We’ve done posts before on how ratings and reviews are second only to word-of-mouth from a trusted friend.  For the most part, the logic behind it was that everyone is so used to looking up customer opinions before buying anything in their consumer lives, that it’s inevitable to use the same powerful concepts in our professional lives for our businesses.

Then the recession hit.

Now everyone has to make the most of their time and budgets out of pure necessity.  Small to Mid-Size businesses can’t afford to pay a high-end analyst firm for research and they definitely can’t afford to pick the wrong vendor.  Ratings and reviews of business applications and products are being done more and more out of necessity and it’s paying off for both the buyers and the solution providers.

With marketing budgets slashed, solution providers are doing everything they can to take advantage of social media and word-of-mouth campaigns at costs that are a fraction of the old-school methods.  Part of that is getting key customers to provide online references and reviews for them to help them stand out among the competition.  Expect this trend to grow in 2009 and 2010.

As people start to feel optimistic about the economy improving, smart companies are not going to jump back in to habits.  They are going to seriously look at what helps the bottom line and what doesn’t for the foreseeable future and taking advantage of ratings and reviews for business applications and services will be a key tactic for those wanting to beat the competition.

Tags: Economy, online reviews, ratings, Ratings and Reviews, referrals, reviews

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 at 2:11 pm and is filed under Marketing, Social Media. 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.