It's a print/online “review funnel” solution that makes it easy to get more customer reviews on the sites that matter, including major directories like Google, Facebook, Yahoo! and Yelp, as well as niche and industry review sites like Taxbuzz or Thumbtack.

It consists of three stages:

STAGE 1: GET CUSTOMERS INTO THE FUNNEL

• Invite customers to give feedback
• Craft the right message
• Offer an incentive to engage

STAGE 2: GUIDE THE CUSTOMER THROUGH THE REVIEW PROCESS

• Drive the customer to a landing page you control
• Focus the customer on leaving a review
• Help the customer select a review site and complete their review

STAGE 3: MONITOR AND RESPOND TO REVIEWS

Underpinning the success of this service there is a technology we build and install around your business which is the Online Reputation Channel designed to perform scheduled campaigns, get a fresh set of 5-star online reviews every week, give you feedback from unsatisfied customers in a private channel, stopping potentially bad reviews in their tracks and monitoring and responding to online reviews in an engaging way. With this service, I've been able to lift some of my clients business revenue by up to 100%.

If you have the budget for it, SEO and paid search advertising can be highly effective channels for generating new customer leads. But they’re also ultra-competitive and therefore expensive, with high costs involved for either type of campaign to work. Note also that online reviews are not just about influence: they create visibility, too. Especially in smaller markets, getting online reviews is one of the most effective and inexpensive SEO tactics you can implement. For example, a new CPA firm in Erie, Pennsylvania just wrote to me after he got his first Google review with : That SINGLE Google review finally put me on the map, literally! My business never showed up on Google maps with a little letter until that review!

Google wants to see signs of life. A legitimate review on an authoritative, third-party review site is one of the most powerful signals you can send to Google. And the more reviews you have, the more visible your business listing across the Web, whether that’s through better rank in search results or more prominence on review sites themselves.

Absolutely not!

Knowing how trusted and valuable customer reviews are, marketers and business owners can be seduced by the notion that for a few bucks on Elance, Craigslist or Fiverr, they can have an unseen army of amoral magic bees populate their profiles on Yelp and Google+ with 4- and 5-star reviews. The only drawback is that doing so will have the exact opposite effect from what you want: It will destroy your reputation and maybe the business itself. Sure, there’s the brief intoxication of seeing all those stars next to the company name. There may even be a burst of increased visibility online and resulting new business.

But in the end, your reputation with real customers—the kind who actually keep a business running—can’t be faked. Maybe the review sites will catch on to the scheme, filter out the fake reviews and publicly shame the business for dishonest practices. Even if their filters don’t catch on, the “BS” filters of hundreds of real potential customers will, and they will think worse of the business than if it had negative reviews or no reviews at all. Remember: Widely disseminated customer reviews are a good thing. They create a better marketplace and help correct the information asymmetry between buyers and sellers. 

Fake reviews are a fraud. Don’t buy fake reviews. If you do, you will find yourself on the wrong side of history—and the law.

You can find hundreds of recent stats and studies that confirm the insanely influential role online reviews play in getting customers to buy or try new products, services, and local businesses.

The fact is we now live in what Forrester Research has dubbed “The Age of the Customer,” and guess what? Empowered customers are more demanding than ever, and they have the ability to make or break your business. They don’t trust what you say about your product or service, and they really don’t trust your ads. Instead, they trust other people like themselves: 

72% of consumers trust online reviews as much as recommendations from friends and family.

So, whether you’re talking about a restaurant, a medical practice or an accounting firm, it’s hard to overstate the influence its customers now have on each other. Because customer reviews are perceived as being written by regular folks with no agenda, people trust them—even more than they trust expert opinions. A 2011 study found that 55% of consumers felt that the opinions of “people like me” had the greatest impact on their buying decisions. And online reviews are precisely that. 

70% of consumers trust online reviews from people they don’t know. 92%percent of consumers around the world say they trust word-of-mouth recommendations, whether from strangers or from friends and family, above all other forms of advertising. Online reviews are precisely that.

4 out of 5 consumers reverse their purchase decision based on negative online reviews, before dining or shopping. 

93% of U.S. consumers check online reviews at least some of the time.

Based on those facts and statistics I'd say online reviews really matter for your business growth and health.

I totally understand you. 90% of typical U.S. consumers read online reviews; 6% write them. Happy customers who intend to write a review still won’t do it if (1) they forget; (2) it’s too hard; or (3) they’re too busy. So the task of your Online Reputation Channel is essentially threefold:

1. Remind each customer to write a review

2. Make the process easier

3. Avail them of it during their downtime

I provide a flexible and turnkey print/online review funnel system that serves these functions for a wide range of scenarios and businesses.

My Online Reputation Channel strategy can make use of multiple tactics, channels and assets (human, print, email, Web, mobile, etc.), but the formula is simple:

• Provide a way for businesses to ask and remind customers to share their experience online
• Drive customers to a destination that’s designed to convert them into reviewers
• Guide each reviewer through selecting the best possible review site and completing a review

However, getting more positive reviews from real customers require a commitment from your business itself that no technological solution can provide.

In the end, winning the reputation game is about understanding, delighting, connecting with, and serving customers. If you count reviews as a measure of success you are using a wrong metric. The right metric, should always be customer satisfaction.

The Online Reputation Channel strategy offered here is aimed at building a virtuous circle of customer satisfaction and customer reviews. I believe that it’s the only proactive way to do reputation management with integrity and foresight for the long term.

When you Google yourself, what do you see? Even the top 20 big brands who blanket the web with content and PR see that 25% of search results on their brand are user-generated content.59 In the Age of the Customer, the power balance and information asymmetries of commerce have tipped away from marketers and business owners toward customers. Or have they? Customers now have a powerful voice, access to critical information, and shared memory afforded by online reviews. While it may seem like this empowerment of the customer should come at a cost to businesses, in fact businesses have gained immensely, too. Consider what we as marketers and business owners now get for free:

• Our most trusted and effective marketing is being done for us by volunteers
• Those volunteers surface more info about our offering than our own advertising can, and that helps differentiate it from the alternatives.
• Our customer service now serves multiple ends: creating customer satisfaction and broadcasting it to potential new customers
• We get focused, real-time business intelligence to assist in quality improvement and competitive analysis

In order to unlock all of this value, you only need to decide how we’re going to do it, what tools and tactics we’re going to use, and to what ends.

My service helps you work with online customer reviews in a proactive and fruitful way to increase your revenue. The future of your business may depend on it.