Feedback and Its Influence on Brand Reputation

When a person needs something, he or she looks up the Internet ‘how to use …’, ‘where to buy…’, ‘review of …’ Search results affect choices and decisions to buy or collaborate with one or another company. That is why it is important to monitor what is written about you, your company and products on the Internet.

Brand Mention Analysis

First of all, it is necessary to determine at what stage of awareness your brand is now:

• nobody knows about the brand, it needs development;
• the brand is badly reported on, the image has to be beefed up;
• the brand is all right, but one needs to open up its new aspects.

For appraisal, one can use the number of positive and negative mentions in search queries, product or service rating in feedback sites, online traffic conversion data.

Reputation analysis can be manually or by means of automatic services like IQBuzz, Brand Analytics or Youscan. The snag is that the services give a general picture without details. This blurs the correct catch of mention moods—programs do not understand irony, sarcasm, or metaphors.

Besides, the analysis needs to determine a real reason of negative feedback, which is impossible via automatic services. That is why we recommend using both methods—get a general picture by means of automatic monitoring at first and then handle it manually. For this, we look for and cluster comments and then elaborate a strategy of how to operate them.

We recommend collecting positive and negative feedback separately: positive recommendations of buyers can give you a clue to the advantages of the product and will help you reason your position when responding to the negative stuff.

Building Communication

Reputational marketing has no classic algorithms and operation schemes. Every task needs its own solution. At that, you should remember that, when replying to the feedback, you must not sell directly—your task is to define a client’s distress and problem and to give an expert recommendation. For instance, you do not sell a house, but bring up discussions and create a friendly atmosphere in the developer’s district; you do not promote a cosmetics brand, but discuss make-up composition and techniques.

This helps you prepare the audience, get in good with it, involve it into discussion, affect opinions by means of logical and objective facts. The purpose of such work is to show the benefits of the product that was underestimated at first sight.

Account Database

It goes without saying that if answers come from one and the same user, parties to the conversation will clearly see that you are just a company’s agent and the level of trust to you as an interlocutor will go down (it relates by no means to the cases when you act as the company’s official representative).

For discussions, you need to create several characters. Every account must have a profile picture, a legend, and, if the platform implicates so, some rating and reputation.

You need to maintain life in your accounts—write comments to reviews of other participants, publish not fewer than half of reviews without ads even when their active work is not required.

For an advertising campaign, you need to prepare twice as many accounts on average as the number of messages you are going to post. Half of them will initiate discussions, while others will maintain them and handle negative comments.

Proper Feedback

Feedback that you prepare for placement must be true and proper. You must not compliment downright cons of the brand—people can see falsity. You need to promote real advantages of the brand and carefully inform of restrictions.

The main rule is—DO NOT LIE!

Monitor Posts

Improper posts can be deleted, or comments of haters and trolls can appear there that will spoil work results. Every comment should be checked several times against:

• compliance with the service’s rules before posting;
• moderation results in 3-4 days;
• relevance and absence of negativity in the discussion thread in a couple of weeks;
• concordance with the strategy when summarizing the campaign.

In order to collect 100 target comments, you need to make 200 different posts and, out of them, choose ones that fit the project goals most and have passed all check stages.

Where Do I Write?

As we mentioned before, some platforms provide an opportunity for company’s agents to register. This must be done from your corporate email and sign up for notifications of new feedback. This is how you will be able to react to the feedback faster, which will later improve loyalty of your target audience.

• irecommend.ru – a popular service in Russia where users daily post hundreds of reviews of everything, from cosmetics to hotels.
• otzovik.com – dozens of thousands of authors post there their impressions on anything and everything, assign scores, give useful advice and ideas on how to spend your time and money to advantage and at a profit, as well as warn about possible disadvantage and problems that everyone can face when buying something or going somewhere.
• migreview.com — the service allows giving feedback about companies, goods, venues, food, websites, and many other things one-click. You do not even need to register—just fill in 3 fields and give feedback anonymously. It is important not to post this review anywhere else and to add a picture.
• otzyv.ru – the services where you can both give feedback and participate in discussions in the topical forum thread.

As for travel companies, we recommend paying special attention to the following services:

• tripadvisor.ru – the biggest site in the world about travel where users share their impressions on countries, hotels, cafés and restaurants, and some points of interest in the cities.
• booking.com — the biggest hotel feedback site. If you are a hotel owner, you must not only monitor what people write about you and your competitors but also give prompt feedback on behalf of the hotel.
• tourister.ru is way more than just a feedback website—this is one of the biggest communities of experienced travellers in the CIS.

Recommendations

• Analyze online brand reputation manually before you start working.
• Look for out-of-the-box approaches to the target audience of the brand. Look at human hobbies, beliefs, habits.
• Build up your account database in the themed platforms—feedback websites, forums, social media.
• Create a legend for every account.
• Monitor comments, reviews, and discussions within one month after posting.

Remember that reputation is created for years but can be destroyed in one day. Reviews, being recommendations in the form of opinions of ordinary people, is one of reputation components. Do not risk—address experts from the RMAA marketing agency, and we will help you create a ‘right’ reputation in the Russian market.

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