“We can fix your reputation on search engines and put good reviews first”… If you’ve turned on the radio or network TV in the past year or two you’ve heard the companies claiming to fix brand reputation by reordering results and even creating content. The ethical ones draw a line at impacting existing reviews while the bottom of the barrel doesn’t just outright admits they’re making stuff up and either way the message is clear to consumers: the review system can be gamed.

Of course gaming is not only bad companies trying to pretend to be good; scan through enough reviews and you’ll find gems like this one: “I haven’t bought this but everything XYZ makes is overpriced so I give it a one star”. Whether its brands attacking each other, service providers raking in money with promises of hiding bad reviews or consumers gone rogue in a negative [or even positive way], there’s a growing credibility problem with reviews.

There’s no doubt that reviews are downright vital…. in fact Millennials place more trust in others than friends & family, and we’re only getting started. However as reviews grow in importance, the efficacy of the system is taking a serious hit – reviews will become less trusted and now is the time for companies to tackle the problem.

1. We need to validate reviews on our sites.

When Starwood announced their review program last year what stood out was their move to validate every comment. Knowing what’s on their site is real is a powerful move, and moves the ball to trusting that they don’t filter, not that the reviews were made up.

2. Reviews must be presented authentically.

When companies re-order their reviews or even worse, just list the top ones, the entire concept becomes useless. As research has shown, it’s not the 5-star rating people want to see… it’s the reality of the product, the fact that someone has an issue with it, even if the issue is a non issue. Being honest with how we show reviews gives people a reason to believe that what we’re showing is all inclusive.

3. We need to provide a method for others to validate off of.

Amazon is as much a research site as a purchase one – etailers and content sites are not just getting reviews from their own sales / bookings. They need a way to authenticate too and that means those of us making products or selling services have to move to being more open, to provide  a mechanism identify a real customer by anyone.

This is not an easy path. If you sell in store how do insure a product review is real? If you turn away someone because they don’t validate aren’t you just encouraging them go to a third party site and make even more noise? Validation is by no means a simple process but it’s the right step to move towards to make those reviews count and to root out the problems, whether they’re negatives or positives. In the end transparency wins out.

It’s like we’re screaming “we’re at the party too” in the hopes that people will think we are cool because we’re there, except this party doesn’t have a guest list and everyone has shown up.

What we’re really doing when we broadcast our social sites is sending a very loud message – go somewhere other than our corporate “home” to see how “authentic” we are. We didn’t open up the doors in place where everything is suppose to be tidy and perfect so we’ve rented out this space down the street and that’s where you can find the “real” talk.

At the same time, by the mechanics of social networks plus along with our fangating and page settings, ask everyone who comes over to like us – even though they don’t even know us. We’re preaching engagement but requiring visible affinity to even ask a question and then wondering why people don’t respond when we do post something up to them.

And of course let’s not forget the difficulty seeing and using these channels in the first place – we run dozens of profiles for different products and regions – which one is right? We drop people off at a wall full of different types of messages that we expect people to sift through. If they don’t find what they wanted, it’s waiting for a response from us or someone else or clicking a link over to our website where interested customer probably wishes they had gone too in the first place.

In the era of social the word control has been become taboo but controlling the experience by aggregating is not a bad thing. So rather than trying to look relevant by telling people you’re on XYZ, be relevant by giving them the all the information they actually need – and putting it in a place that is identified as yours — that’s transparent, that’s useful.

Social is about the opportunity to engage – not the requirement to do so. Short comments, full reviews, check-ins, photos, all of the features that exist out there can come right into your site [from those networks in fact] and extend, validate without the need for a visitor to click away from your brand. You’re creating all of this great content, why limit the exposure? Why mix your fan base with people who are just looking? Instead build your own community out of what people are already doing and bring it back.

You can’t call your brand social, expect to grow from social, and yet have social be a silo that lives outside of your brand.

While the holidays offer a great opportunity, they are also present a unique challenge as the buyer is often no longer the recipient of the product: write a review prompts, follow up offers, social campaigns  all go out the window and to maximize the opportunity, a seasonal strategy is needed. Here are 3 programs to connect and grow even when you’re not certain who is getting the order in the end.

Write a Review / Story Inserts –

Knowing that products are often hoping around before reaching their actual recipient may take automated emails out of the equation but it increases the potency of any included insert which suddenly is the only “marketing” that’s anywhere around. Leverage that holiday style.

Rather than a typical old “share your thoughts” piece, take the opportunity to make your insert extend the gift and bring your brand into the picture [in an acceptable way]. I’ve seen luxury products go as far as to include a greeting card with a direct, back of the page, message but even a standard single-sided insert can wish the recipient a happy holiday and invite them to share their thoughts about the product, or story about getting it in a fitting way.

With the right spin, you can even bring the customer back to a social channel to follow you for more down the road now that they’re a “part of the family”. But leave the cross-sell piece out for now; we are talking about a gift after all.

Share the Experience of Giving –

While your direct customer may not be the person using the product at the end of the day, chances are they have a great deal of investment in how it turns out and building around that initial impression is a virtually untapped idea, but exciting in its own right.

While you can’t ask these users for a review [and you should disable your write a review email to anyone who checks gift wrap / present options], you can ask them to comment about why they picked the gift, how the gift holder reacted, even to share a photo or video as the person giving it out. The content that stems out isn’t intended to validate the utility of the item but rather to validate the decision for everyone who comes back considering that item, or your brand, for a future gift themselves. Just think how much visibility you could get from a video contest that led to a dozen kids ripping open the paper on their new favorite toy of the moment.

Did You Get It? Social Network Participation

For many brands Christmas Day can be the biggest engagement hours of the year with the surrounding weeks taking other top spots. Why? Because people either got it or got disappointed. For youth focused brands and high ticket items this is especially more true with kids rushing to tell each other that the latest iWhatever ended up under the tree after all.

So whether you celebrate the holiday with a big family gathering or head to the nearest theatre to catch a movie and escape it all [you won’t be the only one], it’s a day you simply cannot turn the computer off for. Instead embrace the rush with a few messages that pull out the excitement from those who got it and fuel them back to your channels to motivate those who did not. You’ll build up post-holiday purchases [hello targeted offer] and explode validating content to your networks, blog, and product pages with ease.

Of course being socially active on a major holiday via support and a few updates scores serious points with your customer base: it’s a double play or better.

Become a part of the gift experience today and give people a reason, and opportunity, to do the same

Gifts are special for everyone involved and yet so often go untapped as a source of discussion. By appealing to the excitement, and staying away from the sales push, there’s a lot of upside to be had in building buzz for 2012 and beyond. And remember, if you don’t gather the content today, you’ll be back in the same spot with big coupon offers and bright creative come 12 months from now.

The chief issue with a like, a retweet, or any other broadcast that is asked of a user is the endorsement behind it. Just as social has a code of conduct for brands engaging with consumers, the same exists for consumers engaging with each other. Posting to the wall and using a strong statement, each “like” is a statement. And not only do you have to get past that hurtle, but under the current feed systems, each action disappears off in minutes to a sea of new updates, photos and other likes leaving little long term connection outside of a smart counter.

But with Facebook’s new timeline feature and the apps that plug into it, the sharing game is in for a massive change.

As Facebook demonstrated with their launch partners at the recent f8 developer conference, a timeline app is an aggregation of activities from a particular site or tool that are individually less visible but collectively add up to reflect a part of someone’s life in their profile — whether it’s sharing a live playlist with spotify, last nights’ movie with Netflix, the current craft project, or even an automated stream from a vacation, apps will allow for users to associate activities as a part of their self identification.

Less visible & less significant, the opportunity for exposure will increase

The challenges to liking that I mentioned previously poses a significant barrier on many levels — users are selective about how many companies they like in total, how frequently they will add something new and even how they interact with sub-level pages like a brand vs an individual item for fear of overdoing it or being spammed by brands. By lowering the priority of each post and enabling more reasonable actions (reading, watching, listening to, researching, etc) it’s logical that users will become more willing to share and even allow for automated posting for trusted and appropriate tools.

In traditional advertising we consider repeated exposure vital to building up awareness and consideration so while these changes reduce the impact of any individual share action that is moved over to a timeline app, repetition is a worthy tradeoff for building social credibility.

Social has gone far beyond speeding up support inquiries or driving discussion n product launches, brand building is now really more “brand attachment” or the connection a brand is able to make, keep and show within a customer’s life. Timeline draws this evolution out literally and even further drives home the significance of moving from a buyer-supplier relationship to a partnership of sorts.

Early adopters will benefit significantly from viral effects.

While f8 outlined a few possibilities, there’s really no consumer facing brand that can’t find a way to bring themselves into a timeline.

The opportunity for timeline apps to is significant across many b2c and even b2b channels going from the very straight forward and “obvious” activities like a streaming service post to far more complex sharing like an update after a QR code scan or the departure of a plane.

Pulling in my own real world example, we see timeline as a game changing way to launch and build activity bringing gift related actions out from our standalone web and mobile platform and into a user’s existing social base without having to force (or build) a full app connection. With a simple confirmation, the wishlist picks, reviews and discussions around products created on our site live in a central place right where our user is most — Facebook. This in turn drives up repeated impressions which not only gives us the chance at growing our users but it helps the user fulfill their goal of getting their wishlist shared, seen and that gift purchased – it’s an action that we both want.

From my seat as both managing a consumer service and bringing brand marketing programs out, timeline apps are one of those changes that we will look back on and say “wow, that changed things” but I am eager to know what you think — is your team mapping out ideas, knee deep in code or holding on the sidelines to see if things shake out first?

Are the social tools we are using the right tools for our businesses?

Let’s start with a couple examples…

It’s Sunday afternoon and a man walks into Robins Brothers, “the world’s largest engagement ring store”. After having a great experience with the clerk and making a selection, he’s prompted to share the store by a kiosk on the door. Elated about the experience he quickly “validates” the store by liking it through Facebook. Before he makes the 5 minute drive home his soon-to-be fiancé’s friends have all posted back congratulating the two on an engagement that hasn’t happened. Whoops.

Fast forward a few days… the same man heads out with his [now] fiancé to watch a movie at the local theatre. The film is considered a “chick flick” but he likes it. After the movie, fandango asks him to post a review through his choice of social sites… all of which use his real name. Concerned from his last incident that he’ll get caught by his buddies he says nothing. Opportunity lost.

The next day the woman’s wife who works for a large corporation that was presented in the movie in a less than great way gets a call from her bosses’ boss asking about a comment she made about the brand integration on her new Twitter account.  Realizing that what she had said was public, she turns off the feed from the site where she posted to Twitter.

None of these are far fetched, in fact, they’re all based on real stories that have happened and you can bet there are millions more out there. From a casual comment on a “like” of a particular brand to noting a review on a product a friend would not have expected you to buy, people are increasingly aware of the association between their lives and their postings.

While there’s inherent benefits in forcing real identity around social content like accessing someone’s friend network, or even seeming necessity, like detailed commentary, that’s a pro we’ve created without necessarily considering the impact of the con.

Thus it comes down to a decision: more content or better validation.

Luckily most brands don’t have to pick one or the other. With a host of tools it’s possible to allow both sides and with tweaking, even seemingly open tools can be made rather private. For example, Facebook’s basic like button posts right to the wall while the much richer UI share widget allows the user to select to exclude or include friends. Simple messaging to explain this may encourage a user afraid of exposure to hit share.

Give people enough choice to decide what and how while matching their own need for privacy, all while encouraging them to influence others – which accomplish your goal of creating visibility and buzz, even if it’s not quite in the way you wanted.

This is an all too common tactical error that, as we become more connected, is having a greater bottom line impact.

1. Customers don’t operate on your 9-5: It’s a big world and people are not all located in your corporate time zone, that already sets the stage to be “unavailable” at times when you’re expected.

2. “After hours” can be the most important contact time. No one wants to work Friday afternoon but if you run a weekend focused business, that’s many people are most likely to reach out.

3. People “get stuff” on days off. Weekend birthday parties, christmas morning… these are often the biggest days for engagement as people, especially kids, students & young adults [who are of course extremely active online] are often gifted products. Gifts don’t tend to arrive Tuesday between 10 and 2.

4. A quick, off hours response says a lot about your brand and whether it’s a “congratulations” on the gift, a “we can help you with that tomorrow” or a “here’s some quick info”, it’s a major win at building loyalty and reducing flare ups.

It’s ok, heck it’s proper to have reasonable “offline” times. But as consumers take more control, their expectations have shifted and you stand to miss out by sticking to the hours that are easiest for you.

Instead, why not give your teams a little flexibility: leave early for that afternoon yoga class, take a morning hiking trip, but when you’re resting up this weekend, pop back on to Tweet deck and see what’s happening. It doesn’t take an entire split strategy shift to be active & catch the low hanging opportunity; it just takes thinking on a different term.

And as for that Hawaii boat operator, we went with another vendor, one who was around not in real time, but that weekend. That’s all it took.

Expertise in what the brand really stands for: employees know best

While corporate builds the brand strategy and sets a marketing tone, the truth is that all the store visits and surveys in the world don’t put us in the driver seat with the customer. Retail associates, shipping teams, customer support are already the face of your brand to your customers and the true experts on the pulse of the business. From a practical, when it comes to reaching people in a meaningful way, perspective your employees are your best assets as they live and breathe the true brand every day.

Expertise in how to use social: It’s a usage curve, not a training one.

One can say that only so-called experts should be putting messages out the public but let’s face it, social is new… evolving every day and is used by just about everyone so the learning curve to participating on a useful level is unlike any tactic before. Sure you have to figure out CoTweet, Buddy Media or a similar tool, learn the goals of a social campaign and the reason for authenticity but really it comes down to thinking like a customer, being willing to look at the brand from a new vantage point and not just as a marketer: then you can make an impact.

Guidance required: Setting the right tone

This does not mean giving free reign, doing that invites arguing, insider information, and a host of other problems but with logical guidance, rather than walls, programs like Twelpforce from BestBuy have shown, leveraging the mass employee base scales far better than any corporate managed program can.

Not just employees who contribute officially: Involvement is every mention

But of course not every employee is going to be out there advocating the brand on social channels in an attempt to become the next social media manager. Even then, there are three reasons why you should continue to let everyone log on, access farmville and tweet about their weekend plans.

First you have the opportunity of each person’s network — networking in the 21st century is as much about Facebook posts and +1s as it is sales events or conferences and every employee comes to you with a unique group to influence on many levels.  You see this when employees, far outside of marketing, talk about their great corporate culture, the latest products or even defend their brand. Within their influence circle, each employee becomes the voice of their brand. Take away access and you silence their ability, and desire to support.

Second you have information. Whether it’s an earthquake or a business trend, social is the fastest tool out there. It’s why we can stun our executive teams with the speed in which we discover relevant case studies or consumer insights and the same is true across the organization. With training rather than filtering, employees can tap in to this to understand what the brand is doing, their contacts at agencies, partner providers, even local competitors.

And there’s a danger to limits: Your own social backlash

Then there’s practical side. Block Facebook and Twitter online and people will turn to their phones. Block their phones and they miss out on what’s happening in their personal life. That breeds resentment which at best hurts your retention time (hi HR) and at worst leads to a lot of bad commentary on glass door and all over the social we as people get home and log back on. People are social beings so just as you don’t stop employees from a quick chat at the water cooler or a smoking break, you shouldn’t be slapping their hands to keep them off of social.

Open up and educate to benefit.

Whether it’s leveraging motivated employees to provide a face to the brand, influencing friend circles or simply giving employees enough respect to check in now and then, there’s great opportunity in opening up social to your entire organization and focusing on educating and training rather than limiting and penalizing.

If productivity stinks, Facebook is merely today’s outlet for free time, and a ban will not fix the problem anymore than removing the free water cooler.

You can’t claim engagement if you’re buying it

Whether it’s a flier in a newspaper with a Facebook coupon, a tv spot with a Twitter url for a contest or an outright offer to buy fandom with a deep discount (see “Did This National Restaurant Chain Put Too Much Love Into the Like?” by Jay Baer) the result a purchase of a like rather than a connection with a customer. As this sort of buying becomes more common place, it’s not surprising that even as brands talk about wonderful ideas like engaging and building community, research from the Get Satisfaction blog shows that 43.5% of consumers are following brands for offers — and why not, that’s what they’re being told they’ll get.

Already missing the mark on relevancy, social sites penalize poor relevancy

With hundreds of connections per user noise has become so high that systems like Facebook’s EdgeRank now exist to tune down what a user, their friends, and even the overall “like” audience see from a brand page. Even on systems like Twitter that don’t have scoring of responses, the mere amount of information makes the less than relevant disappear into the bottom of a long stream. Thus the more a brand buys it’s following, the less each follower sees, or cares to pay attention to the brand. This becomes a cold reality when you discover that some brands are suppressed to over 80% of their audience.

This doesn’t mean abandoning growth goals, but rather settingt expectations about what they lead too

A brand that decides “I’m going to go out and advertise my page to build up” is wrong to use the word engage to refer to that program. Conversation is gone and while the activity is on a social channel, it is as much broadcast marketing as an email list or a weekly mailer… Even worse with virtually no segmentation offered by social networks, the existing loyal fan base is lumped in with the prospecting effort. Everyone becomes one jumbled mess.

On the other hand, a brand that says let’s insert a flier with orders to share a comment, or posts a sign inside our stores with a mention that you’ll find expert product insights, company updates and occasional offers on their social pages is building the expectation of dialogue and is attracting loyalty and certainly customers. A discount may be associated but the qualification is that you want to be an insider, a participant first, and get a little something in return for it in access and savings.

Bigger counts do not actually mean bigger reach or results

It’s a critical realization and once you step down the paid like road it’s very difficult to get back up the relevancy ladder.

View of Yosemite Falls and the Valley from from Glacier Point

As the photo above shows, my view right now is pretty impressive… In many ways it’s easy to think of this setting as completely detached from the world of social marketing or brand but as I listen to the conversations of the people around me they tell a different story: first a remark on the view, then a comment on how great it is to get away from it all followed by a quip about their energy drink, the new shoes they’re breaking in for the hike down, the car trip for those who drove in. Truth is, for better or worse, products are a part of our everyday lives and they don’t get talked about simply on a public Twitter stream – they get brought up in context.

Whether its chit chat on a 4-mile hike to reach an amazing view like this one or on a closed Facebook group, most of the conversations that happen about our brands takes place in a world which we as marketers have no direct access to. Yet in an attempt to become more transparent by speaking to customers, we’ve unwittingly backed into a corner and become stuck on only what is right in front of us — monitoring and “owning” the public conversations but missing the big opportunity.

Rather than focusing on what’s “in the open” and trying to be the master of every conversation, it’s best to focus on the power advocacy can bring to all mediums – whether it’s responding to a late night plea for support, sharing a review, or combating a negative belief in the line at the cafeteria. A trusted friend tops any other marketing, social included, and it doesn’t care what channel or privacy rules apply to the conversation.

Next time you’re out of your controlled environment, whether it’s a camp ground or an amusement park, listen to what’s being said about products & brands and ask yourself not how you could be speaking in that conversation but rather how you could win the attention of one of the participant’s time so they speak for you, or at least about you.

[This post was recorded on the trail to Glacier Point 7/16/2011 and typed up later. Thanks iTalk!]

Just because you have data doesn’t mean you know the full story

Since the banner first hit the web marketers have been stuck in the same paradigm – the data is there so measure it. And why not, with data coming in seconds rather than days or even weeks, the temptation to assume it’s all right there is great. Yet we’ve started to learn that people are using multiple ads, are narrowing in with many searches over time and conversions are taking longer and longer as the web becomes a corner stone of shopping. Single metrics are dangerous.

The opportunity cost of using social media only to acquire

Instead digital marketing, and even more so social media, must be looked at as holistic program that is as much a necessity as creating brand awareness and consideration is.

Some 70% of Americans say they consult product reviews or consumer ratings before making a purchase, according to an October 2008 survey by Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates

One could look at driving user reviews as an acquisition effort. There’s an audience to target, an expense to drive, host and promote reviews and a lift associated with a product that has them over one that does not. But it’s deeper than that.

When the majority of your customers are seeking reviews it’s not just about what you can increment, it’s about what you stand to lose. If you opted not to push for reviews because you couldn’t justify the cost on new sales, you risk all sales, not just new ones as people turn to other sites or product lines that offer the support they’ve come to expect. That’s not captured in lift metrics.

There are no longer channels, even tactics outside of marketing, must complement to earn a sale

Your investments into all forms of media drive people back to you or your partner’s digital properties for research.  Just like with reviews, if someone who uses Twitter sends a message for pre-sales questions and gets nothing… not a customer support message, not a suggestion of a peer to peer area, just silence. That speaks volumes about what your brand will be like after they buy.

This extends to all channels… after being intrigued by a radio spot and going a company’s website a user who discovers a blog about the culture and expertise becomes a great choice, even a premium value, while the other company that just promotes their tradeshow booth feels empty, or “salesy”. Customers don’t care which channel gets attribution for the sale, they simply look for validation – a good buy or a bad one.

Let’s not forget the brand awareness opportunity either

This isn’t just about tactics that support a product purchase on the front end either. Just like TV is run on a negative upfront ROI basis to produce over the long haul, a social campaign can have the same value.

750 million people on Facebook outrank major sports events, dramas or reality tv, and they’re around just about every day. So if a customer goes knocking on your Facebook page and it isn’t there, or isn’t doing a good job of holding their attention when they “fan” up, that’s a wasted opportunity. But with social this isn’t just prospective awareness, this is true engagement opportunity where a good program can have that person showing affinity and even spreading it. How does that factor in to upfront sales?

Measure but measure the right picture

By no means do I advocate stopping or backing off on measuring your campaigns but instead it’s about making sure you understand their full impact and measure that. The problem with data is that we tend to focus on what we have easily available, and that’s new customers who come in directly or old ones who stay attached… but engagement, validation, cross-channel sales, and many of the other components of social are not easily studied and thus they are skipped and that not only short changes your programs but opens the door to cutting something that’s far more important than you may realize.