This morning, a hotel client asked me how to motivate positive customer reviews on popular ratings and review site, Yelp.

One of the ideas she threw out was to offer a gift certificate to those who commented positively. Another was to hold some sort of contest for a free gift card. These are common responses that take one thing for granted: Genuine praise cannot be bought or sold. But it can be reciprocated and appreciated.

Here’s how that breaks down along with some specific ideas for motivating your own customer reviews on ratings and review sites like Yelp, Urban Spoon, etc.

Why Public Gift Card Offers Will Fail

It just smells bad. Think about it. For example, what if a hotel offered its Facebook fans a gift certificate for their positive review on Yelp? No matter how large or small, it’s still a pay to play situation.

First off, it takes away all chance of an authentic review because the review has been “bought.” Making a simple positive review is pretty low risk, and since humans have a tendency to say almost anything for money or perceived value, they might just patronize your business for their own benefit.

Worse than that, however, is that for all of those who saw your offer – which extends to the networks of your fans and friends, you’ve just devalued, even broken the trust of the ratings site for which you were seeking to motivate reviews. If I know outrightthat the reviews on a site are “bought,” then I’m can no longer trust that site, and it ruins it for the rest of the businesses and users. Now, I understand that your intent as a business owner may be completely pure. And in the old world (pre-social media and relationships marketing), such a tactic was widely accepted. But in today’s world, customers and prospects alike have little trust – and are looking for a reason NOT to trust you as a business. Tactics like these give them just such an excuse.

Bottom line: Reject tactics that offer “payola” in return for customer recommendations or high ratings in any form on any site.

All you have to do is ASK.

First things first: Make sure you’ve set up your page, completed your profile with all vital information, photos, etc. on the ratings/review site in question (This allows you to communicate more directly with your reviewers and gives you some analytics and other information. Your business is most likely present on these sites – you just may not be informed or able to access the data directly.) Here’s what you do next:

1. Get the link to the exact place where one would go to comment or give recommendation about your business.
2. Post the “ask” on your Facebook Page wall. It might look something like this: “If you’ve ever stayed at our property and LOVED it, you can tell others about it by posting a recommendation or testimonial at Yelp.” Share the link and post. If appropriate, write a blog post or “note” on Facebook explaining the importance of such recommendations to your business – from a customer perspective.
3. Tweet out the request with a shortened link to the recommendation page
4. Post a graphic on your web site asking for recommendations from past customers and pointing prospective customers to this site for unbiased feedback.
5. Ask for feedback as a part of a routine e-mail newsletter. Maybe re-use the graphic you put on your web site.
6. Institute a system that e-mails customers within 24 hours of departure asking them for a recommendation while the adrenaline of the experience is still flowing. These will be your best and most vivid comments.

All of these efforts make your customers AWARE of your endorsement and desire for them to participate in specific ratings/review sites, and it encourages them to be human – to share their positive experience with others.

As an alternative to the public campaign, you can ask your best customers for their testimonials. If you’ve been in business for more than a week, you should have at least a handful of loyal, dedicated, outgoing customers. For most of our clients, this list of folks comes immediately to mind. If I ask you to name ten folks who are your “ideal” customer – few business owners hesitate before naming these customers. In this case, call these customers up, send them a private e-mail or Facebook message or Twitter direct message (DM) and just flat out ASK for the testimonial. Send them the link to appropriate page of the ratings/review service. Make it easy for them. Whatever you do, make it a private communication.

Be a Giver. And Always Reciprocate.

Instead of making public offers of reward, I recommend changing your perspective. No matter what the technology platform or off-line situation, a thankful attitude and giving spirit are always in style – and always appreciated – because it’s never done enough.

While potentially controversial among social media purists, this is business after all, and here are two possible alternatives to public purchase of ratings:

1. Say thank you.

When you say “thank you” publicly, you are showing gratitude, taking the spotlight off of you and putting it where it belongs (on your customer) and creating an atmosphere of appreciation and trust among your customers and prospective customers.

Say thank you on the platform, if allowed. Most ratings and review sites have some means by which the business can show appreciation for reviews. Regardless of the tone of the comment, you can learn from it. Be thankful for that insight – and voice it. Future visitors to your business’ profile will see gratitude and a willingness to listen to customers as part of your business DNA. This leads to trust and sales.

Say thank you across platforms. For instance, if someone recommends you on Urban Spoon, but you are already connected to that person on Facebook or Twitter – be sure to publicly thank them on the other platform. Something like this posted on their wall or tweeted at them will do: “Jenny, thanks so much for recommending our restaurant on Yelp! You have no idea how much we appreciate your loyalty.” This will likely lead to an exchange where all of Jenny’s friends and your connections see this and are also motivated to either try out your business OR make a recommendation based on their own experience there.

2. Be a giver.

Random acts of kindness never go out of style. You have a currency that you can spend in your business. If you’re a restaurant, you can give gift certificates or certain food/drink products at very low dollar value – but with great perceived value to your customer. If you’re a hotel, you can give room nights, meals, drinks, value-added experience like free spa treatments or valet parking. Whatever your currency, you can and should spend it to build loyalty through random acts of kindness.

There are many applications for this practice, but today we’re going to focus on how it applies to appreciation for recommendations given. Specifically in this case, I personally believe that you should not give publicly. Use the messaging feature on Facebook, the DM on Twitter or an e-mail to thank the customer and make them aware of your gift. Let THEM do the telling. This is much more authentic and valuable. Once they tell, you can re-tweet, reply to their wall post, etc. thanking them again publicly for their loyalty. Do not in any way tie the gratitude to the specific action of the recommendation in the public forum. May that recommendation simply be a signal to you as a business owner that you have a customer who is sincerely and overwhelmingly loyal – to the point of sharing your business with others. These are the types of customers you want to build relationships with for the long-term. Showing your sincere gratitude to them as part of an ongoing relationship is a great step to this end.

3. Whenever possible, reciprocate.

Do you have customers who are business owners themselves? Whenever possible, look for your customers and their related businesses on-line. Do business with your customers whenever feasible. And if you have a good experience – say so. Go to their profiles on Yelp, Urban Spoon an the like – and leave positive recommendations. Become a fan of THEIR Facebook Pages and leave praise for their business. Comment on their blogs. Don’t ask for anything in return. Be habitual about this. Just build social capital for you and your business – it will pay sooner AND later.

See related article: Leverage for Success

Recently, after spending the weekend talking to other business owners, social media folks and marketing leaders in different industries, I visited a client’s restaurant for a very late lunch on Monday. It was perfect timing. As it happened, we ran into the bakery manager who was testing out some new treats, and she let us taste a new chocolate concoction. The dessert she was letting the staff (and lucky bystanders and restaurant consultants) taste was great, and the experience of testing something as it was created and developed was amazing–especially something for the bakery case!

But even better than the dessert was the reminder of a concept businesses often forget to use. To be successful, we must LEVERAGE.

What does LEVERAGING mean?

One can be over-leveraged financially, and that’s not a good thing. But in this case, I’m referring to “leverage” as the ability to move faster or grow more quickly or make sales more efficiently by spending in the currency you have. In every business there is something – whether intellectual property, food, room nights, beverages, event tickets, etc. – that are worth more outside of your business than within.

Leveraging Food Costs in the Restaurant Biz

For a restaurant, that means spending in food whenever possible. Instead of spending $1400 for a magazine ad where ROI is difficult to measure, why not spend $100 in food costs to reach a specific target customer group? Not only do you spend less in overall dollars, but you may be simply using food costs that would have been wasted anyway since food waste is a very real portion of any restaurant’s overall budget.

With that in mind, what if you took excess cookie samples to the law office around the corner or gave away one free pastry tray a week to a deserving office in your neighborhood. What if you gave away a free appetizer through a daily drawing or simply offered dessert samples throughout the lunch and dinner hours to existing guests as leverage to make the upsell?

Recently, one of our restaurant clients ran a last-second Twitter promotion targeting college students. To help spread the word quickly, we offered a free pizza for the first person to re-tweet the message. It turned out that two tweets basically tied due to a technological blip, so we gave a way two free pizzas instead. Let’s assume that the pizzas hold about $4 in actual food costs (not counting wait staff, business overhead, etc. when considered as a menu item). In this case, the folks who won the free pizzas brought in groups of 6 and 12 respectively leading to a direct ROI of more than $200 in additional sales on our $8 in leveraged food costs. This doesn’t even count the other sales they helped generate through their social media participation.

Other Ways to Leverage In Business

Business owners can leverage any asset that is of more value outside the business than within. This means your time, expertise, food costs, employees time and skills, etc. are all fair game. I believe that, as business owners, one of the most critical things we can do is to leverage our time. As an example, I use social media to convert more clients and maintain a much larger network reach than I could have imagined five years ago before Facebook and Twitter.

Marianna and I leverage our time to create opportunity for you. An airplane ride like this one (I am currently flying back from Florida) is filled with getting blogs written, e-mails returned and photos cropped, edited and tagged – tasks that don’t require the Internet. It’s amazing the things we can do when we steal time from a wasted time category and turn it into profitable activity.

It’s great how the little moments that were formerly wasted, can be used profitably, but that also means that as business owners, we must make a real point to relax and turn off sometimes. Some of you know that I can’t seem to free myself from my cell phone at any given time, but we all know there’s a time for disconnecting and turning it all off.

I took a little vacation this month, where you weren’t able to get me by phone, email, Facebook, or Twitter…  I leveraged that time to recharge, stop thinking about old work, spend time with my family, clear my brain, eat some good food, and return–and turn back on!–ready to find opportunities for new work!

How can you use the concept of “leveraging” to improve your business today?

Photo Credit: shortlake

In a spur of the moment decision, we headed to the Coast to spend the night earlier this week. We’ve done this before, but sometimes we do actually book a room before we get to our destination. This time however, it wasn’t an option, we simply didn’t have time. I looked online for deals, but seeing none, we tossed our bag in the car, and we ran to our last meeting of the day…

But not before I remembered that a MAJOR destination hotel on the Gulf Coast is on Twitter.

I immediately followed them and tweeted at them: “@hotel_name DM me some deals.” I’m a known cheapskate, so I love a deal. Having sent the tweet, I thought that should initiate SOME response on the part of aforementioned destination hotel.

Now, nearly 18 hours later, I’ve spent the night with a competitor who offered me a deal over the counter. Much like selling a home, I took their offer, counter-offered, and then we settled on a price (about 40% less than their list price that evening).

So why didn’t the first hotel, which is one of the largest employers in the area, have ANYONE who could Tweet back at me? Direct Message me or anything? I don’t know, but I’m guessing it’s because they see Twitter as a new twist in the old-fashioned push marketing game. To them, Twitter is just another billboard: one with 140 characters… A one-way communication street.

Experience and theory in hand, I decided to look at the numbers behind the “destination hotel” Twitter account. Other than MY Tweet, they’ve gotten only two human @replies and 1 bot or automated @reply in the last 5 days. They have 485 followers, but they only follow 50% of those people.

From my professional vantage point, that’s abysmal since they are a huge hotel, casino, and entertainment venue with exponentially more than their follow number as in-house customer count at any given moment of any given day.

Unfortunately, this phenomenon isn’t unusual. mainstream, old school marketers are flooding onto Twitter en masse to “keep up” with the buzz. The problem is, they are using it for themselves – and their clients – to PUSH information out and INTERRUPT followers. They wonder why more people aren’t engaging with them on Twitter – because they aren’t engaging.

Relationships are the single most valuable asset to any business. Twitter provides a venue for nurturing relationships and finding new relationships – all with the brevity of 140 characters with tools called @replies, DMs, hashtags and Twitter Search. If you don’t “get it” – maybe it’s because you’ve only seen folks doing it WRONG. For those doing it “right” – success has been overwhelmingly positive with immediate results where it matters – on the bottom line.

To provide some closing contrast, one of our local small businesses (a client) has gotten SIXTEEN @replies in the last 24 hours as they engaged the community, answered customer questions and received customer compliments.

To destination hotels who want to use Twitter well to intercept customers from your competition, answer customer questions, get customers in your empty rooms tonight, sell tickets to events and fill tables at your restaurants – it can all be done. Twitter is an amazing tool. But right now, there are a lot of mainstream marketers making it #fail.

(If you don’t know what that means, maybe you should give us a call – we’ll teach you how to do it well. You’ll know right away that something’s different. It’s what we do.)

Photo Credit: nickbilton