Here at 1000heads we’ve always had a very strong belief in the value of honest word of mouth for businesses.
That means good and bad.
Our ethics policy explains that we encourage people to discuss what they *really think* about brands, products and services. They won’t get rewarded for one-note glowing reviews. They won’t be given scripts to regurgitate. As long as their conversation is authentic and constructive (i.e. not an abusive rant), we love it, and generally our clients do too.
Because of course the ‘negative’ conversation is usually the most useful stuff. Maybe not if your only objective in social is to engineer a whitewash of promotional-style blah. But definitely if you want to use this space as an opportunity to learn and grow with your customers, and let them in on the process. It’s an amazing chance to get unbiased feedback about how you’re doing, rather than spending thousands on market research that might produce a skewed result – and if you don’t want to hear it, or do something about it, then you have much bigger problems than a grumbly Facebook page.
It’s therefore great to see the latest research from our friends over at Reevoo, the social commerce crew. Digging into the data around the website review plugins they provide for clients such as Tesco, Sharp and Sony, they’ve discovered that allowing bad reviews to coexist with the good ensures that:
- 68% trust good reviews more when they also see the bad ones
- 95% suspect censorship or fake scores when they don’t see any negative reviews
- people stay longer on your site, giving you more time to persuade them to buy
- people view more pages – only 1% leave your site after seeing one badly-reviewed product
Surely the important word here is trust. It’s the lifeblood of effective social brands – that is, ones that don’t just forge great relationships, word of mouth and loyalty, but ones that make money from their social interactions.
Download the full Reevoo report here.
