How and Why Manipulating Online Feedback Ruins Your Personal Brand
The What
In today’s digital economy world, your online brand is a combination of your resume and your reputation. We all want to show everything we believe we are very good at and we want as many people as possible to validate our skill with positive feedback. We want Likes on Facebook, upvotes on Reddit, and direct positive discussion and feedback on our blogs and web sites.
Positive reviews with five star ratings are what we strive for all of the time and achieving the proverbial “perfect score” is the only acceptable outcome. We only want to be viewed as being perfect without being willing to even acknowledge that we might NOT be perfect and we could actually get or be better at something. In fact, sometimes we are so focused at only appearing to be perfect that we will do anything and everything in our power to not just ignore anything that indicates we aren’t perfect but we will work very hard to ensure those comments and such never see the light of day for others to know about.
Make no mistake – this manipulation of information does not make you look better. In fact, it arguably ends up making you look worse because it opens the door to conversation about WHY you look so perfect.
The How
There are a variety of ways that one can manipulate data. Let’s start with the most basic – don’t allow any kind of feedback or rating at all. There are a lot of so-called “bloggers”, especially in the tech community, that publish articles that are light on facts, heavy on personal opinion, and completely devoid of any consideration for how others might use a particular piece of technology. And they offer absolutely NO OPPORTUNITY to comment on the article, provide feedback, or generally point out where the article is factually incorrect.
Next are the places where the providers can explicitly dispute reviews and ratings or even actively work to have them taken down. These are places like Glassdoor, Yelp, and even Google. When I claim that a provider (a “company”) can actively work to have reviews taken down, I am not claiming there is any form of direct button to delete a review or anything similar. I am saying that there are various ways to request that sites like Google remove the content either by reporting it as infringing on a copyright, reporting it for violating the terms of service, or even using something like the DMCA to claim that the content itself doesn’t actually belong to the account that posted it. Since large sites will get a lot of reports, automating the review of them and making a decision on what to do with the content will be automated. In other words, no person ever actually looks at any of the claims or the reports.
The last type I’ll mention here is the directly-tied web site. This could be any entity that is maintaining their own presence on the Internet either through various blog sites or through a privately funded site. My site (presuming you are reading this directly off of my web site) falls into this last category. Specifically, I want to only focus this section on sites that allow commentary from individuals (like mine does) since any that prohibit any sort of comments from readers fits the first category. Do you love this article? Hate it? Want to call something out? Add a personal anecdote? You can do any or all of those things here. And, while I do use some filtering to help keep SPAM posts from showing up, I generally don’t do any moderating beyond that. Yes, I may decline or remove certain comments if they may be inflammatory, contain inappropriate language, or indicate someone is simply not behaving appropriately (especially towards others – I won’t tolerate anything derogatory, abusive, or similar), but I support your right to comment. I am absolutely NOT perfect at anything, and I am worse at some things than I am at others. But I do have thoughts, ideas, beliefs, and opinions that I will share in as reasonable and appropriate a manner as I am able to. All I ask is that you be similar in your participation.
The Why
Up to this point, I’ve mentioned what having and maintaining a “brand” comes down to and (generally) how many businesses and people can manage it. Now, though, I’d like to delve into why it’s more useful to the audience to be as transparent as possible and not try to manipulate the information available to them.
There is a company in the Northeast that makes a variety of fabric-based products. Throws, blankets, sheets, robes, and more. They are reasonably well-known. I looked at every single product on their web site and found that almost every individual item not only has at least 200-300 reviews, but the worst rating of any item anywhere on the site is about 4.25 stars. Interesting. I dug into the actual reviews of some of the products and found a couple of things I thought were interesting:
- They present every item individually which makes it appear that they sell much more than they actually do. For example, selling one blanket in three different fabrics and six different colors isn’t reflected as three products with color choices – instead, it’s 18 ‘unique’ products on the page.
- The majority of products seem to have a between 2 and 4 percent of the total ratings coming in at one star. Many products have zero one star ratings and I did find two outliers that had 6 or 8 percent of the ratings coming in at one star. They are accumulating ALL of the ratings for a particular style together, regardless of color even though they present each style/color combo individually on the site.
- There were almost no reviews more than a year old, none of the reviews have dates of when they were written / published, and lowest ratings seem to only be in the more recent months. And many of these mention the quality having gotten worse.
Here’s the good news about this company – they NEVER used to allow any sort of negative commentary or feedback but clearly, they now do. I know they never allowed it because I wrote a review of one of their products and submitted it with a three star review. While the bulk of my review focused on the way they were made and the materials being of decent quality, I pointed out that I would have loved to have seen them offered with a specific sizing option (common in the industry but they didn’t offer it at all – possibly to manage how much inventory they would need to support). They refused to publish my review or my rating and responded directly via email telling me they don’t offer what I had mentioned and had no plans to, so that’s why they wouldn’t publish what I wrote.
Really? What were you worried that my review was going to do? Show you that there were a lot of people interested in the same thing that I was and put you in the position to… (gasp) have to serve the consuming public by offering something they want to buy?
Here’s another little story about a blogger that likes to publish cooking content, including a lot of recipes (I’m talking about you, H). While the recipes themselves are fairly good ones to either use directly or use as a base to make modifications on top of, the way the content is presented is poor. As before, here are a couple of observations about the site that I found interesting:
- There are more recipes than I could have reasonably expected – over 2800 of them. All kinds of dishes, all kinds of varieties, all kinds of ethnicities. This is really great.
- I could not find a recipe with a star rating below 4.93 anywhere. No matter where I looked, everything has hundreds of reviews / ratings (or thousands) and the lowest combined rating I could find in a short search was 4.93.
- Each recipe had the ability to have comments, ratings, or both combined together. The ratings submitted without any kind of comments were basically all five stars.
- I could not find a single rating anywhere less than four stars.
This web site strictly manipulates what they will allow to be posted and what ratings they will accept. Again, I know from first-hand experience because I attempted to add comments about a recipe that indicated it created a good finished product but the way the recipe was structured / presented was more confusing than it needed to be and made it more difficult for the reader to assess either whether they had the appropriate items on hand or what the needed to shop for. And coming up short DURING the cooking process makes for bad results. My comments were allowed, but my three star rating was not.
What was more irritating is that they replied and told me that I could just go to the recipe card to see everything. That was exactly the part of the presentation that I had an issue with, but that comment isn’t one they would publish.
The Conclusion
For me, both of these entities have left a bad taste in my mouth due to how they have managed their brands. The first company has gotten slightly better, but they are still presenting their products in a manner that I feel is somewhat deceptive. And my original interaction with them was very off-putting to how they were managing their online brand reputation. The second entity has shown me that they are simply not to be trusted. If they are absolutely unwilling to even accept constructive criticism, that tells me that I should be suspicious of all of the content on their site. Yes, it’s cooking and baking recipes. But, how do I know that they are being truthful and accurate if they are talking about things like ingredient substitutions or whether something would adhere to certain standards (like dairy-free or similar, for example)? If they refuse to even acknowledge when someone points out where something is a little off, then that means they aren’t interested in fixing any of what they have published.
The main issue I had with the second site is that what I was told to do (jump to the recipe card) didn’t actually solve the problem. In fact, the recipe card itself WAS the problem. The ingredients are listed in the specific “parts” of the dish they pertain to only. There is no single list of them that can be used as a “shopping list” of sorts. This is a strange way to list out ingredients and is one I have seen nowhere else. Here is an example of a recipe (Instant Pot Chili) that we like quite a bit and is presented in the way we are accustomed to.
Businesses and individuals that are so focused on looking perfect that they manipulate facts trying to look good just end up looking very bad. They are trying to improve their reputation when all they are truly doing is degrading it by being deceptive. I can appreciate that too many people don’t actually know how to provide any sort of feedback or criticism that isn’t perfect without being overly harsh and even aggressive about it. Still, not allowing feedback at all or ignoring what comes in means that there is no opportunity to improve going forward. And if you aren’t improving, you aren’t growing. And that just means you’re shrinking and becoming less useful and relevant.
Let’s Hear From You
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this article and whether you may have any tips or tricks for finding good sources of information or additional ways to identify information that may not be very good. I’m also open to hearing your feedback on whether the content you see on this site seems legitimate and trustworthy. In other words, how am I doing at managing -my- online brand reputation?