We’re all used to going online and finding outside information in the form of ratings and reviews in the B2C world, however when it comes to B2B, service providers still tend to be the gatekeepers for prospects in terms of finding customer feedback before they decide to purchase.  It’s not that they intended to be the gatekeepers, it’s just that nobody else shared or organized the information with the exception of high-end analysts firms that sell their reports and evaluations for a fee that most small to mid-size businesses can’t justify.

However, with more people participating in social media for their professional lives, that’s changing fast.  People are creating and joining professional groups and networks to share information with one another relating to their jobs and responsibilities.  As this trend progresses, more professionals are starting to share their experience with business products and services and the companies that provide them just as they do in their consumer lives.

While your business will never be able to control or manage what’s discussed about your company and solutions, there are steps you can take to curate positive reviews and referrals in a way that helps them rise to the top of your prospects radar.

Create a referrals or customer comments page on your own site.

Something that is well within your control is to create your own customer comments and referrals page on your site.  Ask key customers to provide you with a recommendation that you can publish.  In addition to displaying those comments on your respective product pages, create a specific landing page for each one with a title like “[Product Name] Reviews” or “Customer Comments on [Product Name/Company Name]”.  Make sure you also include those terms in your page meta-data.  This will increase your chances of the positive reviews you’ve put together coming up at the top results when someone does a search.

Listen and participate in social discussions on your company and solutions

Use a listening service of your choice to closely monitor any mentions of your product/service or company.  Thank those that are positive and address the negative ones.  If someone’s had a bad experience and is making it public, do your best to resolve that mistake and/or apologize to the customer in the same medium.  Not only will this ensure that prospects that see the comment also see your resolution but there’s a good chance that you’ll turn that upset customer into a company advocate.

Ask key customers to provide a recommendation of your company on other sites

In addition to getting customers to provide you with a recommendation on your own site, it’s also worth it to get them to provide a recommendation on your company on other sites that prospects may go to in order to learn more about your company.  One key point here is to make sure that the review/recommendation is for your company and/or solution and NOT for a person on your team.  Why? People and companies take different paths and if that person leaves, it does you no good.

Taking these steps will allow smart businesses to curate comments about them or their solutions.  It won’t totally control the conversations and it isn’t a magic bullet for marketing but as the use of social media continues to grow for B2B companies, it’s a best effort to make sure the positive Word Of Mouth from your customers gets heard by as many people as possible.

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.

Today people venture to the internet for answers to anything and everything. Unless you live under a rock, you are aware of the immense choices for filtering restaurants, travel, entertainment, news or purchases. Between Yelp, Angie’s List, Digg, Zagat, Fandango and many others, countless options for ratings and reviews allow us to make the ideal selection for our every need. Be it a channel we prefer, or a review site we trust, we are continuously aware of the time and cost savings behind an efficient means of processing information. Anyone can write a great tag line, but only a seriously satisfied patron can write a good review (or in the opposite a bad one). This is how we live our daily lives, prioritizing time, money and efficiency.

Here at FYIndOut we venture to ask the question: Why not business? “Time is money” as they say, and internet searching consumes enormous amounts of time in a business day. Search engines, in all their glory, don’t offer an effective means of finding the best business product, service, or research. Scanning the thousands of keyword related results to your search will never guarantee you’ve located the best information, and few things are worse than realizing you made a bad choice when its too late.

Certainly there are options, throw the search to the interns, outsource your search process, trust the first click, or just pray. But wouldn’t it be easier to have a platform that did the search for you? FYIndOut offers that platform.

Everyone wants more time and we would like to give you more of it. FYIndOut offers a directory of B2B services and research with peer ratings and reviews that make finding simple. Give it a try.

(Picture Moving Sidewalks by Brittany G)