Giving fans and critics a voice online

The Government’s announcement that it is launching an online review mechanic for public services is an interesting move. It’s an eye-catching initiative, although providing customers with a voice in relation to very specific service experiences is a risky enterprise unless handled very carefully.

The key issues are:

Authenticity – Can readers be certain that the reviews come from bona fide customers of the service? Too many online review services are prone to manipulation, bias and blatant falsehood. What is required is a closed loop system that guarantees the authenticity of the customer. Reevoo is a perfect example of this type of service and is building a widely trusted brand.

Independence – Any review process that is not managed independently will be open to accusations that it contains politicised content.

Politicisation – By individualising criticism – bringing it down to a personal level for both the customer and the provider – there is a risk that it takes some of the most acute responsibility away from Government and places it on the desk of the individual provider. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, in that it places greater scrutiny on local delivery and enables more rapid organisational response to failure, but it does potentially change the nature of political debate in relation to public service delivery in this country.

Reputation – There are two points here: (1)Research commissioned by Reevoo shows that reviews have several times more influence on purchasing decisions online than advertising. (2) The internet creates a context within which all of our decisions ought to be more informed.

Both make the case for the implementation of minimum standards in any review service. Recently, there have several incidents that have the potential to undermine the effectiveness or erode trust in online reviews. An electronics manufacturer was found to have paid for positive reviews of products and a popular listings site was found to have solicited payment from client companies in order to remove negative reviews.

There is a better way and my hope is that the Government will look carefully at process and make any review service that it implements watertight and unimpeachable. Enabling customers to mark your card is a brave and sensible move in the age of opinion. We just need confidence that we can believe what we read.

Old PR formula: X + Y = maybe. Our formula: X + Y = likely.

I recently set up a PR and reputation consultancy, following twenty years in-house as a director comms for a range of retail, technology and professional services businesses.

I've taken the view that the worlds of media, PR and business are all changing at such a dramatic pace that it is time to tackle the way that businesses communicate with the media, and through it their customers, in a new and more effective way.

All our senior are either former in-house communicators or former national journalists, from broadcast and print. We're well connected and our reputation and effectiveness rest on our ability to place interesting, brand-enhancing stories under the gaze of millions of eyeballs.

So far, so good. Every one of our clients is the regular recipient of substantial levels of national press and broadcast coverage - and our reputation is growing, both as a source of great stories and as expert counsel to our clients.

A senior editor at the BBC recently described to me the emergence of "ambient news", supplied by fewer journalists, challenged to deliver their content across multiple media. An editor at the Daily Telegraph recently told me that he no longer sees the Telegraph as a newspaper - today it is a multimedia organisation.

The old methodologies that were used by businesses and PR advisors - what some would describe as old-fashioned warfare - lobbing a press release out of your trench and hoping for the best - no longer apply. If the media is changing, so too must the PR advisor. For us, relationships are everything, and judging by the reaction to date, we may be on to something....