this year, of course you should be searching your brand and your products on a regular basis and you can also set up what are called Google alerts and Yahoo alerts. Are you familiar with those James?
James Martell: Absolutely!
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