A friend of mine, who shall remain unnamed, works in sales for a tech company.
Today, he asked the group chat to give his company some five-star ratings on Google, Trustpilot or something.
My reaction to this information:
Hold Up
Here’s the thing that small hustlers and big-time companies mess up all the time.
The act of getting your buddies, employees or otherwise non-customers to leave reviews, while harmless enough, is very bad practice.
Don’t do it.
You Can’t Fake Real…
It’s not 2006 anymore.
Everyone, and I mean everyone including your potentially-geriatric mother, knows that people leave fake reviews on things online. They know, even at a subconscious level, that there’s a lot of astroturfing going on; from the prime-time television through to the Amazon reviews on the knock-off Chinese version of whatever tech-gear they’re buying their grandson for Christmas.
Call it Fake News.
So you’d best believe getting your buddies to leave five-star reviews without comment on TrustPilot is going to be taken with a grain of salt.
In fact, go to Trustpilot right now. Find a random product.
Chances are, you’ll find someone commenting something similar to this:
“All the positive reviews are FAKE. We had a terrible experience with this and the only people who like this company are the bosses who are leaving all these fake reviews.”
Now…
90% of those sorts of reviews are just idiots with an axe to grind for bad service.
But it’s relevant because fake reviews are a hot-button topic that the average person knows that they can appeal to. So by soliciting non-customers for reviews for whatever reason, you’re playing into that potential pitfall.
Here’s what you should do instead, because…
…You Can Engineer “Real”
Back when I was doing the consulting thing, and even more-so when I was doing the PR Politics business, I devoted a lot of time, thought and energy into making things look real.
And then I realised that it’s easier to make real things than fake them.
It’s also more effective; cost-wise, in terms of virality, in terms of customer retention and growth; the whole shebang, basically.
There’s nothing like actual, full-blown grassroots organic marketing for any cause.
You can’t catch lightning in a bottle, which sometimes happens. But you can engineer something similar.
Instead of astroturfing, you engage and direct real sentiment.
It’s the same psychological principle that having barricades as riots uses; you know people are angry, excited or otherwise impassioned, and the way you stop this from spreading too quickly is by something as simple as making them walk the long way around.
In other words; you take energy and you direct it where you want it to go.
Organic Guerrilla Marketing
Guerrilla marketing is where you astroturf a campaign; you make it look grassroots but it’s directed.
Organic guerrilla marketing, which might be a term I’m making up and coining right now, I don’t know, is instead where you take existing sentiment and collect it, direct it and, importantly, turn it into something self-sustaining.
Which is all a round-about way of saying if you want star-reviews from your audience, then you have to take their positive energy and coerce them into noting it down by leaving a positive review.
You can entice this in a number of ways, and it’s one of the key components of how I teach Bootstrap marketing in the upcoming Foundations course over in the Member Vault.
But because I haven’t actually finished that yet, I suggest you just ponder what the hell I’m talking about, and maybe get a pen and paper and write down ten ways in which you might be able to trick someone who is happy with your service into leaving a positive review.
Because a lot of people seem to have no clue how to do this, and I’ve got the rest of the course to write.
I’ll see you in the next one.
– Jamie