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I wonder why so many companies have yet to embrace a social media strategy. There seems an abundance of research suggesting the impact of online comments and reviews has a significant effect on the buying psyche of readers. No more more so that the travel and hospitality industry. Think about this ... you want to go and stay at a hotel in Beijing or Tokyo. You then browse the reviews online and start to read some horror stories about the very hotel you had considered staying. Doubt will set in and at worst (for the hotelier) you change your hotel.

According to TripAdvisor, a property’s response to criticism can have more influence on traveler decisions than the criticism itself. Hoteliers have a chance to redeem themselves, yet the vast majority chooses to remain silent, willfully allowing reputation and business to suffer. Granted, not all review sites allow hotel responses. Online travel agencies posted three times as many hotel reviews than traveler review sites last year, yet whereas Ctrip, eLong, Expedia and Hotels.com allow responses, Priceline and Travelocity don’t, effectively shutting hotels out of the conversation.

Given their influence on purchase intent and the buying cycles, I would argue every organization needs to determine a process for discovery and engagement (responding to comments/reviews in this case). It’s time for companies to make more time for monitoring and responding to public feedback.

Daniel Eward Craig in his post "Best Practices for Responding to Online Hotel Reviews" provides some example responces for reviews to minimize damage and cast your business  in a more positive light (those are indented below). These are focused on the travel/hospitality area but lessons can be learned for others in areas such as retail or food/beverage.

It is important to highlight that each company will have a different approach to addressing social media comments and reviews, so I recommend answering these questions based on your own company guidelines and against a strategic plan.

Should I respond to all reviews?

This is an interesting question and one that is posed on most of our consulting projects. The responce is that you should respond to any feedback that is potentially damaging to your company’s reputation. This can take the form of a simply acknowledge of the issue and can be an apologizy. Just consider this from your own perspective.... if you see an unanswered complaint or review... it makes you think that this could possiblity be true or at least have some basis.

Another type of review is the positive one. These are great to see as someone working in the company but more importantly these can go a long way by turning a fan into a fanatic. For example, we conducted a Accor Hotel campaign where people were trying to win a trip to Sydney and though this campaign we had one particualr person create some very positive comments. So rather than just expressing appreciation we reached out and rewarded them with a dinner for two. They did not expect this and it was out of the blue. The result was having this person continue to post interesting news and information related to Accor Hotels. At the very minium I would suggest a private note of thanks.

Bad response: “It is with tremendous joy that I read your most gracious remarks regarding our cherished employees, who take immense pride in pleasing our valued customer …”

 

Better response: “Thank you for your wonderful remarks, which I have shared with our staff. We are thrilled to hear that you enjoyed our service, and look forward to welcoming you back soon.”

Who should respond?

Another important consideration within any social media guidelines. I would suggest that the comments and reviews are given a kind of rating score. This score then determines the level of responce. So for example, reviews that are promoting for further information or have mis-information can be addressed in one way. The more hostile, deflamitory comments may need a different level of manager to review the reply or some system of further monitoring to ensure it is appropaitely addressed.

Bad response: “How dare you insult my company! I spit on your mother’s grave!”

 

Better response: “We welcome all constructive criticism, as it helps us to improves systems and processes.”

When should I respond?

The timeframe question.... as a rule, the sooner the better. The longer a complaint is left online the more folks that will see it in the site or via a search querry.  There is already a litinay of negitve comments found when doing a search on Baidu or Google. Most not having a response or visible action to addressing these.

Search engines have made poor or negitive reviews easy to find. It used to be that reviews posted into a review site were walled, meaning only people within that site could see and read these reviews. However, many of these sites are allowing the crawling of their content by the search engines and this means front and center and in view of a much wider audience.  In practice, taking a proactive and timely approach will mitigate many of the potential issues.

The greatest challenge is knowing where the reviews are being posted. I recommend a reputation management tool like SinoBuzz (which is developed by SinoTech Group), which will monitor the web for mentions of your company on all social media platforms (in both Chinese and English) and deliver a daily summary to your desktop via an RSS feed, an email or through their online platform. This is an enterprise solution that automatically determines sentiment (toneism) but for a free solution, Google Alerts will surfice.

Bad response: “I would have appreciated it if you had brought this issue to my attention sooner..... ”

 

Better response. “You will be happy to know that, as a result of your feedback, we have implemented the following changes …”

What should I say?

Making a decision to respond to a comment or review obligates you to investing time to ensure you articultate a well worded responce. Don't make the situation worse and provide a poorly worded response. Something that I think is very poor is the use of auto responding bots... I belive your readers will be put off by auto replies, and a don't just use a standard template with a few changed words as this will go down badly if the community clue's into this..... I also think that paying for comments has more downsides than up so consider this carefully before moving down this path. It was a practice used widely by some PR firms but thankfully seems to be fading.

Bad response. “Let’s try to avoid accusations, shall we, you said 'our service was the worst experience EVER!’ Yes, we dropped the ball, but we had two employees call in sick and you didn't make a reservation.’”

 

Better response: “Clearly we were not performing at our usually high standards that morning, and for that I sincerely apologize. I have reviewed your feedback in detail with our restaurant manager.”

Companies should have a plan in place and respond according to whether the problem is an isolated event or situation, a systemic problem or a personal issue, such as with a disgruntled customer who has a need for attention or a desire to bait the retailer. So where do people need to start? The first thing is discovering where the comments and reviews are being posted.  This discovery process  is a core competency that all marketers must master. Without good discovery & listening skills, marketers will not be able to effectively use social media to engage their customers.

Additional Reading: Best and Worst Practices Social Media Marketing by Lee Odden