It’s a great concept, really. In case you didn’t know, you have 10 “Best Ever” medals to award to your most beloved places, from your favorite coffee shop to your cable company. You may be able to go around handing out 5 star reviews to hundreds of businesses, but not so with medals. However, if you find a new place you love even more than the last, don’t worry—you can remove and reassign your medals. If your business receives—and keeps—a “Best Ever” medal, consider it an achievement.

If you’ve made it a point to follow all of Google’s frequent product updates, you might already be using medal ratings, or you at least know where to find them. Most of you who are familiar with Google Places probably recognize the reviews section. When you visit a business’s Google Places listing, you can leave a review if you’re signed into your Google account and have created a Google Places profile for leaving ratings. You can leave star ratings from 1-5 and you can also include longer reviews if you feel like it.

But you can’t leave a “Best Ever” review from the main listing page (or on your iPhone app). You also can’t leave “Best Ever” reviews by clicking on Google Places in your list of products, because it takes you here:

Because you are trying to leave ratings, not create your own business listing, the best way to access the Google Places dashboard where you can leave “Best Ever” reviews is by going directly to http://www.google.com/places/.  I mean, I could go into using the now technically defunct Google Hotpot, but to keep it simple, just take my advice and memorize the Google Places URL. Or bookmark it.

You should see this screen after going to the main Places URL. Click on the blue “Start rating” button on the left.

After you hit the blue button, you should see this screen. Once you’re here, you can finally start awarding those coveted “Best Ever” medals.

So, the next time you’re getting ready to leave yet another 5 star review for a place that you feel actually deserves a little bit more, remember the medals. And businesses, take note…it’s not quite as easy for someone to leave a “Best Ever” rating, and to make the top 10, services and products should be great, not just good.

Kristen Watson

Kristen Watson is a Search Marketing Associate at Direct Online Marketing.

Twitter - More Posts

Similar to Facebook and Twitter, your channel now has a feed. Your channel feed displays any content you decide to share. Any of your interactions, such as comments, uploads, favorites, and likes are automatically posted to your channel feed. Additionally, your subscribers are able to view your activities on their homepages.

Your YouTube channel feed allows you to manually post your own updates and activity as well. Interestingly, posts don’t have to be linked to any YouTube content, although they do give you the option. The YouTube channel feed appears to be similar to Facebook and Twitter feeds, so it isn’t exactly innovative in concept, but it’s a nice addition for those who enjoy sharing.

To edit your channel and change settings, simply click on the “Edit Channel” button in the top left corner. You can make changes to your channel’s appearance by adding an avatar and background image or color. However, the most important option found in the Appearance section is the “Switch back to the old channels design” button. If you hate the new look (after giving it a fair chance, of course), simply click the button to revert your channel back to the old version. It’s extremely easy.

Are you going to make the switch and start using the Feed?

Kristen Watson

Kristen Watson is a Search Marketing Associate at Direct Online Marketing.

Twitter - More Posts

I’m writing this today as I have just finished writing a letter of commendation to a couple people on behalf of Detective Burns of the Charleston (WV) Police Department who went above and beyond the call of duty.  I figured he deserved some praise on the ‘net in addition to written letters to his boss and the Mayor.

Additionally, I’m hoping that it will provide some information in case you find yourself in a similar situation as it turned out to be incredibly difficult for a lay person – especially one who did not know him – to track this person down.  Also, I hope it serves as a public shaming for twitter for their callousness in lack of response.

Backstory: The Suicide Threat

Without getting into details about the person, as I said, we received notification of the suicide threat on twitter.  Without getting into it, I was reasonably sure the person was on twitter.  I had a name that might or might not be correct (it was), and if the picture was of him, I could roughly guess his age.  That was it.

My first call was to the Suicide Prevention Hotline: 1-800-273-8255 figuring they had dealt with this sort of thing before.  They were of no help, which was really a bit scary.

Then I called my local (Wheeling, WV) police department.  Incredibly nice, but didn’t see anyone in their database with that name and couldn’t help.

So then I tried to track down a phone number to twitter, which is no easy task.  With enough digging, you can find an email address – help@twitter.com, to which I submitted an email.  After a couple bad phone numbers, I eventually found one that worked: 415-222-9670.  You won’t get anyone live, but you do have an option for law enforcement (#1), so I left a message as well.  Additionally, I mentioned them on my own twitter feed in the hope they might see that.

Twitter never responded and I doubt ever looked into.  I get they’re busy.  But this is potentially a matter of life and death.  I was crushed at work that day, but still took out 3 hours.  If there is any sort of protocol – which again, I doubt – they failed miserably.  That’s why I titled this post as such.  While suicide is in no way a joking manner, my hope is an inflammatory post may get them to rethink how they handle such requests in the future.  And for that matter, the Suicide Prevention folks, although that may be as simple as reaching out to facebook, twitter, MySpace, et al, to develop some procedures.

In the meantime, this person changed his display name, took the account private, then deleted it entirely.  I had written down the display name, so I had that, but I did not screen cap his followers / following, so I had no way to reach out to people that knew him and could check on him. This would be my #1 recommendation in the future to do that quickly and send out some quick check-ins with those folks. 

Finally, I called the Charleston WV police just as kind of a last effort.  It took me forever to get someone on the line no matter what phone # I tried – truly disheartening – but I did eventually get hooked up with a Detective Burns (sp?).  The detective is their internet crimes guy.  When I asked if he had to deal with really awful child porn type cases, he casually replied that he had some up on one of his screens right then.  I cannot imagine how awful of a job that is and sincerely thank Det.  Burns and everyone in law enforcement that deals with those evil people.

Through some well, detective work, Det. Burns finally tracked down the young man, then followed up with me letting me know everything was okay.  So for this, I salute you, Det. Burns.

What to Do If Someone You See Threatens Suicide on Twitter

I’m sure there isn’t a one-size fits all solution, but based on my experience, here’s what I’d do:

1. Screenshot at least a page worth of:

1. Their tweets (so you can see with whom they’ve interacted recently)
2. Their followers
3. Whom they are following

Hopefully one day there will be a useful way to contact twitter and the Suicide Prevention folks and enlist their help.

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

“That was quick,” I thought to myself.  Facebook forced recommendations in the upper right hand corner of business pages only back in July.  I was guessing they just received a lot of negative feedback from big advertisers who were tired of trying to police their pages from facetious recommendations.  Like, say, ESPN (and trust me, this is just one of many examples – you could do a drinking game hitting refresh and looking for sarcastic recommendations):

Turns out if you click on the link can read, they’re only getting rid of facebook Reviews and Discussions “tabs.”  I think it’s cute they’re still officially referred to as tabs even though they’ve been nothing but really menu items since facebook’s layout change.

So instead of cowing to advertiser complaints and removing negative discussion from being so visible, facebook has moved in the opposite direction making it (and positive discussion) more in your face.

Fare thee well, Reviews and Discussions.  We hardly knew ye.

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

Actually, I meant Pittsburgh Pirates, but we do celebrate International Talk Like a Pirate Day around these seas.

If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile or have spoken to me ever, you probably know one thing about me: I’m obsessed (cursed?) with the Pirates.

If you know a second thing, it’s how strongly I feel all businesses need to understand how their online reputation can either help them get more business or have money snatched out of their tills.

Last week we updated you on a sea change for how Google now handles outside reviews.  Namely: it no longer lists them on the Places pages themselves.  Google said it’s because of recent feedback; others say it’s to deal with long-standing complaints from review sites like Yelp; others are speculating it’s due to a recent FTC probe into their business practices (including specifically about how it handles 3rd party reviews in Places).

Likely it’s a combination of all three and other reasons.  Ironically about the FTC probe, if Google’s successful with building the community of artists formerly known as Hotpot and continuing to grow reviews, I think they’ll gain a bigger monopoly than if it continued to show reviews from sites like TripAdvisor.

Any way, Google’s stance is that it has taken down third party reviews from Places Pages, which it has done.  You won’t see ratings or reviews on individual Places Pages.

However – outside third party reviews are still appearing in some snippets for Places listings within Maps results.  Here’s one example of what is clearly identified as an InsiderPages review:

It appears (I’ve done a little digging, but wouldn’t call the research exhaustive by any stretch) that this is happening when Google Places previously displayed a review from an outside source and there are no current Google account reviews.

I can see how that would happen from a technical standpoint, but just think it’s kind of weird – or an oversight – that you’re seeing that information in the snippets.

As a business owner, you need to be aware these 3rd party reviews could still be haunting or helping you in this way.  However, you’ve already been focusing on increasing reviews on Google Places, so it shouldn’t be affecting you, right?

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

Of course we were going to pull this pic. We've only seen this ad 13,440 times. Yes, we counted.

If you weren’t paying attention last week you missed that Google Places has dropped 3rd party review ratings and stars from its pages.  That meant for many companies going from a dozen reviews to 0-1 or from hundreds to a handful.  Which makes this a big deal.

But what exactly does it mean for you and your Places Page?

Outside Reviews Still Matter

It appears – and only makes sense – that Google is still using reviews and ratings from sites like Yelp, Yahoo! Local, Insider Pages, Citysearch, and dozens of others to determine how high your Places Page should rank for searches along with the other variables in their local algorithm.  Just because they pulled them off their pages, doesn’t mean that they no longer matter to how well you do in Google’s map results.

Third Party Reviews Still Easily Accessible from Google

Just because the reviews won’t appear on the page itself, Google will still link out to some of them.  Here’s one example:

So even if you don’t think that your clients and potential customers ever visit a particular review site, they can still get there very easily from your Google Places Page.

Update 1: Just as important – Google may show star ratings directly within its main Web results for other sites as well, such as Yelp.  Here’s one sample picked up today for Yahoo!  Funny to think of Yahoo! previously being their biggest competitor and now Yahoo! allowing users to sign in with Google accounts and Google showing star ratings from Yahoo! sites:

Update 2: 3rd party reviews are not removed from all things Google Places yet.

Getting Actual Google Reviews More Important Than Ever

Whenever speaking, I tell a story of a friend who moved to Mississippi and needed to buy a big-ticket appliance.  Based on a coworker’s recommendation, he decided where he was going to buy it.  Right before leaving his apartment to pick it up, he decided he’d better check his hours to make sure it was still open.  He did a branded search (meaning he looked them up by name) and saw a one-star rating.  So then he started reading reviews, reviews that were really awful.  So he took his key back out the door, sat down and started researching a new place to buy, in essence taking several hundred dollars out of the till from the original store.

Those star ratings are huge – look at this example:

Which local listings draw your eye?  Which ones are you likely to click to learn more about?

If you don’t have many reviews from Google users on your places page, you need to start getting them now.  As several dealers told Cars.com, it’s not just about preventing lost sales from negative reviews – it’s about gaining new leads and sales from showing off great reviews.

Have a Good, All-Encompassing Reputation Management Plan

A word of caution here: the temptation for many companies will be to just chase after Google reviews and stop worrying about other review sites like Judy’s Book, Kudzu, and various yellow pages sites.  While I agree that – depending on your particular situation – getting Google reviews up to snuff becomes your #1 priority short-term, nothing replaces having a strong online reputation management plan.  And that starts with providing great experiences to your customers and encouraging them to tell their stories.

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

Facebook has had Reviews for business pages for quite some time, but just last week* launched Recommendations.

* Don’t hold me to that time frame.  I started this post right after I first saw the addition, but it’s been sitting in draft mode for some time.  My beard isn’t touching the desk, so I’m pretty confident it’s a 2011 thing.

So what are facebook Recommendations and how do they differ from Reviews?  Well, personification of rhetorical device for writing this post, I’m glad you asked.

What are Facebook Recommendations?

Let’s start with the basics. When you go to a facebook page (as opposed to a profile – you can’t recommend Aunt Mable for her famous chili con queso), you’ll see  a “Recommend This Place widget over on the right hand side, like this:

If you choose to recommend a page, you simply write whatever you’d like in the recommendation box, choose whom you want to see it (everyone by default), then hit the recommend button.

But maybe you don’t want everyone to see it – no worries.  You have several options as you can see here:

Here are your sharing options:

• Everyone
• Friends Only
• Friends of Friends
• Only Me
• Specific Friends (enter manually)
• Your Networks

You can also choose to hide from particular people.  This can come in handy when you want to recommend that cleaning service that you didn’t tell your spouse about and s/he thinks it’s you doing all the work.

The recommendations will then show up in the same spot on the right hand side with the recommender’s profile pic, name, and comment.  If their network has left comments or liked the recommendation, you can see this here, too.

As a page admin, you can’t remove the option for people to recommend your place.  You probably wouldn’t want to do this anyway unless you’re experiencing a healthy dose of sarcastic reviews. And if you don’t think that’s a potential issue, check out these “recs” for ESPN.

Speaking of which, you can’t actually even see a recommendation unless it’s marked for everyone or you happen to be in the recommender’s list of friends or other settings as marked.

If an individual recommendation is marked to be viewed by all, you can see it and you can hide it from appearing on your page – just hover over the recommendation and click on the x like you would to remove a comment.

To learn more, you can read facebook’s official explanation.

How are Facebook Recommendations Different from Reviews?

In a few ways, including:

• Location.  Recommendations appear in the upper right.  A link for reviews (if not hidden) appears on the left hand side where you can click to read on a separate page.
• Reach.  Reviews are left for everyone on the business’ page.  You can do that with a recommendation, but you can also make it more personal and just show to certain users.
• Format.  Reviews have comments and star ratings; recommendations just comments.
• Commenting & Liking.  Anyone can comment or like a review, but only people within that person’s network can comment or like a recommendation.

When you want to leave a review, you simply click on the link if you have that option for a page.  (If they do have it, you can also just add “?sk=reviews” to the end of the url.)  Then give it a star rating and leave your comment:

And if your page is popular, you’ll get all sorts of reviews – positive, negative, and spam links to chat rooms from women with interesting…profiles.  Like Starbucks does!

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

Update: Google has emailed all or at least a healthy majority of its advertisers announcing the +1 button coming to ads, so looks like it’s ready to leave experimental land.  One line stood out in the form email: “The final landing page URL of your ads can also appear on the Google profile of any user who +1’s your ad.”  Guess that’s so they can argue there is some benefit.

Before I delve into +1 for AdWords, let me preface with two thoughts:

1. I don’t see +1 getting wide adoption, period.  The reason facebook like buttons became so prevalent is because they tie into an integral function on a social network where people have real social interaction.  People don’t have that same community with Google outside of geeks like us.  Therefore I’m guessing +1 dodo’s out like other Google forays into social like Wave and Buzz.*
2. I’m usually wrong in these predictions.

* If you’re thinking Buzz isn’t dead, you’re technically right, much like you would be if you said cassette tapes aren’t dead.  But they’re a shell of themselves.  I also allow that Google Buzz could make a major comeback if Google ever figures out social.  They’re making good in roads via local, so all hope isn’t lost.

The Basics of +1 for Google AdWords

For the time being, +1 is something you have to sign into your account to see and go to Google Experiments and opt in to the experiment.  It’s browser dependent and doesn’t work with certain ones like IE7.  You may also have to clear your cache if you’re seeing messages like “The experiment you’re trying to access is no longer available. Go to experiments overview.”

Once you get it working, you should see a grayed-out +1 logo next to search results – both paid and natural like this:

If you scroll over any listing or ad, then the +1 box motions in some color, which at the end looks like this:

Then, if you choose to plus one the ad or result, it’ll appear in dark colors with a notice reminding you you have +1′d the result / ad and allowing you to undo it.  If this is the first time you’ve done a plus-one, it will give you a pop up explaining what it means, how your name will appear next to it publicly, and if you’d like to continue.

If you’re wondering if you should opt-in or opt-out of +1, quit wondering.  You don’t have any choice.  Google’s just going to do it – and it might not be consistent.

They say not to worry and from a cost standpoint, you don’t have to – they’re not charging you for +1′s.  Also as of right now, it doesn’t affect your ad’s quality score (although it does affect natural rankings).  But who’s to say it won’t in the future?  I’d argue it’s ripe for gaming for both SEO and paid search, but certainly Google has a lot of engineers and resources at its disposal to check for these signals.

If you’d like more info, you can check out this Google AdWords post about +1.

Why +1 for AdWords is a Terrible Idea

My main beef with +1 for AdWords is that it becomes a popularity contest.  Google’s theory is that it will be used by people as a recommending tool.  But what’s more likely is that it will be judging ads themselves and not the advertiser or its products / services.

We all like to talk about and vote on what the best Superbowl commercials are each year.  How do most of us do it?  Which one was the funniest or most emotional without offending our sensibilities.  But do those ads move product?  Make you actually remember the brand or, heaven forbid, think about going online or to the store to purchase or learn more?  You might like that new Doritos ad, but hate the taste of their nacho cheesy goodness (how dare you!?!).

Put aside the potential for gaming the system, that’s what concerns me about the +1.  I’m not getting too worked up about it, because I don’t see it gaining too much traction, but if it does, color me very worried. Because if you need to be funny at the expense of selling to get better positions and cheaper clicks, doesn’t that defeat the whole point of advertising on AdWords?

If I were going to ask for anything, it would be the -1 button.  As much as I’d like an unlike button for facebook, the -1 would have even more value for ads.

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

JS: One of the things I thought was interesting is that you have a partnership with Bazaarvoice, is that correct?

Nick: Yes.

JS: Have they had to scrub much so far in terms of profanity or some of those other things or have they not really had to remove many reviews so far?

Nick: The amount of reviews that they are scrubbing hasn’t changed much since we’ve launched. I looked today and I think we’re at about 14% that are being kicked back. I’m actually pretty happy with that because it shows that yes, we are finding things that we don’t want and are rejecting them but it’s not been overwhelmingly so.

JS: I would imagine, I’m trying to put myself in your shoes, are you kind of learning as you go along with seeing the kickbacks and changing your stance on things and modifying what you want to see and what you don’t want to see or are you like, ‘here are our guidelines and here’s what we’re sticking with?’

Nick: We’ve definitely been tweaking some things and I think one of the big things we’ve seen, and Bazaarvoice has been great – they do a lot of fantastic moderation, but one of the things that we’ve seen is that the dealer business is so different from a lot of other industries that we have found that we have to tweak some things over time, but more along the lines of really understanding that here is the type of experience that would lead me, as a car buyer, to leave a review.

So, I think one of the best examples that I’ve seen is that on most review sites, when you’re reviewing a product – a physical product – you don’t want to include that I got something that would indicate that I got X number of dollars off the deal because you’re reviewing the store or the deal. And what we’ve been seeing is we get a pretty substantial number of reviews that call out specific things like that. It’s one of those gray areas that we’re taking a look and trying to figure out what makes the most sense in our world because for the most part I say that we probably all know someone who has gone to a dealership and got a fantastic deal and they immediately came back and said, ‘oh my gosh, you should shop at this store because they gave me $400 off’ or whatever it was. We want to make sure that we encourage people to leave those types of reviews while also not setting a certain expectation that it’s always going to be done this exact way for every person who comes into that store.

JS: Ruins their leverage to be able to do those types of things. Do you have a breakdown of what percentage have been kicked out for being spam, you know some evil person in my industry automated that’s trying to build links vs completely flaming vs….

Nick: I don’t have anything that I can quote off the top of my head but I do know that I’ve looked pretty closely and I really haven’t seen very much spam at this point mostly it’s about specific content rather than the same review being posted over and over again by the same person …that type of stuff.

JS: Do you have stuff in place to kick stuff out for dealers trying to game the system, not for negative reviews, but trying to get people to leave good, fake astroturf?

Nick: Absolutely. It’s the first thing that brought up when we talk to site users or the dealers. And it goes both ways. It’s this fear that:

1. How do you make sure that a dealer is not leaving a lot of negative reviews, followed by ‘How do I make sure that the dealer down the road isn’t coming in each morning and telling his salespeople that they’re going to leave five glowing reviews today just to build up our volume.’ So there are a couple different things that we do and you’ll see this when you look at the screen shot [see below], we do ask whenever someone leaves a review, the last question that we ask is a check a box to certify that they’re not employed by a dealership. I realize that’s not going to catch everyone, but we do want to make sure that right off the bat that we are asking the question to make sure that people understand that if you are a dealer, leaving a review, we are going to pay very, very close attention to it and you really shouldn’t be using it for that.

JS: Because you have a little bit of a hammer that you could bring down on someone for doing that.

Nick: Exactly. It gives us the ability to come back and say, ‘you know what, you certify that you weren’t a dealership, but your IP address indicates that you are so we’re going to do something with this.’

The other thing that we do is we require that each and every review goes through a validation process by the person who wrote it before we even look at it. The example that I use, is that if I’m at work and I’m bored and I am going to go write 20 bogus reviews, I’m going to get 20 different emails, and I have to open up each and every one and validate it and say yes, indeed I did write this and I did mean to send it. So, as a first step if we get 20 reviews, we do take a look at where the reviews are coming from so we do have some threshold there that will kick-off something that says, ‘you know what this is a little suspicious or we just don’t want this at all.’

JS: I can understand why you might not want to disclose any of this information, but can you talk about anything that you have in place to guard against astroturfing or false-flaming or anything like that?

Nick: What I can talk about is pretty standard from what I’ve heard in the industry is to pay very, very close attention to the IP address of any dealership. I know some folks who go to the trouble of specifically collecting the IP address of every dealership and for other folks who just pay attention to once a response is written, capture the IP address and then sort-of flag that for any reviews that come later on. So, we do similar stuff there because we do want to make sure we are paying very, very close attention to. Once we feel like something is coming from a dealership, we don’t other different types of content coming from someone who may have a biased viewpoint there.

JS: Have you had any feedback…one of the things that … and almost everyone deals with this because anyone who has reviews, like you said, some kind of IP check…something along those lines, but one of those throwing the baby out with the bathwater type of issues, at least from my perspective, is that it’s really convenient if a dealer can just leave up a computer and have the new car buyer talk about their experience, right there in the moment.

Nick: It’s one of the hardest things in the world and it comes up so often and it’s such a great idea, you know ‘I’m in the store, I’m buying a car, I’m sitting there waiting for the financing to go through (or whatever it is)’, and they say, ‘why don’t you go ahead and leave a review for me while you’re here.’ We would love to be able to do it, it’s just that the number one concern, from both site users and dealers was that we’re filtering out those false-positives. We’ve suggested some things and I had one dealer come up to me at NADA this year and he actually suggested that he was going to create an entirely separate network at his store to have a separate IP address just so people could still leave reviews, but they would always be replying on different machines. I thought that was interesting.

JS: But, would he be recycling the IP address?

Nick: No, so he was actually talking about setting up an entirely different network with a different IP address that he would be paying extra money to support; just to be able to capture those on site.

JS: But, you would still see that there would be multiple, multiple, multiple entries from the same IP address.

Nick: You would, and that’s the type of thing that would have to be worked out with the concept of ‘how can I really verify that they have this kiosk in the store.’ And that’s something that I called out to him and I think that’s it’s something that we could probably do if we have someone going to that extent to keep things pure, but initially it would flag something on our side and probably other places to say that the volume coming in from one location is abnormally high. That’s where you would look at voice, you look at dates they came in, you look at scores…things like that.

JS: Makes sense. This is one of the most fascinating areas so I really appreciate you giving some thoughts on that. We have kind of talked about the dealers’ fears….How do you compare yourselves to a Yelp or Google Places or something like that?

Nick: And I kind of make a distinction between those two because Google is such a aggregator of all of the content that’s out there; usually the question that I’ll get is comparing us to Dealer Rater is the big one that comes up. Usually what I tell folks is that our goal was not to set ourselves up as a competitor to any of those sites. Typically when I talk to a dealer I tell them ‘the more places you have positive reviews out there, the better off you’re going to be.’ Because then, wherever people go, because we know people love Yelp, so all the more reason to have positive reviews there. The more places you have reviews, the more likely you are to catch all those various users across sites and see ‘yes, I’m going to have a positive experience at this store.’

I think this is one of the things that I strongly believe you want the content across as many places as possible and that’s when you start playing into Google, as they aggregate from every where, so once they see that there are enough reviews out there, all of a sudden on your Places page, you have a great amount of content, coming all across the Internet. All the more reason for who sees you on Google, says ‘you know what, I am ready to work with this store.’

Going further, I actually do suggest to folks who say ‘why should I be driving volume to Cars.com, rather than Yelp or Google or to Dealer Rater or wherever.’ I tell them, ‘you know, if you’re driving volume to three places just make us the fourth one.’ Again, it’s a win because they have more content out there. But I am not in any way trying to tell them that they should drive traffic to Cars.com because we have found that when people find the sites they like that’s the site they want to leave review content on. And that’s not a bad thing, whatsoever.

Really though, what we look at is, the story I always tell is one of our affiliate sales managers here told me back in December that she was shopping for a car, and she obviously went to Cars.com, she found the exact type of car she wanted. She then narrowed it down, she found the specific vehicle she wanted and she found the dealership where she thought she wanted to shop at, and then she left our site to go do additional research about that dealership. So, I just look at it as the more ways you can integrate that fantastic review content, where people are already digesting other information, the better off you’re going to be. And that’s really the whole reason we started getting into this. I say that the more places there are reviews out there, the better it is for everyone …. It’s just a huge win.

JS: Along those lines, do you have any agreements or discussions with Google Places, with Yahoo! Local, with bing Local, any of those places to use your material?

Nick: We have. I think what you’ll find with most of those places is that they all have their secret sauce and their own way of doing things, but typically the understanding is that you have to build up a certain amount of volume to be viewed as a credible source on this type of content, so we know that once we hit that it will be a lot easier to be aggregated, but our goal is certainly that once we have the volume we will make whatever site tweaks that we need to in order to be included in the aggregation.

JS: So, you definitely want to be included in the aggregation.

Nick: Absolutely. If it gets the content out there, it adds to the SEO value, so we definitely want that out there.

JS: Is there anything else you’d like to add as we wrap up the end of this?

Nick: The more places that content is our there, the better. We are certainly trying to encourage our dealers to view this as it’s an opportunity to really take control of what’s being said about you out there, so we’ve gone to the lengths of trying to provide them with various materials they can use in-store to drive volume. And again, I typically say, ‘if you’re already doing something, if you have banners for a different location, that’s fine. Just add us to the mix, one way or another. But you are driving the volume.’

I really look at it from a dealer perspective and one of the stories I heard from one of the dealers is that they’re viewing reputation management and reviews as a lead generator. So, what they do is look at it and track the number of phone calls they get, specifically from reviews, and they pay attention to the facts of how much more money can they make based on the fact that they have this great reputation that’s out there in the field. So, I’m just trying to convince people and say that this is a really good thing, assuming you really take advantage of it and you really start playing up your positive reputation, the better off it’s going to be for you.

JS: It’s interesting and we deal a lot of times with the opposite of it, where it’s not the wanting to get more leads (of course, they always want to), but when they look at online reviews and reputation management, at least in the beginning, it’s a question of ‘how can they stop any loss or perceived loss’ that is out there because they don’t have enough reviews or if there are some negative reviews out there. So, it’s really interesting to hear the flip-side of that, as well.

Nick: What we really have tried to talk to folks about, and we really have heard this over and over again, as we did our own market research…consumers kept telling us ‘you know, one negative review really isn’t the worst thing in the world and in a lot of cases it’s actually a positive. As when consumers see a lot of reviews that are all five stars as compared to similar scores that are 4.7, 4.8; that 4.7 has a lot more credibility because site users and digesters of information get the fact that every experience is not perfect and sooner or later, someone is going to have a bad day and it’s going to come off ‘not-perfect’.

So, when you do have some of those real-life experiences it’s actually a good thing. I also do try to convince people, when I do talk to them, that when you do get that person who did have a poor experience, it’s a great, great opportunity to leave the response indicating that they want to take personal responsibility for what happened, that it’s an aberration, that’s it’s not typically how you do business and you want to make sure that it goes right. Because all of a sudden, you’ve driven home to the people who come later on, that that’s not how you do business and that you really do care about each individual consumer.

So, yeah, we get it a lot, the first question of ‘what happens when I get a negative review,’ but we really do try to get people to understand that one negative review isn’t the worst thing in the world, and second there are all kind of ways for you to drive volume of positive reviews and the sooner that a dealer starts taking advantage of that and the sooner they start making it part of their process, the better off they’re going to be.

JS: My old boss used to say ‘You have two chances to meet someone….The first time you meet them and the first time you screw up.’ So along those lines, I’m a dealer and someone has just left a negative review. What mechanisms are in place to respond? Do I get to respond privately or only publicly, or am I able to respond to them at all? What are my recourses there?

Nick: This was one of the things that we debated most hotly before the launch; and so what we settled on was that anytime a review is posted the dealership always gets an opportunity to respond to it whether it’s positive or critical. And after they respond we close out the conversation. That was based on a large part on some of the feedback we heard from dealers that don’t do a lot in this space today. They were a little nervous about how much more process we’re going to build into this. So we didn’t want to get into the process of building a whole back and forth public exchange. I also think, anecdotely, I saw a decent amount of situations where that public back and forth just didn’t turn out terribly well. I think it’s just far easier, when you’re having that continued conversation, that you’re just going to regret one way or another.

The one thing that we’re keeping a very close eye on is the concept of allowing a private response before something gets posted. And originally, the way we landed is that we shied away from that because we really wanted the focus to be about your online reputation, less about a way to resolve customer service disputes. I think there’s a great amount of value in that and to be fair it’s kind of the norm in the industry right now. What we were really looking at is that we really have a substantial number of dealerships that don’t do this today and were very, very loud about the fact that they don’t want this proceeds to be complicated so we wanted it to be as simple as possible. That being said, we’re keeping a very, very close eye on the type of feedback that we get because we really need to make sure that if this is something we need to do, that we’re paying attention to it.

JS: Do you have any sort of automated notification system for the dealers if someone leaves a review or is it on them to check it themselves and monitor it daily?

Nick: We have a backend tool for dealers that we call My Dealer Center. And anytime a review is posted on Cars.com, meaning anytime it’s been through validation, moderation and it’s been approved, once it’s posted, the dealer automatically gets an email that says ‘You got a review posted on Cars.com. Please login by clicking this link and write a response to it’. We do make sure that we notify them, whether it’s a positive review or a critical one, we do notify them that it’s there and we do try to encourage them to reply to every single review not just to the ones that may be a review on a experience that was less than ideal.

JS: To me, I see a lot of fear from business owners about that….that it’s just going to be out there and they’re not going to know about it.

Nick: We definitely wanted to avoid that. I think it’s just one of those things that we saw as we got into this that there are places that have been aggregating for a long time and dealers just didn’t know what was there. So, we wanted to make sure that we are doing everything we can to warn them right off the bat.

I’d just like to publicly thank Nick and Cars.com for all their time and transparency regarding their dealer rating and review process.  If you’re shopping for a car, check them out.  Or if you’re a dealer, make sure you sign up for the My Dealer Center and start accepting reviews now!

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

Nick was extremely gracious with his time.  There’s so much good stuff that we’re breaking it up into two parts.  The second half of the interview will be posted Friday.

JS: Before we get started, is there anything in particular you want to say in particular about the review program?

Nick: The stance we continue to take and the whole reason that I’ll say we got into this is that we heard loud and clear from both our site users and dealers that there was just a crazy amount of demand in the marketplace for this type of content. The last six months that I’ve been talked to everyone under the sun about this, every month or two there’s a new stat coming out where the bar just keeps getting raised higher and higher where consumers are just aching to consume this content generated from other consumers. So the way we looked at it as if we started to collect this type of information and get it on our site and get the consumer the type of information they need, but it also helps our dealers by present their story right then and there. We looked at it as a win for our consumers, our dealers, and cars.com.

JS: I just can’t believe how many changes there have been with the review process in general over the last 6-8 months. It’s just been insane.

Nick: It has blown up. It is the hot button at this point. Everyone is talking about how can I start using reviews to start generating sales, how can I manage my reputation online, more and more we’re just hearing it everywhere. We’re just happy to do what we can to advance the conversation.

JS: Right now, your dealer review process is still in the opt-in phase for dealers, correct?

Nick: Correct. We’re opt in until mid- to late-summer. And then at that point, we’ll enable the functionality for every single dealer on cars.com.

JS: So you don’t have a set date yet for the hard move over?

Nick: We do have an internal one, trying to avoid really talking about it publicly until I am completely set that there isn’t not going to be any last minute change. I feel pretty good about it but more just because we are talking about it being beta, we just want to make sure that something else just doesn’t pop up. I feel very very confident that it’ll be over the summer.

JS: Ok, so mid to late, but you all have your own target date?

Nick: Yes, I feel pretty good about, it’s more that dates have tendency to change but don’t want to talk publicly then we decide we need to play with the functionality and then it gets pushed back a little bit. But for the moment we’re still paying close attention to the feedback we’ve been getting.

JS: How many dealers have signed up so far? [Editor's note: this interview was actually conducted April 29, 2011, so adjust dealer opt-ins accordingly.]

Nick: We actually have… over 6700 yesterday.  Let me get an up to the minute count for you….

JS: While you’re waiting on that, have you noticed any distinguishing characteristics for the dealers that are signing up….large, small, certain pockets from the country, anything able to grasp from that so far?

Nick: Originally some region localization, and we’re still definitely seeing that.  What surprised me is the adoption in our smaller markets, so you typically expect to see in large, metro markets more opportunities, more sales folks localized, but we’ve seen some really, really good adoption in some of the areas you would see as more rural. It’s hard to say that there’s a specific type of dealer because it’s been really been pretty consistent. Most folks saying yes, we’re interested.

JS: Do you see something where one or two dealers will opt in then competitors in the surrounding area are seeing that and moving towards it as well?

Nick: I’m expecting we’ll start to see it as the review volume continues to grow, so one of the things we have talked to people about is this is a great time to get in initially and start building the volume. I think the bigger draw is not necessarily people having the ‘Review-Me’ functionality on Cars.com; the bigger draw is when I’m a dealership and I have those five gold stars next to my name, then it’s a little extra incentive for the guy down the road to say, ‘You know what, I want to be a part of this too.’

Just so I don’t forget to give it to you, we are just shy of 7,000 dealers now. We’re seeing about 100 a day.

JS: How many dealers are there total across the US?

Nick: In our side of things ballpark of about 17,000

JS: I can see why they would want it, but it just seems like it’s moving really quickly with them voluntarily knowing about it and voluntarily opting-in.

Nick: I think one of the big things that really surprised me was that I came into this with the same expectations as a lot of folks though ‘Oh my gosh, this is going to be a really scary thing and are our dealers going to be excited about it?’ We did some really interesting focus groups with both site users and dealers back in 2010 and I remember my second day into the project and I was just floored by the amount of positive feedback that dealers were putting out there. And it was really along the lines of them saying, ‘one way or another I do something with reputation today.’

And, so all of them were talking about their CSI scores, most of them would bring up something about the Better Business Bureau … one of the insane things that really surprised me because you just don’t think about it is even the smaller, independent dealers were very quick to say that they have probably sold a car online at some auction site at some point or another, and on all those sites you leave feedback for someone. So most of them were already doing it in some form or another and pretty much all of them said whether they were doing it today, they realized that this was the landscape and it’s going to happen sooner or later. So, I think the dealer reaction overall was surprising at the beginning, but now it’s everywhere so more and more folks are getting involved in it.

JS: Has the feedback changed or what kind of feedback are you getting now from the dealers after they have opted-in?

Nick: It hasn’t changed too much. I mean, dealers are pretty good about offering us some suggestions, and some tweaks, but nothing that has been hugely surprising just yet. The big thing I’ve been seeing, thus far, is that there’s a feeling out there among some that reputation management is a combination of both a resolution of customer service issues and also this idea that I’m going to build up my brand and my reputation in various places. So, that’s one area we’ve seen is a lot of requests and or suggestions, but overall we’re still just seeing dealers are opting-in, they’re starting to get on board, they’re starting to do more to drive volume and it really hasn’t changed too much from when we first launched to where we are today.

JS: Thank you. That’s really interesting. We’re seeing that with our clients we do reputation management with where it’s a little bit of, ‘Oh, shoot, we have to look at some our own internal policies and how we’re handling things in addition to how are we cleaning up outward facing as well.’

Nick: And that’s something that I’ve heard from a pretty substantial number of folks; this idea of ‘you know, I like the idea, but before we opt-in, give us some time to really nail down our process.’ Which I think is a fantastic thing. Whenever that comes up, I tell the dealer to ‘take your time, figure this out.’ It makes perfect sense.

I would rather you come in ready to go, feeling like you have your process nailed down then you feel like you have to figure it out overtime. So, we’ve seen a decent amount of that and I love the fact that more and more dealers are realizing that reputation management is a very important part of their daily process and they’re going to figure out a way to make that work.

JS: Well said. What kind of visit adoption have you seen so far?

Nick: Visitor adoption has been pretty much how we expected. The interesting thing, the dilemma, we’ve faced from a user experience perspective is that we feel really good about the fact that we’re likely going to cross 7,000 dealers opted in today or Monday, but on the flip side it’s still not a majority of our dealerships. The difficulty then is; how do you present it to a user who wants to find a specific dealership that may or may not already be opted-in, and if they are opted-in they may or may not have the review volume just yet.

What we have seen though, when we launched we were getting a certain number of reviews a day, and I just looked this morning and saw that the average number of reviews coming in has more than doubled. We’re seeing that adoption pick-up pretty quickly, but it’s still one of those things that we’re trying to make sure we’re presenting the best user experience possible so we’re not saying ‘come read reviews’ and then they can’t read those reviews. We’re keeping close eyes on it and it’s going in the direction we want it to, but it’s one of those things that I expect we will be able to talk a little bit more intelligently about it once we have every single dealer live on the site.

JS: So, if the dealer is opted-in and the consumer is looking at one of their cars, is it going to be right on that page where they can leave the review?

This Mike Erdman Toyota (Merritt Island, FL) page shows how dealer ratings and reviews look within Cars.com

Editor’s note: here are some links for cars.com review samples that Nick sent over after the interview:

• Dealer Locator Search showing Ratings
• Dealer Specific Page showing Ratings & Reviews
• Dealer Specific Page for Rating & Reviewing
• Vehicle Specific Page with Reviews

Nick: There are two main places where the content kind-of lives today. Right now when you come to Cars.com, in essence there are different ways that you can search but it boils down to I can choose to search for a specific dealership or I can choose to search for a specific car. Anywhere that you’re searching for a specific dealership, where we’re presenting dealership information, we have a column right there in our dealer locator functionality that shows the current rating. And then underneath it is the link to click here and read all the reviews and next to it is click here to write a review. We’re trying to separate those pages out just so our dealers can take advantage that and funnel people to the appropriate page.

The other place that you’ll see similar functionality is on each individual vehicle page. Again, the idea being we want to present their score right there in the context of the vehicle so it gives the user all the confidence in the world to say, yes I do want to work with this dealership. We don’t necessarily want to force all that content into that page though because we want to keep the focus on the vehicle information. Very, very similar, they can click on the link there that takes them to the dealer specific review page where they can read all the reviews and right at the top of that page is a big purple button that lets them write a review if that’s why they’re on that page.

JS: I’m looking at this, and I don’t know if I just missed it before or you just put it up recently, but that review a dealer link on the homepage, has the green beta tag on it; I’m just curious if you have looked at the analytics and if you know like are people going through there to rate dealers or are they more likely to do that after they have looked at a car. Do you have any stats on that?

Nick: Off the top of my head, my impression is that they are going through the link on the homepage, although we are getting a lot of traffic on the dealer specific pages. One of the stances that we’ve taken is that we want to do everything to empower our dealers to drive the volume as best as possible, so each dealer has a specific URL to their store where they can send out emails or do whatever they want with it. They can tell people ‘if you want to leave a review for me click here and go directly to this page.’ We are getting a substantial amount of traffic that bypasses the homepage and goes directly to there.

What we’ve seen though, in terms of the vehicle page compared to the homepage is the people who write reviews are not necessarily looking for a car right now or they’re not drilling down and find a specific vehicle, and then realizing that I’ve shopped at this dealership and I want to leave a response. More so, they are coming in, they’re reading reviews and lots of times the folks that read reviews then actually want to write reviews as well.

We’ll add a link to Part 2 here when the rest of the interview gets posted.  The second half of the interview goes into great detail about astroturfing; review scrubbing; how they view themselves in the greater review landscape compared to places like Yelp, Google Places, and Dealer Rater; and how dealers can respond to criticism.

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?