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.

One of the biggest issues that still remain when you’re looking for a product or service for your business is getting enough honest and open information on the solution provider(s) you’re looking at.

I know some of you out there are thinking, “What do you mean? One of the first things we do when we’re picking our short list is to ask for referrals.”  That’s great.  You should be.  And just to keep this conversation focused, let’s all agree that these are legitimate referrals from happy customers and not some fluffed up referrals from close customers they take to the game every once in awhile and give their product to for free.  In regards to referrals, my point is that they’re needed and great to have but is getting three to five referrals enough when spending a good chunk of your budget?

In our consumer lives, not only do we have the ability to see referrals for a solution but we also have the opportunity to share and read reviews on a product, service, restaurant, and almost anything else.  The number and quality of reviews from your-website-of-choice help you get a pretty good gauge of where you’re about to spend your money and if you should.  You get to hear the good with the bad or sometimes just the good but if one provider has ten recommendations and the other only has one, you’re still much more comfortable as to who you’re going to go with.

Now back to the business world. You’re sort of stuck with getting your information from the business you’re trying to review.  It’s great when a company can give you referrals but when that’s the only info you can get, where does that leave you?  For the mid-size to large corps that may have some extra money (or did before ‘08) you could pay a research firm of choice for a report of providers in that area.  Once again, to keep this simple, let’s agree that the research firm is great and not paid by said solution providers to be included in a research report in the first place and/or receiving revenues or referral fees of any other sorts from said solution providers. (That’s a whole other blog post.) How does the analyst find out who the solution provider’s customers are? They ask them.  How does the analyst know about the product features or benefits of the service the solution provider offers? They ask them.  How does the analyst know what the solution provider will be offering in the future? They ask them.  So outside of a great looking document with bullet points, charts, and an invoice, it still comes back to the solution provider is the gatekeeper to full input from customers about their offering.

Nobody’s saying the solution providers wanted it this way or that there’s some conspiracy in place for b2b.  The fact is that as the internet continues to improve access to everything the business world is just behind in comparison to the platforms and knowledge we’re able to share in our consumer lives.  That’s changing now.  In the current economy and with the increasing number of small businesses while large companies continue to merge or close, we’re going to see increased use of our consumer online practices in the b2b world and we won’t have to rely on the company selling to us for open information on their offering and service.