Testimonials - The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly - Part 2

After recently reading a post by a fellow blogger and apartment marketeer, Mike Brewer, about Trust Marketing I thought back to a post I did back in June about testimonials. I like what Mike says in his post about gaining customers trust. We are in a world where our friends, family, acquaintences, and online sources are the driving forces for what we buy. While clever advertising is still fun to watch on TV, it seems to me that more and more people are just entertained by the ads but not influenced by them. There are a few exceptions to the rule, but this is the trend and is reviewed thoroughly by Seth Godin in his most recent book Meatball Sundae. To me, people buy from people and brands they trust.

So, as I said, I reflected back on my "Testimonials - The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly" post from June and I was curious how many of you are helping to control the online conversation about You? How are you helping to build trust for your brand online? As we read on blogs, Amazon.com, apartmentratings.com, yelp.com, and many others, customers are writing reviews. Unfortunately for your company, brand, community, etc. the majority of people that typically write these reviews are ones that are not happy. All this said, I'm writing this follow-up post today to pose three questions that I would love your responses to.

1. What are you doing already to control the online conversation about your brand?

2. Does getting involved in the online conversation about your brand help to build "trust" in your brand or should you just let the cards fall as they may?

3. Is it ethical to solicit feedback from your customers (survey them) and then post that information online while filtering out the bad (as most likely that bad is already being posted)?