Meta, Google & co. A crackdown is coming that will change the online reviews

2 July 20222 years ago babelfish

Also in our country the process of transposition of the European Directive 2019/2161 is underway, which modifies, among other areas, the spaces for intervention on the front of reviews. The intervention of Andrea Boscaro, partner of The Vortex

Anglo-Saxons, in interpreting the different roles that social media can play for organizations, argue that they can be "owned, paid and earned". If the contents published on a Facebook Page or on an Instagram Profile by a company ("owned") are subject to an inexorable decline in visibility due to algorithm changes and if the purchase of advertising space ("paid ") Suffers from increasing tracking difficulties, the focus should be on monitoring and improving the management of online reputation and word of mouth (" earned ") given the conversations concerning the brand, the products, the services marketed and the reviews that may have been posted by customers.

Also in our country the process of transposition of the European Directive 2019/2161 is underway, which modifies, among other areas, the spaces for intervention on the reviews front: if it continues to be illegal to publish false reviews, the transparency required of companies increases because they inform consumers of the procedures aimed at ensuring the verification of the origin of the reviews by real buyers and there is an obligation to report whether the review has been stimulated by a reward or a discount coupon. Furthermore, the Directive prohibits making a totally discretionary use of the reviews received to the detriment of correctness, such as through the non-publication of negative reviews by valuing only the positive ones.

The Directive extends to prohibit "indicating that reviews of a product are sent by consumers who have actually used or purchased the product without taking reasonable and proportionate measures to verify that the reviews come from those consumers" and "Send, or instruct another legal or natural person to send, false consumer reviews or false appreciations or to provide false information regarding consumer reviews or appreciations on social media, in order to promote products ”. Although it is necessary to wait for the extent to which this Directive will be transposed into our legal system, it can however be said that there is a real crackdown on reviews and how they have been, up to now, collected and used as " social proof "in digital marketing and communication strategies.

If the Directive then increases the obligations of digital platforms – Meta and Google, for example, respectively with regard to Facebook Pages and Google My Business – to remove untrue reviews, the role of reality as Verified Reviews is destined to grow. , Trusted Shops and Trustpilot that provide verification systems that do not allow manipulation by e-commerce sites thanks to compliance with shared standards and the result of a sample verification process of the reviews received.

The Directive was introduced by the European Commission on the basis of the assessment according to which purchasing choices are increasingly influenced by reviews whose manipulation risks being an unfair commercial practice. This reading was accompanied by a research, conducted at the same time as the introduction of the Directive, the data of which show, for example, the fact that 114 out of 223 sites analyzed cannot guarantee the authenticity of the reviews and more than half do not provide information on how taken to avoid posting fake reviews.

To protect the online reputation of a company it will therefore be increasingly necessary to plan a real strategy:

listening to reviews received on digital platforms to mark the truthful ones as inappropriate so that they are deleted;
protection against comments posted by anonymous users, trolls and haters;
mapping the criticisms received to remedy them;
of active customer service that, if possible, prevents the publication of a review or, when published, that responds to you by enhancing, both substantially and in terms of communication, the support offered;
of collaboration with suppliers of verified reviews so that reviews from as many customers as possible are collected in the permitted manner, so that they can compensate for the opinion expressed by the reasonably lower number of dissatisfied customers.

Online reputation management cannot therefore be a simple form of customer assistance, but for it to be able to deal with the "noisy minority" while activating the "silent majority" it must become a real communication activity that requires organization and skills to be able to perform it at its best.

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/meta-google-co-in-arrivo-giro-di-vite-che-modifichera-le-recensioni-online/ on Fri, 01 Jul 2022 05:18:49 +0000.