Aren’t the Rating and Review Sites such as Yelp and Get Satisfaction just a form of an old fashioned Recommendation Letter? Remember Recommendation Letters? Sales folks would salivate over getting one about their company, and proudly display them for all to see somewhere in their store, or in a binder for folks to peruse. Why, because people like reading what other people have to say about you. This is not a newfangled idea.
SNAIL MAIL IS NO MORE
While the idea of Recommendation Letters may somewhat still exist, none of us get much Snail Mail anymore. The handwritten note takes too much time, and a letter, who does that when you can zip off an email much faster. We all certainly still get a few handwritten notes and letters, but not so much. So, if folks aren’t sending letters or notes much anymore, how do we get those ever so valuable Recommendation Letters?
We have been working hard to point our residents toward our Urbane Yelp page, Urbane Get Satisfaction page and Apartment ratings page. However, folks sometimes just don’t have the time, so now what?
AGGREGATE and CONSOLIDATE
Ironically, as I was drafting this post, John Jantsch from Duct Tape Marketing who has been called the World’s Most Practical Small Business Expert for consistently delivering real-world, proven small business marketing ideas and strategies, just posted Bring the Conversation to Any Web Page. What John is suggesting is exactly what Mike Whaling from @30Lines, also an Urbane Lab Technician, crafted for Urbane Apartments, a ratings and Review page, aptly named Urbane Talk.
FISH WHERE THE FISH ARE
We have used this metaphor before, and it is just on target, You should be hanging out where your customers are, where your Residents and Prospects are hanging out. But what about when they are in different places? We have actually added a page to our web site to highlight ratings and reviews and conversations about us labeled Urbane Reviews.
It is really just another blog site that our main web site points to. That enables our residents/customers to thread a conversation there via comments. We have set up RSS Feeds to automatically aggregate reviews from our Urbane Yelp page, Urbane Get Satisfaction Page and Urbane Apartment Ratings page directly t the site, with link backs to check authenticity.
The real value though, is just what John points out, Fishing Where the Fish Are. A lot of conversation about our Brand takes place on our Urbane facebook page, and we have started to aggregate those over to this Rating Page too.
We just launched this recently, so we are working out the bugs, but the point is, it becomes our show place for everything that folks are saying about us, good and bad.
Not all reviews and comments can be good, and I think the manor in which a company responds and participates in the conversation is also valuable to your prospects decision to choose your company
Eric’s background is rooted in the rental and real estate industries. He founded metro Detroit’s Urbane Apartments in 2003, after serving as senior vice president for a major Midwest apartment developer. He established a proven track record of effectively repositioning existing rental properties in a way that added value for investors while enhancing the resident experience.
He also established The Urbane Way, a social media marketing and PR laboratory, where innovative marketing ideas are tested. Eric has been featured in Entrepreneur Magazine and Business Week Magazine.
You can connect with Eric_Urbane on Twitter.
Eric also writes regular articles for the following publications;
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