Google have launched another new product that will make the everyday user, even more dependent on their services. I’ve been trialling it for a few weeks now and it seems to be extraordinarily clever. based on what you do, book, search for and hundreds of other things, it gives you the information you need, when you need it, in a sliding tile format.

Google Now recommends things it knows you’ll like based on your reviews and previous behaviour

So, why is this important to Feefo?

Well, the learning comes from your actions and behaviours. If you review something positively, it will begin to recommend things that it sees as similar in future. if you write a negative review, it will avoid pushing you down the same path. when it comes to attractions, restaurants, hotels and even business services, the review will become ever more important. Whilst I don’t know for sure yet, but I can be fairly certain – Your recommendations or negative review will actually feed into the results that others see too (a little like Genius on iTunes). ie what you say will affect what others see too.

Powerful stuff and yet again, elevating the status of your power as a reviewer to make or break businesses.

But a computer system that learns and modifies it’s behaviour based on what you tell it? That does feel remarkably like the 1983 film WarGames, pictured below. Whatever you don’t don’t show a tendency towards liking Global Thermonuclear War, it’ll end in tears.

WarGames HAL in full learning mode

Oh no, you just left….

One of the really powerful aspects of a review is that you get to actually hear whether a customer is happy or not and have the chance to do something about it.

How many times have you had a bad meal and sat there, put up with it – even telling your waiter or waitress that it was fine, paid the bill, leaving and then just not going back?

Yes, me too. Loads of times. I’ve probably made the effort to tell a few friends about the bad service i’ve received.

I have been trialling new systems this week for an online service I use and tried four different systems. Only one was right and none of the other three have asked me what I think and why I haven’t signed up beyond the trial. So in the same way I’ve just left after a bad meal, i’ve left after a reasonable,  but not perfect trial.

If they cared enough to ask me, I would have told them where I thought their system worked and where I thought things could be improved. Hopefully, if they had listened they could have dome something about it built a better business. They may have even been able to come back in and convert me from an apathetic triallist into a passionate advocate – just by listening.

It’s always interesting to read the live feedback from Feefo customers, but it’s often even more interesting to see the responses from the companies that have listened and started building better businesses.

Thanks to Ruby Lyle Photography for the image.

Robert Scoble with his beloved Google Glass(es) in the shower

If Robert Scoble is to be believed, then Google Glass will change all of our lives. In his review of Google Glass over a two week period, he wrote ”I’ll never take it off the rest of my life”.

So what is Google Glass?

Google Glass is a project  by some super techies at Google. It seems that they have worked out that search will change enormously over the coming years and their own role within it will change too, so they are aiming to diversify and use some of their profits to break into completely new areas of business. They are for example, working on a driverless car too. Presumably with the ability to physically drive round and search for things in real life.

So why is this relevant to Feefo?

What we see is that if the way we interact with the Internet changes, then reviews will change too and grow ever more important. If, rather than having to constantly check your mobile, your computer is right on your face and popping up with reviews and notifications as you move about a city, or even a shop, then the number of LIVE offers and reviews you are exposed to will increase enormously too.

Four shirts for £100 from Charles Tyrwhitt with 97% positive reviews? Yes please. A new bluetooth kit fitted by Halfords with great money off offer but only showing a One Star Review. Hmmm, not so sure.

So reviews become live and delivered at the Zero Moment of Truth, just when we are about to decide whether to buy or not to buy. Now that’s getting exciting.

Feefo is growing quickly in the travel, retail, financial services, insurance and automotive sectors, so we are adding to our extraordinarily talented team. With our brand new offices about to be finished too, we can offer a great working environment as well as exciting and challenging roles.

You can download the job description for the two roles which are for a Marketing Manager (here) and Partner Relationships Manager (here).

But in summary, the jobs are as follows:

Marketing Manager Role: £35,000 + bonus – office based in Petersfield reporting to the Sales and Marketing Director. Budget allocated to hire staff within 6 months to build a small team around you. Experience required: Essential that you have worked in marketing previously and can show your proven record of success generating market interest. Ideally you will have worked in the online sector or with technology such as software as a service. Read more…

Partner Relationships Manager Role: £30,000 + £12,000 OTE Commission (uncapped) + travel expenses – Field based around London with a day in the Petersfield Office, reporting to the Sales and Marketing Director. Experience required: You should have worked in the digital arena and have a sound understanding of selling technology such as software as a service in to businesses. You will either have worked in sales or in relationship management and have a proven track record of success. Read more…

Welcome to the best hotel in Glasgow according to Tripadvisor.

The Bellgrove Hotel in Glasgow – The best hotel in Glasgow

The Bellgrove hotel is a homeless hostel in Glasgow, but this week made it into the UK’s top 100 hotels on travel website Tripadvisor after a series of completely fake reviews where written, which spoke of its “crystal chandeliers” and “spa and leisure facilities.”

The listing has sadly since disappeared and has apparently gone on holiday.

But how can Tripadvisor explain this? Well, in one of the limpest arguments I have ever heard a ‘spokesman’ said (probably rather embarrassedly)

“As this property is a homeless shelter, and therefore doesn’t meet our listing guidelines, the listing itself is being removed from TripAdvisor.

“With over 60 pieces of content coming in every minute, occasionally a review or business that does not meet TripAdvisor’s guidelines may slip through the cracks, and in these rare cases, our members can report the material to us, helping maintain the high quality content of our site.”

So what this means in effect is that anyone can leave a review, however spurious, and only if lots of people gather together and complain that the reviews are fake, they will do something about it. But it wasn’t just a few fake reviews was it Mr Spokesman for Tripadvisor.

It was EVERY single one of them.

Wouldn’t it be better to gather real reviews from people who had stayed there in the first place?

Hotel Latour Birmingham, a proud new Feefo member

Hotel La Tour are a new member of Feefo and already receiving amazing feedback with over 93% of customers rating them as good or excellent for their service and for the quality of the hotel itself. They were introduced to Feefo through our friends at Micros, who provide enterprise applications to the retail and hospitality industry. They have over 370,000 systems installed globally.

The hotel itself is centrally located in Birmingham on Albert street and awesomely stylish across its 174 rooms, Aalto Restaurant and Alvar Bar. The Menu for Aalto has been created by Michelin-starred Chef Marcus Wareing, so we are not surprised reviews are good. He’s the one who was judging other chefs in Comic Relief does the Great British menu.

We wrote a while back about the feedback that restaurants and hotels receive and how many are damaged by the reviews that they receive on TripAdvisor and others from people who have never even stayed in or visited their hotel, but with Feefo reviews, this should be the end of it, as only real customers will be given the chance to write real reviews.

We have often heard over the years that clients are worried about negative reviews, but the research now shows, they can be genuinely good for business. You learn what your customers like and dislike and you get a chance to correct things before they get out of hand. But more importantly, they increase sales. This lecture by Panagiotis Ipeirotis of New York University puts a $ value on some of the words chosen within those reviews. In this case shown below, the company (Willoughby’s) drew more sales than their competitor (17th Street Photos) even though their price was $140 more, but also because of some of the language used in the reviews of their competitors product.

The price of your online reputation

What was interesting for me was that it blows the assumption that writing your own reviews would work better. If you had to sit down and write a bunch of fake reviews, you would inevitably draw on the same language and it appears that we can now sense this when we are looking at reviews with a view to buying. What is written in the review is as important as the review itself. You can damn with faint praise or you can gush effusively, but plausibility is key.

The $ value of words used in reviews

So all this still seems quite scary until you think it right through. How can a negative review actually increase sales?

“Negative reviews that are specific and well written actually tend to serve as risk mitigators,” says Ipeirotis, who has seen this effect in everything from hotels to video games.

It seems that if people read about a few minor problems about a product they tend to think “if this is the worst anyone can say about this, then it must be okay!”, but if it comes to non-delivery then people tend to shy away from buying completely. So the business lesson here is listen carefully to reviews and if there are delivery problems, then work very hard to get them resolved.

As a young marketer in training, we were taught to respect the AIDA buying model. Traditionally customers went through four stages. Attention, Interest, Desire, Action, or AIDA. But because of the way we browse data and rely on reviews, this has now changed. The way we engage with our customers needs to change to reflect this too.

According to this paper from Google, a full 70% of consumers now read reviews BEFORE they make the purchase decision.

So we believe that the model has now changed, with a more realistic buying process having evolved to become Attention, Interest, Research, Desire, Reviews, Action. or AIRDRA.

Feefo can deliver these reviews into the heart of your site and convert more of your website browsers into real buyers.

1. Only allow genuine customers to review
Fake reviews are illegal in the UK and do more harm than good – both to you and to your brands reputation.

2. Don’t moderate reviews
Moderating reviews to only show positive ones is not just bad practice, it’s bad for business too. Consumers are much too savvy for you to get away with that anymore.

Consumers spend four times as long on a website when they interact with good and bad reviews.
They are likely to convert 67% more than the average consumer.

3. Don’t try and ask for your own reviews
Allowing a third party to ask for your reviews not only adds credibility but also delivers a much better response rate, in some cases up to 4x as many.

4. Actively request reviews
If you ask every customer for feedback, you will get reviews across your entire product range you sell. Our research shows that a customer who sees ‘be the first to review this product’ on a product page is 30% less likely to buy, as they assume it is an unpopular product.

5. Choose a system which generates Google Stars
Only a Google Licensed Content Partner can generate stars.
You need a minimum of 30 reviews and 80% service score or more, and within approximately four weeks your stars should be shining.
According to Google, showing stars in Adwords increases Click Through Rates by 17% on average.
They also increase your Google Quality Score which in turn helps to reduce your PPC cost.

6. Tag product reviews with Rich Snippets
This allows Google to treat your reviews in the right way and show your seller reviews in the search results. Whilst it is in no way guaranteed, Google often generate stars that show in natural searches!

7. Show your comments and customer feedback on your own website
Adding dynamic, key word rich, User Generated Content is perfect for SEO! It also allows clear differentiation in the search as you can be found through product specific reviews too. And, it gives Google good reason to come back to your site time and time again to review your ever changing Content.

8. Show ratings next to ‘Buy now’ buttons
Positive reviews next to the ‘buy now’ button encourage customers to actually make a purchase.
Our own research shows this increase is an average of 6%.
So doing it right, will help 6% more people convert from lookers to buyers.

9. Encourage social commerce
By allowing customers to share their purchase experience with their friends via Facebook, Twitter and other social platforms, they can exponentially increase your own brand’s reach at no additional cost.

10. Have a plan for responding and stick to it
By responding efficiently and politely you can show others you are a truly customer focused company and it also allows others to learn from the response to gauge the relevance of the rating.

Our sales and support teams have loads more information which can make massive differences to how your reviews work and how much they can help you build your business online.

Andy Mabbutt at TGT Conference 2013

Our very own Managing Director, Andy Mabbutt was a keynote speaker at the Global Travel Group Conference 2013. The conference, held at De Vere Carden Park in Chester had nearly 300 attendees and was followed by a Gala Dinner and Awards Ceremony.

Sharing a stage with the former Dragon’s Den star James Caan, Andy told the audience how reviews are here to stay and why it’s vital for you to lead the online debate about your brand and your business. It was a presentation full of killer stats, but one of our favourites, whilst initially coming from the hotel industry, is just as relevant to other markets too.

“When deciding between two places, 65% of people say that seeing a management response would sway them to book with the responding establishment”

So, reviews make sense for business and they clearly make sense for customers too.

Feefo’s Andy Mabbutt speaking at TGT Conference 2013