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?

And it’s not just on branded searches – it can be for any specific company rating on an outside review site that shows up in their listings, such as for this non-branded search on “tuxedos lexington”:

I can’t say definitively that these haven’t been here before as I couldn’t find any announcement about this, but I checked around the office and we don’t remember seeing them.  The ones they’re pulling from include Yelp, Citysearch, and Yahoo! Local.  We’re not seeing it for other ones like Insider Pages, at least so far. If you want to sniff around and find others they are or are not using these logos for, add it to the comments and I’ll update this post.

What’s really interesting about this is that bing had been seemingly backing away from giving ratings prominence.  For one, users haven’t been able to write reviews directly on bing local listings for about two months now.  For another, they’ve removed star ratings from many local results that they list on the Web results tab (although they’re still in full effect on the local tab).  On that note, I did find some more examples of them including stars on the Web results tab, though they’re still very much far and in between:

The Bottom Line for Local Businesses

So what’s this mean?  While I’m not sure if this is a test or a “permanent” change, it does indicate bing’s getting more serious once again about providing user ratings to its searchers.  And with the logos and giant numbers, it makes listings stand out even more to searchers.  It will also surely make their partners like Yelp happy as it should lead to higher click throughs straight to their listing pages.

Note Bene: My Brave New Local / Social World: Recent Changes to Local & Review Sites and their Effect on Online Reputation Management presentation will be running once again with Online Marketing Connect next week as part of their Search Week.  Registration is free – just click that link.  The reason I bring it up here is that it’s a pre-recorded presentation, so there’s no mention of anything in this post.  Don’t think I’m the Absent Minded SEO or anything – just can’t go back in time.

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?

Nothing too interesting when you do a search on St. Patty’s Day: all t-shirts, which you might expect. They did throw in some product results as well, which were more interesting and included personalized gifts, posters, and boutonnieres (misspelled on the ad and the product page – way to go, Target).

Overall, nothing too exciting, although if the click costs are reasonable, I’d imagine all of these companies are making money today for being on top of the holiday.

So I was about to do some more searches to see if I could find anything more interesting, when the Realtime results caught my eye.

For those of you not familiar, Google will include realtime results within their standard results for certain search queries that are trending and likely to have lots of people talking about them right now (like “St. Patty’s Day” on the actual day).

The vast majority of these results come from twitter, but they can come from other sources as well, like Google Buzz.  I mean, I think they still do – need confirmation that Google Buzz still exists.  [Quick search]  Yup, it still exists. If you want to see Realtime results for any search phrase regardless of whether or not Google is displaying them within their standard results, no problem.  Under the date range section on the left hand side of the results, choose “Latest.”

Bing also offers up real time results, although theirs are exclusively from twitter.  These results work okay in IE, but not so much in firefox, or at least my version / OS system combo.  They tend to run over the paid ads, which I’m sure Microsoft adCenter advertisers are thrilled with:

Anyway, back to Google.  When I looked down at the Realtime results, I saw this (click to zoom):

Well, at first I had normal SafeSearch set at Moderate, the default setting.  But then, I went in and changed it to Strict and still got this same result.  If you don’t want to click to enlarge, I don’t blame you.  It shows a tweet from a woman whose twitter profile pic is basically her face and her hands holding / covering her bare breasts.  Her twitter handle?  PunkRockT**s.  Now, there was nothing wrong with her tweet itself: “Happy St Patty’s Day! Crack open a Guinness!”  I’m not prudish about these types of things, but with three kids under six who use the computer and will be Googling soon, this does bother me.

SafeSearch Strict Difficulties

Let’s be fair about this to Google:

1. The tweet itself should not have set off any flags.
2. With twitter handles, there’s no spacing.  So if you would automatically filter out this site owner’s / affiliate’s profile based on the handle, you’d also be filtering out other combinations.  For example, what if someone really hated TSA’s current security features and set up a profile for AntiTSA?
3. Pictures can be tricky.  No nipples are showing and you’ll see cleavage walking down virtually any street in the U.S. on a hot summer day and certainly at any beach.  It’s easier for a human to tell that this picture is skanky and likely to lead to an unsafe result for children.

Now, let’s be a little more critical:

1. If you’re choosing to make your SafeSearch results strict, you probably don’t care about a little collateral damage and want Google to err on the side of caution.  That would be enough to kick out this twitterer’s tweets based on the handle.
2. They do have the ability to scan images to determine – to a large degree – what should appear in image results, so they could use this same technology for social media profile pics.  However, you wonder if Google has the same definition of “Strict” as the average person when you have that setting applied and do an image search for breasts (CAUTION – EXTREMELY NSFW, especially if you don’t have your settings already set to “Strict”).
3. Google absolutely knows how to crawl sites.  If they crawled her landing page (which is what you’d see if you clicked on her name – I keep defaulting to “her” because of the name even though I’d bet dollars to donuts that it’s some guy running this stream), they would see some absolutely unsuitable words in her timeline, and right at the top.  They’d also see a ton of links to a tumblr for a site called “naughtyamateurs.”  I thought at first this might be for Phil Fulmer’s former players.  Turns out, no.  The other thing you’d expect from that name.

I completely understand posting real time results creates difficulties in this arena for any search engine.  But, if you’re going to offer supposedly safe search results, you need to figure it out BEFORE you start including the results.  If you can’t, why not just turn off Realtime results for anyone with the Strict setting?

Happy St. Patty’s

And now, back to the real reason for this post.  A very merry St. Patrick’s Day to ya.  Enjoy all the green-laden festivities and best of luck to you in your NCAA pool.  Let’s Goooooooo, Mountaineers!  And ‘Dores!

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?

Cars.com will add consumers’ dealer reviews on its automotive marketplace website, starting in March. “We are throwing the entire organization behind it,” Cars.com CEO Mitch Golub tells Ward’s here during the North American International Auto Show. “It is a win-win for consumers and dealers.”

“There are about 500,000 dealership reviews out there, but it is a fragmented space; there’s no critical mass,” Golub says. “We can bring order, balance and credibility. And we will split reviews between sales and service, which are two completely different dealership areas.”

Although some dealers may dread the prospects of customers rating them online, surveys indicate 80% of dealer reviews are positive.

Initially, only dealers who sign up will be subject to reviews. “Any dealer can join,” Golub says. “Then, in the summer, we’ll put all dealers onboard. We want to take the time to do it right.”

Dealers who skew to bad reviews should see that as a reason to make changes at their stores, Noeth says. “A lot of negative reviews reflect negativity in the dealership, something that hurts sales. In a sense, our posting reviews will give dealers a free focus group.”

An outside firm, Bazaarvoice.com, will monitor the consumer postings and delete highly offensive ones

“We’re not editing out critical reviews, but we want to make this as fair as possible,” Golub says. “We may choose not to publish personal attacks or reviews that are blatantly unfair.”

Dealers will get a chance to respond to negative reviews, as well as to post a description of what they might do to resolve contentious issues.

Cars.com will run two 30-second Super Bowl ads on Feb. 6. The theme of the spots will be online reviews, without specifically mentioning Cars.com’s impending dealer reviews, Golub says.

Auto dealers take note!  Sounds like cars.com isn’t just jumping in with both feet, but grabbing a couple friends and doing a group cannonball.  You (and really, any business) need to have a plan in place for online reputation management. A big part of that plan will include monitoring reviews.  Make sure cars.com is at the top of your list beginning this March / June depending on whether or not you are or are going to become a Cars.com member.

One could argue about the fragmentation quote.  Google – especially with Hotpot and in its historic practice of scraping other sites’ reviews – will end up being a consolidation point.  And cars.com isn’t the only auto-place out there.  But with 200-million visitors per year, this will certainly make an enormous impact on the auto dealer industry. It’s also good that they will allow an easy way for dealers to respond to posts: just don’t be defensive!

As for scrubbing reviews…that’s a tough one.  Certainly some things need to not be added.  But just like with blog commenting, they’ll need to have a clearly defined Review Policy for transparency. Otherwise, people might believe cars.com plays favorites and undermine their dealer review efforts.  And it should go without saying that big advertisers should not get any special consideration here.

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?

• The Golden Rule
• Never wear white after Labor Day.
• When I get an email that starts off addressing me as “the Local Search guru,” it’s getting published on the Found Blog.

In that vein, off we go with last night’s email:

as the Local Search guru, here’s a little example for you to use sometime if you wish.

I was just about to walk out the door, I already knew where the place was.  Then decided to grab their phone number just in case.  I used my local phone book (aka Google Maps) and got to their Place page.

[Link to bad review - see edited screenshots below]

Bad reviews I hadn’t even planned on looking for literally stopped me from going to this business.    The end.

There’s a lot of deliciousness in this email, including how he classified Google Maps / Places as his local phone book, but let’s recap what happened here:

1. He was already aware of a business and made a decision that he wanted to buy from them.
2. Just in case he got lost or it was closed or whatever, he decided to do a Google Maps search to grab their phone number.
3. He saw this (click to enlarge):
4. He never went to this business and instead found someone else to meet his needs.

How Negative Reviews are Only Going to Hurt You More in the Future

Google’s putting much of its considerable weight behind local search. They’re making changes all the time to tap into – and monetize – this growing trend.  That’s why you see that big Google map in the upper right hand corner for so many searches  these days.

That means these Google Places listings are going to show up more and more – whether or not you’ve ever submitted anything to or claimed a listing from Google.  They’ll just add them on their own.  Up until now, reviews weren’t stressed that much by Google Places.  Sure the rankings mattered as any local SEO could tell you, but Google itself just kind of let users add reviews and scraped more from other sites like InsiderPages.  They didn’t incentivize or otherwise give searchers a reason to leave reviews.

Well, that started to officially change back in November with the release of Google Hotpot, their effort to make local search more social with recommendations, especially from those within your individual social sphere.  The one major problem with Hotpot was that it didn’t allow you to rate places from your iPhone – either through an app or directly from your browser.

I had complained about this to Vanessa and the other fine folks on the HotPot team on several occasions and am sure I wasn’t the only one.  They were even kind enough to send along a bit of swag.  Well, yesterday, Hotpot announced a Google Places iPhone app.  You can download it here or just do a search for “Google Places” on your iPhone app center.  Here’s a sample of what you’ll see:

So, again, why should you care?  If Google can get users actually leaving reviews with any sort of regularity – and I’m betting on the HotPot – iPhone connection to get it kicked off – businesses with negative reviews are going to be screwed.

Many people like this emailer use Google as their frickin’ phone book, just to look up information about a company that they already want to buy from.  That’s the first (and often only) place they look.  They see negative reviews, and they’ll pull a Doug from The State and said, “I’m outta heeeere.” (Sorry – no YouTube embed. Slightly NSFW – language.)

Google still has some review kinks to work out, which Mike Blumenthal continues to chronicle.  Beyond that, though, I think it really needs to figure out a suitable way to have fix the ability for all business owners respond to reviews in a meaningful way.  They started offering this for business owners with verified listings in fall 2010, but many owners are having problems doing so.

3 Steps to Protect Yourself from Negative Google Places Reviews

So, what do you do?

1. Create or claim your Google Places page.
2. Encourage – but do not pay -  people to leave reviews about your company.
3. Monitor your reviews regularly.

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?