This week Domino’s Pizza made a really brave and innovative move by posting live customer feedback on a display in Times Square. The comments were edited for language and relevance but not for positive or negative opinion. This kind of transparancy has become one of the hallmarks of social media.
It made me think about how important it is to get real and believable testimonials from customers. It is no longer good enough to have a ‘Testimonials’ page on your website full of glowing, well thought out recommendations. People need to believe that they are 100% real. Social media gives us the opportunity to prove the validity of our customer feedback and although we aren’t all going to be as brave as, or have the budget of Domino’s Pizza there are a few ways we can collect convincing testimonials.
If someone says something good about you on Twitter mark the tweet as a favorite. Once you have collected a few you can link to your favorites page from your website, blog, Facebook page or email signature. You can even embed the live stream of your favorites directly onto your website.
YouTube
If someone is speaking their praise direct into camera there can be no denying that it is real. Video testimonials can really work. Try to keep them short and to the point and most importantly in the words of the person giving feedback. Try not to put words into their mouths.
Channelship have done this really well as have the Kerry County Enterprise Board however I do feel the Enterprise Board could have benefitted more from a lot of short videos rather than editing them all toghther. Internet Video viewers have a short attention span and an 8 minute long video would be enough to put some people watching.
Blogging
We’ve mentioned Buyers Broker’s Blog here before. They use blogging to display customer testimonials, written in their own language and including a photograph. They are very believable.
Screen Grabbing Facebook posts
It can be frustrating if people compliment you on Facebook as even though they have gone out of their way to recommend you the post is only visable to people who visit your page, it will not appear on the news streams of people who like your page unless they happen to be a friend of the person posting it.
To share these comments with your Facebook likes you can screen grab them and post them as photos to your Facebook page.
You can grab recommendations from anywhere on the Internet forums and add them as a photo album to Facebook or even Google+.
What creative ways do you have of collecting testimonials from your customers? I’d love to hear your ideas so please leave a comment below.
