Last week a posted an article on the Perfect Patients blog on "Getting Your Practice In To Online Review Sites." This Tuesday during a presentation to the Milwaukee AMA I was asked about some of the quickest and easiest ways that small business customers can deploy social media (and leverage the power of their customers to help market their business).

Try asking your customers to review you online. Huh? How? What?

It's pretty straightforward. Here's a _ action plan.

1. Find out which websites that list local businesses in your area have review capability. This is easily done by searching for something like "cityname profession" such as "Green Bay Chiropractor". That will give a good look at what directories rank well for your city. (you'll usually see their results on page 1 or 2 of the results) For our local Green Bay, Wisconsin market, the breakdown looks like this:

• Google Local


• Yahoo Local


• Switchboard.com (user reviews sourced from Judy's Book and Insider Pages)


• Judy's Book


• Insider Pages


• Superpages.com (Verizon's yellow & whitepages site)


• Citysearch.com (Green Bay version linked to)

2. Make up simple cards (postcard or index card size) with the URLs of the most popular review sites on one side an a couple quick points of instruction (like...visit the site, look for the "review" link, post your comments, save) to keep at your counter and to send out with all bills, statements, invoices and the like.

3. Link to the review sites (and perhaps mention a glowing review, with permission of course) in your e-newsletters that you send to customers.

4. Enjoy the positive word of mouth and energy that comes from having a great online reputation and a bushel full of great reviews!

This makes so much sense, since all of us are unavoidably consumers. As a consumer, I certainly make up part of the majority population who trusts the opinion of other consumers who have purchased the product. Same goes for services. The question is, then, are there any businesses or industries that may be too small, too unique, or otherwise immune to the success of an online review?

Interesting info, I never knew about it until now. Thanks for sharing
this valuable information.Great post. Keep it up!