Online Marketing Blog: Social Media Optimization, SEO &
Web Marketing Strategy

With the astonishing popularity of sites like Amazon and MySpace many lesser known online retailers are taking notice of the elemental differences. Allowing for customer comments, photos, and more importantly reviews is quickly becoming a requisite feature of any e-commerce business and it’s a move that’s paying off! Studies show that customer reviews are around 80% positive and that 63% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase from a site featuring reviews and other forms of feedback.

Ok, that sounds great if you are or hope to be a high volume retailer of consumer products but what if you’re a business with longer sales cycles and more expensive products? What about the consultants of the world? How can they attempt to duplicate the customer review phenomenon for the same commercial benefit?

Enter Social Media Optimization (SMO)

The process of soliciting and displaying customer feedback for others to read and share is in itself a social media. If direct product page customer feedback isn’t a fit there are many other ways that businesses can begin to leverage the power of social media. One of the best choices would be the creation of a blog such as this one. By allowing customer feedback to exist you appeal to the customer’s sense of trust by:

• Conveying responsibility - it’s nice that they would be interested in my feedback as a customer
• Showing accountability - if there’s a problem I can leave a comment to be read by many other customers, they’ll have to help me with my problem
• Displaying confidence in the business - they must be confident in their products and services to take the risk of bad press being displayed directly on their website

Read more about Social Media Optimization

Technorati Tags: seo, search engine optimization, smo, social media optimization, social media marketing

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 12:03 pm and is filed under Marketing, Social Media Optimization, Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.