What Service-Based Marketers Need to Know About Reputation Management Right Now With Michael Buzinski From Buzzworthy Integrated Marketing [AMP 260]

What do people say and think about your brand online? It carries much more weight with potential customers than your own marketing messaging. Always responding to negative comments and reviews are opportunities for service-based marketers to turn haters and detractors back into customers and brand loyalists. Today’s guest is Michael Buzinski from Buzzworthy Integrated Marketing. He talks about why reputation management matters and how to make it right. The shortcut to good reputation management is awesome customer service. Under promise. Over deliver.
By A CTIONABLEMARKETINGPODCAST

Some of the highlights of the show include:
  • Reputation Management: Opinion of the general public about you/your company
  • Reviews/Recommendations: Who do you trust - family members or strangers?
  • Service-based Businesses: Getting new clients to know, like, trust is challenging
  • Negative Comments/Complaints: Don’t take them personally, but seriously
  • Same Situation, Different Opinion: Customer isn’t always right - understand why
  • Positive Reviews: Systemize, automate, or incentivize reputation management
  • Customer Scores: Do satisfaction, service, retention scores make an impact?
  • Common Mistakes: Don’t be too zealous or pushy, or you lose loyalty, advocacy
If you liked today’s show, please subscribe on iTunes to The Actionable Content Marketing Podcast! The podcast is also available on SoundCloud, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts.

What Service-Based Marketers Need to Know About Reputation Management Right Now With @Buzzworthy7 From Buzzworthy Integrated Marketing

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Transcript: Ben: Hey, Michael. How's it going? Michael: Pretty good. How are you, Ben? Ben: I really can't complain. I am coming off a week and a half vacation, so I'm feeling refreshed, rejuvenated, and ready to do some podcasting. Michael: Nice. This is my last week before a two-week hiatus as well, me and my wife. Ben: Awesome. Michael: I'm looking forward to it. Ben: Yeah, for sure. I'm sure it's well earned and I hope you're able to enjoy it. Before you do that though, we're going to be talking about reputation management. The first question I have is a pretty obvious one. When we talk about reputation management, what are we really talking about? In pretty simple terms, what does it actually mean? Michael: It's a good question. Reputation management is merely the opinion of the general public about you and your company. It really boils down to that. It's actually been shown that what people say about you in general—whether it'd be a Google review or a testimonial—are actually considered more trustworthy than a recommendation from a family member. What strangers have to say about you and your company literally has more weight than what your mom says about you. Ben: That's harsh. Just brutal. Michael: Yes, it is. Two-thirds of all people will look for reviews, which are your main part of reputation management before making a decision to do business with a new company. It usually takes anywhere between two and seven reviews before they make up their mind. Ben: Okay, so that's obviously pretty important then. Michael: Yes, it's very important. Ben: To drill into that a little bit more deeply, why is it particularly important for service-based companies? Why should they really care about this? Michael: Service-based businesses have a very tough challenge when it comes to getting new clients because people do business with people they like and trust. Online, service-based businesses don't get a lot of chances to really show who they are as a person. People hire people. They don't hire features and they don't hire benefits. They hire the person to deliver those features and benefits.   There are two things that reputation management does for a service-based business. One, we already talked about, is convincing the inbound potential clients that you're trustworthy. Number two, it goes before that and that helps with your visibility on search engines. Reputation management really does have an impactful effect on your search engine optimization, your SEO, which then affects your visibility. If you don't have a lot of reviews for your business, Google looks at you and goes, well, it doesn't seem like anybody's using you nor do they like you. If you have bad reviews, I can actually have a negative effect on your Google Maps placement as well. Ben: That obviously raises a lot of further questions and concerns around what you actually do about this and how you actually approach influencing what people think, feel, and say about you. To start or to just find the easiest place to begin here, if marketers are interested in making reputation management something that they proactively invest in, how can they just begin to assess their current standing? How can they get a feel for what the landscape looks like right now on the web and assess how people think and feel about them right now? Michael: It's a great question and it's a very easy answer. Google yourself and find out what people are saying about you. The first place you're going to look is on your Google My Business page. So Google your company and see how many reviews you have. See if you have positive reviews, negative reviews. The first step in making sure that those are optimized is to respond to every single one of the reviews you get on Google to make sure that people recognize when they give a positive review that you appreciate it. If they give a negative review, get an opportunity to make it right. Because a lot of times, you're able to reverse a negative review into a positive review. I would say that the shortcut to good reputation management is awesome customer service—under-promise, over-deliver. Make sure that people understand what they're supposed to get from you. Set reasonable expectations for your service. Don't promise anything you can't deliver and never try to promise anything you've never tried to deliver before. Be honest, be authentic. You'll run into less negative reviews that way. Once you get past the Google review section, now you're doing vanity searches. You're researching your name and looking for bad things people say. Michael Buzinski is a scam and sees if anybody's out there writing about Michael Buzinski being a scam. That will also give relevant searches for bad reviews. You can also put your company name and reviews, company name bad reviews, company name complaints. Get around there, play around. Find all the different ways on how people would be using your name in vain when it comes to the internet trying to complain because 7 out of 10 people will complain before they praise. You have a 70% better opportunity to get a complaint than you will get high remarks on anything you do personally or professionally. I hope that answers that question. You're setting your base there. Where am I at? Once you've identified where you're at, say you have some bad reviews in there, that's fine. That does not mean you're out of business. That just means you have some work to do. We've all been there. We've all been a young company. We've all ignored. Maybe we grew really fast and our customer service wasn't as good as we originally set it out to be. All of the things that happened in business that we couldn't foresee created situations where we just had bad patches, My businesses had it, I get it. We're all there. We're human beings and we're serving other human beings. We're very opinionated about the service they get. You can get a bad review and have done everything right. You just got somebody on a bad day. They just want to make somebody else miserable because misery loves company. Once you've done that, you're going to have to bury bad with good. The only thing you're not going to be able to bury is when somebody Google's bad reviews and your business. Those are going to come up. It's just there. If you go to Google My Business and you see your reviews, they're always going to show the five, four, three, two, one. They're always going to be there. The only thing you can do is show a higher ratio of good and decent, so fours and fives, then anything, three, two, or one. It's okay to have those ones and twos as long as you are responding to the ones and twos with wonderful customer service because the quality of a business's customer service is not measured when things go well. They truly get measured when everything goes kaput. You have to make it right. That's where you actually find most of your raving fans. Ben: Sure, yeah. It's very, very true. I can speak to this anecdotally, as well as with the statistics you shared. People generally aren't always motivated to go leave an awesome review unless they're really, really stoked about the service they got. But it doesn't take much at all for people to go on the internet and complain. People love to go on the internet and complain. For some people, it's maybe their most favorite thing to do. Michael: Just to complain, right? Ben: Complain, attack, demean, or just express frustration. A lot of times that frustration is warranted. Michael: And sometimes it's not. Sometimes people are just having bad days and they're taking their frustrations in their lives and where they're at out on you and you're just having to be in the way that day. Ben: Yeah, for sure. I think it's healthy to remember that, to keep that in mind, and to maybe not take things super— Michael: Don't take them personally. Definitely don't take them personally. It's business. But as a business, you got to take it seriously. I used to loathe negatives and then I learned that, wait a second, this is an opportunity for me to learn things about how my business is running, learn how people might be construing what we think is awesome service in a different way, and it also tests our customer service process to make sure that when things do go bad, we're able to make it good in a profitable way. Because if you don't have things lined up to make things good when they go bad and you don't give the autonomy to your team to make that happen for you, believe me, I know. I'm right now in the midst of an argument with Dell Computers about a $600 computer. My wife is sitting there telling me just go on social media and start just slamming them, telling everybody. tagging Dell, and they'll come around. They'll get their supervisor on the phone because I can't get one on. I'm like, I know, as a business owner, what that means. To a big company like that, probably nothing. But I know what that looks like when I'm complaining and I don't want to be that guy either. They don't have what it takes. They have a rigid 30-day return policy. Their people don't have the autonomy to understand, hey, wait a second, this guy was on technical support for six weeks, so he spent his time, energy, and money trying to get his computer working with our tech support that didn't get there. But the people on the phone don't have the autonomy to say, you know what, we can make an exception. No, it's in their script. There are no exceptions. Ben: Right. Michael: They make it hard for you to talk to a supervisor because they probably don't have the capability to make the exception. That means I got to go two or three. If that's a small business, what kind of reputation do you think that business is going to have around town if they do that one too many times? Ben: Right, yeah. Michael: It's going to be devastating. Ben: It's not going to be good. Michael: No. The bigger you get, the harder customer service is to systemize, so start early. Ben: Maybe the flip side of that is if you are a large company, if you can find a way to deliver customer service like a small company, that's an incredible opportunity. Michael: Most of the time it's just empowerment. It's giving their customer service department the autonomy to make people happy. As a large corporation, my $600 computer is a drop of a drop upon a drop in the bucket. It is so minuscule to the grander scheme of things to Dell. Why would they treat a person who's been buying dozens of computers upon dozens of computers over decades from them? My first computer, I still remember, my laptop was a Dell Inspiron 8800 back in 1998. It had a 386 in it and it had a whopping 8MB of RAM. I remember that thing. But now I'm thinking, if I get this computer sent back, I'm going to go to Best Buy and I was thinking I was going to get a Dell there so I can have some local support with the Geek Squad. That's what they do. But now I'm like, maybe I'll just get an HP. All they had to do was go, you know what, Mr. Buzinski, you've been buying computers for longer than some of the people in my room have been alive. Maybe we should just send this back. You've been a good customer. That's all it took. Ben: There's an important lesson there in terms for a business to ask themselves—a business's goal is to make more money. What decision can you make in that instance that's going to give the business the best return? If you want to break it down into purely transactional terms, which sometimes, large companies have to think that way, but it just seems like 100% of the time, just being a decent person is always going to give you the best return so those goals don't have to be contrary to one another. Michael: Well, you also have to take a look at when you say transactional versus relationship, relational. You're a service-based business, you're in the relationship business. There is no transaction. There is either the prolonged relationship or the severing of that same relationship. When I lose money today to make somebody happy so that they'll come back tomorrow, did I really lose? Say I'm a dentist, I can have 20 to 50 years with one client, the whole family. I don't just lose the dad, I lose the mom and the two kids. You start looking at like, oh, well, this $300 cleaning didn't get covered by the insurance. You got to pay it out of pocket. Is that the best customer service I can give? Do we go, you know what, I’ll tell you what, you guys are a great family, we love having you here. We're going to cover this one for you. This is how we're going to make sure it doesn't happen again, and this is the process. If you ever have a question on the process, please come to me so we don't have this again. If we're thinking short-term, you're going to think transactional. You're going to think, hey, I can't give back this computer because we're going to lose money on it. Am I going to have a client plus all of the referrals and the raving reviews that I give people about Dell computers forever? I've had Macs for a long time, guess what I went to? Back to Dell. I went from Dell to Mac to Dell. I didn't go anywhere else because of my past experiences, but not anymore, right. I also like to remind business owners, especially small business owners, if you've got less than 10 folks, you are going to run into a bad client, you just are, and you have to prepare everybody. I don't agree that the customer is always right. The customer is usually wrong. The problem is that you haven't been able to get your point of view and their point of view on the same plane. Therefore, you guys are talking about the same situation in a different aspect. Until you get into the same vector on that aspect, you will never agree on what's going on. The easiest example is watching football. Do you watch football? Do you watch sports at all? Ben: Yes. Michael: All right, who's your favorite team? Ben: The Packers. Michael: The Packers. I hate the Packers. I'm a Bengals fan. The other week, the Packers beat the Bengals somehow in overtime. Did you watch that game? Ben: Through the most ridiculous series of [...]. Michael: With your opinion, did they win the game or did the Bengals give them the game? In your opinion. Ben: That's a really, really good question because I feel like—speaking as a Packers fan—the way that the fan base talked about it is like, a win’s a win. It was ugly. Michael: It was ugly, but it's a win. Ben: But could have easily gone the other way, but it's a win and you'll take it. When you win the way that they did, which I guess for anybody listening who did not watch the game, was not familiar, or maybe doesn't understand sports, imagine screwing up over and over and over and succeeding anyway. Michael: From my perspective, I saw the fact that we gave you every opportunity to take it. We lost that game. We watched the same exact game, yet we have different opinions about the outcome. We'll never say the same exact thing. Therefore, we will agree to disagree. That's where a lot of customer service ends up. We're just going to agree to disagree. Instead of trying to find that middle ground where it's like, hey, I'm coming from here and you're coming from here, can we understand the middle ground between those two? Can we then find a win-win situation, and many times it's a lose-win in the client's favor because the win for the company is actually after this transaction? Because we're playing the long game and we're going to make that person happy, but understanding why and how we got there, how we're not going to get here again, and why we made the decision to make an exception today in light of my perspective as a company. Ben: Sure, yeah. This has been great. I think really just in terms of diving deep into what really goes on that influences how a person feels about a business and why a business should care about that. For marketers specifically who play a role in conjunction with customer service, in conjunction with customer success, in conjunction with maybe account managers, account executives, or just an array of customer-facing folks that you might have in your organization, marketers control a piece of that. As a marketer, once you've done your initial audit and initial assessment, even if it was just as simple as just googling yourself or googling the company, what's your next step from there? Because there's a lot of different ways you can go. Do you try to solicit more positive reviews? Do you try to patch up your negative reviews? What's the best next step from there? Michael: The next step is to systemize your reputation management. Whether you're automating it or you're doing it manually, it really doesn't matter. You talked about it earlier, it's hard to get a positive review. You can ask five of your raving fans to give a positive review. The problem is that there's nothing in it for them. They're busy people, usually. How do we get positive reviews? It's just a numbers game at that point. Some people talk about incentivizing. The problem with incentivizing is that sometimes you don't get authentic and haphazard reviews and those come off fake. Even though they came from a real authentic client, they didn't come up sincere. They're like, yeah, they're great. You can always see those. I've even gotten one in my book. I wrote a book and I was like, hey, I know you read the book, so could you give me a review on that? It kind of helps me out on Amazon. The book is great. You might as well not have done it. I got the five star, that's great. But if anybody reads down they're going to see, the book's great. What does that do? It doesn't do anything. Now you have this helpful versus unhelpful little vote that can go behind that and unhelpful. Now that thing gets washed out, so my efforts went for nothing. We help our clients by utilizing some software as a service platform, two of them specifically. One is a reputation management tool called BuzzRep. You can go to buzzworthy.biz. I'm sure you'll share the link later. BuzzRep actually allows you to automate some of the follow up that most small businesses don't have the bandwidth to do themselves. It does it in a way that one pre-screens people who are not ecstatic about your service and gives you an opportunity to talk to them before giving a review, and gives reminders to give reviews. It gives that in the ecosystem. You can get them in text messages, you could do it via email. But once you drop it in, you let the system just do what it's going to do. Once they've said no a certain amount of times, they just drop off. You can re-insert them later if you do it manually. Oh, there are 100 people out of the last 200 people that didn't give a review. Okay. All right, Suzie, at the front desk. It’s the slowest time this season, why don't you call them back and ask how their experience was with us the last time that they were in? Then they're like, oh, yeah, we did that. Okay, I'm going to send you another link and you can put them right back into the system. One of the best ways to utilize reputation management is getting video testimonials on your website. Video shows inflection, it shows all of your nonverbals. It does all the things and it's getting that referral from a stranger that we trust more than anybody else without having to go to the boring five-star reviews and hearing how awesome you are. I want to know why you're awesome. I can say a lot more because I can talk a lot faster than you can read. You're going to hear more words and you're going to internalize those words to my inflection much better than you're reading text. For that, we actually have a platform called BuzzBoast. That allows people to automate the process of sending out an invitation and collecting it straight from the computer or the phone that person's using without having any software. Because the biggest impediment of getting video testimonials is the [...] video itself. Then the user, if they're going to send it themselves like, hey, Ben, will you give me a testimonial about me being on your show? Sure can, I'll get it on my phone. You get on your phone, you do it vertically, you're out of focus, all the other things, and you don't remember what to say or I haven't coached you on what I would like you to talk about, all that stuff. BuzzBoast is a really inexpensive way of doing all that automatically, sending that out, and then only paying for what you bring back. Between the two of those, you can then use the testimonials on your website and you can reference your reviews on your website without anybody going anywhere else. That's the next step. I know that was long-winded, but it's a long process. It's not overnight. Ben: Yeah, I think that's a very thorough answer. Once you get past that very initial step, there's so much that you can do and so much that goes into it. I actually appreciate the comprehensiveness of that answer and also leave listeners with some tools that they can go look up to actually go do stuff. Michael: The problem is that when you do it manually, you'll lose zest for it. It just is. Consistency is the game when it comes to collecting reviews and testimonials. It just is. Ben: We don't need to be convinced here at CoSchedule of the value of automation that's for sure. Michael: It's part of your ethos, isn't it? Ben: Yeah. Making things easier is the way it goes. Michael: It's an awesome little platform. I took a look at it. It's really cool. Ben: Yeah, I appreciate that. Speaking of reputation management, the value of third-party validation, that's self-serving maybe, but practicing what we preach maybe a little bit. Michael: You're also talking about social proofing though. That's a psychological thing. The herd mentality sets in. When I see that 100 other people love it, then it must not be bad. I can at least check it out. I'll do the free trial. Ben: Yeah, it makes a big difference. It's so true because even for myself, if I'm just doing some online shopping for whatever type of products, it can be almost literally any product, if I am not already decided what I'm going to choose, one of the most powerful things that a product, or a service, or a company can have going in its favor is, what are people saying about it? Something that I think about pretty frequently is I can be looking at two different options that I know rationally are equal, but I will absolutely pay a little bit more for the one that more people seem to like just because there's always a nagging voice in my mind that says, the cheaper option or the less popular option has got to be inferior in some way that I'm not going to realize until after I buy that thing. But in reality, it's probably just fine. That's a powerful thing, though. When we talked about the herd mentality, I feel like, as much as we all like to think that we're smart, we think critically, we aren't swayed by the opinions of others, we are. Michael: There are hundreds of human mental biases out there. There's a whole book written on all of the biases that we deal with internally every single day, some of them very subconsciously, the things you never even thought about. Things that keep us alive from going insane. It's amazing how much our brains lie to us. Emotions cloud so much logical thoughts beyond what I can even describe on the show. We're not as smart as monkeys. Oh man, I wish I could remember that book. It was a book and it was amazing. I was actually using it. I was writing a book on customer service when I read a book on customer service, the customer service economy. Once I read that, I was like, oh, that was everything I wanted to say. It's already out, I'm good. I stopped writing the book, but I was doing my research on it. I was using all of these biases that people come into a situation with that cloud their judgment in how they buy, how they perceive their service, how they perceive the quality, all the other things that go along with it. You're not far off at all when it comes to that stuff. We do buy with our gut in the end. Evaluate logistically, but we make a decision with our gut. Ben: Yeah, 100%. Assuming our listeners have taken this advice to heart, they've made an investment in making reputation management something that they tackle proactively. How would you recommend that they approach measuring whether or not their efforts are paying off and whether or not the work that they're doing with reputation management is actually making an impact on the business? I think beyond just getting more reviews or improving review scores, obviously, it's much more complicated than that, but that's easy enough to monitor. Beyond that, how can you know whether that's actually making a difference versus does it just look nice? Michael: Right, exactly. There are a couple of ways. You touched on your balance of good reviews versus your bad reviews. You do have to survey internally on top of that and look at your customer satisfaction scores. Because if we go all the way back to the beginning, reputation management starts with customer service, and that is very measurable. Once we've delved into the customer service scores, the customer satisfaction scores, and we see how those match up with how many good reviews we're getting versus how many bad reviews we're getting, or are we getting an unbalanced middle review—a three, a two, too many fours versus fives, those types of things. Those are really good markers. Don't discount them. They're there for a reason. The percentage of reviews you get per request is also an indication of how well you're doing with your customer service. Because you have raving fans, they're going to jump on the opportunity that you gave them to get those reviews. Between those two are going to give you your outcome for that. Then you can start looking at your customer retention. Most service-based businesses are wrapped around returning clients, recurring revenue. Start looking at what your retention rate looks like. If your retention rate isn't a curve up along with your customer satisfaction, along with your reputation management scores, everything is pointed in the right direction. Keep doing that. If there's incongruence between those three KPIs, you got to take a look at what's going on. Where is the disconnect and how can we fix it? Ben: Are there any common mistakes that you see marketers or businesses make when it comes to reputation management that maybe they should be mindful to avoid? We've touched on this a little bit like incentivizing reviews has a lot of problems attached with it. It just almost 100% guarantees that your reviews are going to come off disingenuous. Michael: Especially for services, yes. Ben: Yes, but beyond that, are there any other things that you see happen that are those things that listeners should just be careful to avoid doing? Michael: Being too zealous is the biggest mistake I see with reputation management. Being too pushy in that zeal. You can make a raving fan an annoyed raving fan that's not going to be an advocate. They'll keep using you, but they're not going to be your advocate. That's the next level in the sales cycle, your sales funnel. Conversion is for most the middle of their sales funnel. Then there's loyalty and then advocacy. Your reputation management is going to remind them why they're going to be loyal. Ongoing loyalty and your ongoing customer service are going to feed advocacy. If you're too pushy about the loyalty side of things, you're going to skip out on advocacy. Advocacy is the most valuable client you possibly can have. It's the apex. Even though it's at the bottom of a funnel, it's also the smallest amount of your client mix that you will ever have. It's the one-percenters that go out of their way to get you a new business because they believe in you and they want to advocate for your success for you. Without any extra pay, without any extra discounts, without any extra special treatment, they just want to see you succeed because you're so darn awesome in their eyes. Don't shoo them away by being overzealous and too pushy with your reputation management and trying to get those reviews, trying to get those video testimonials, written testimonials, or spoken testimonials. All the things are great, but be patient with them. Let them understand that you respect their time and that there's no huge rush. Even though you're in a hurry, they're not. You're going to have to meet with them because they're the ones doing you a favor at that point. They've already done you a favor. They've used you as a service and they paid you for it. Gosh darn it, I am very thankful that every time I get hired, every single time I get hired, and my company gets to do that for what we do for other companies, I feel blessed by that trust. Let's not forget that we have earned trust. It's okay for them to take six months to get you that review. It'll probably be one of the best reviews you've ever gotten. I'll leave you with this. I had a client who loved our service so much. When he sold the business, he made it a stipulation that they keep us on as the marketing because it was the only reason that he was able to grow it to the point where he could sell it. With that said, I could not get a review from him on Google for years. He's down in Mexico now retired. He calls me up and we're talking the whole nine yards. We're going through the transition and I did one last ask. I said, is there any way you could give me a review before you disappear into the sunset? He's like, you know what, I'm going to do that for you Buzz, and he did. It was one of the best reviews and testimonials I've ever gotten, but it took years and it was after he even sold the business. Ben: Wow. That is incredible. It's an amazing visual of someone. I literally picture somebody pressing publish on that review, then mounting their horse, and literally riding off. Michael: That was pretty much it. I probably talked to him twice since then. Ben: That is so good. It speaks to a very real psychological kind of thing. If there's something you really probably should do, you got to do, it goes on a— Michael: Inconsistency. If I had given up, I would have never got that, never. One of the lines he said is, "If you're not using Buzzworthy, you're doing it wrong." You can't make that stuff up. Ben: You're literally incorrect if you use literally any other competitor. You're failing. Michael: We're putting that on our website? Heck, yeah. Ben: Yeah, that's awesome. You talked about persistence. It's persistence, but it's not overzealousness. Michael: Right, exactly. You just have to go with the flow and you just remember. If you're that person, the person that you give the responsibility to needs to be intertwined with the customer service, the customer's journey, really. As an owner, we're not always that person. Sometimes it's the person at the front desk that should be responsible for collecting those. I have a dentist who sends me scans of thank you letters they get as a dentist. Then we post that on their website. They get handwritten letters on their website from people who love their dentist. Ben: That's amazing. That's awesome stuff. It sounds weird, but when you find a dentist you really like, it's such a weight off your shoulders because if you're trusting somebody to jam sharp metal objects in your mouth, you better like that person. Michael: Yes, and come back every six months with that. What are you doing as a dentist? Because that's not a very exciting thing, cleaning teeth. You only see your dentist for about 15 minutes, but then you're so happy with the service that you're willing to handwrite and mail in a thank you card. Wow, that says something. Ben: That's powerful because that takes so much effort. Maybe modern life has made us all lazy and we think that writing a letter is a high effort activity. But for something like that, that takes a lot of thought. You can't just casually do that. Michael: You got a card that says thank you and then you're saying your name. There's always a thought. I will tell you, from somebody who was alive before the internet, writing letters back before the internet was just as thoughtful as it is today. I would say it's more thoughtful because most people will copy to an email, a text, or anything like that, so that's more thoughtful, but it takes just as much energy. Ben: Right, because I also remember the days of lacking other options aside from maybe a carrier pigeon. I think that that is such a remarkable signal that you're doing something right when you can inspire that type of response from somebody really without you having to prompt it. But then I suppose, if you put it on the website and then other people see it, they're like, I want to be on the website. Michael: If you think of it this way. It's pretty cool to get something that's handwritten from anybody. One of the things that I fail at doing enough of is sending thank you cards to my clients. Here's a thought. This is something I just thought of. Putting a QR code on the back of a thank you card from your company. The card says, thank you very much for whatever the experience was that you had with that client. You got to make it personal. Then they're going to look at the back and the back is going to say, if you enjoyed your experience as much as we did, please give us a review and have a QR code that will go to whichever place you want. You can have a go to your BuzzRep platform that will then have the current links to whatever you want. Is it on Facebook? Do you want it on Google? Do you want it on Pinterest or whatever review platform you want at that moment where you're collecting more reviews for? It could be an association that you're part of and there's a place for reviews there. Finding a way to make sure that QR code is timeless and you have a place for yourself to change where that goes is great, but having that on the back of your card and any other thing. Maybe you have an appointment reminder and it has that on the back, those types of things. Just keep it top of mind. It's a small ask every time and then that creates an automatic persistence that you are not personally making. Like every time I see Ben, he's asking me for a daily review. Dang it. Oh, here he comes, I got to go the other way. Ben: I am notorious for demanding reviews. Michael: Are you the zealots review demand [...]? Ben: Guilty as charged. Michael: Awesome. If you do it with a smile maybe. Do they run from you? Ben: Yeah, I don't have a lot of friends. Michael, this has been amazing. It's such a good conversation. If people are interested in finding you, your book, or your company anywhere on the web, where would you recommend they go look? Michael: Easiest place to find everything about Buzzworthy and me is at buzzworthy.biz. My book is at the top. All of our DIY software opportunities are at the bottom, and everything we do as a company in the middle.
About the Author

Ben Sailer has over 14 years of experience in the field of marketing. He is considered an expert in inbound marketing through his incredible skills with copywriting, SEO, content strategy, and project management. Ben is currently an Inbound Marketing Director at Automattic, working to grow WordPress.com as the top managed hosting solution for WordPress websites. WordPress is one of the most powerful website creation tools in the industry. In this role, he looks to attract customers with content designed to attract qualified leads. Ben plays a critical role in driving the growth and success of a company by attracting and engaging customers through relevant and helpful content and interactions. Ben works closely with senior management to align the inbound marketing efforts with the overall business objectives. He continuously measures the effectiveness of marketing campaigns to improve them. He is also involved in managing budgets and mentoring the inbound marketing team.