Customer reviews of your products or services are very important to your online brand. Obviously, reviews may range from very satisfied to very dissatisfied.  , and everyone is entitled to an opinion. So  when and how should you  respond to negative reviews?

Generally, you should respond to reviews/opinions when:

Your organization is genuinely at fault

• The opinion/review gives  false information
• The opinion/review takes on a life of its own and snowballs

A carefully crafted response can go a long way to mitigating the damaging effect of a negative review. The content and tone of your response are important:

Apologize if your organization was at fault

• Actively address the issue at hand (i.e., do not dismiss or ignore it)
• Be calm, non-defensive, and honest
• Use plain, simple language  (i.e., limit use of industry jargon and big words)

Never underestimate the power reviewers have over one’s online brand! Monitor customer feedback and reviews and respond when necessary.

Online learning can take many forms, from simply reading a page to interactively participating in virtual classrooms or simulations. Also widely variable is how training is produced, the production time, price, and in the end, its effectiveness. Are you choosing the right method for teaching? Sometimes you can tell information to your learners, but other times you may see better results if you show.

Mind & Media recently launched a training community website for therapists helping couples deal with the challenges of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Learners attend a classroom session and then are granted access to the online community where they can expand on the one-time classroom experience. Sure the site will include manuals, and a discussion forum, where information is told, but also in the works is the development of role-play videos that will show great examples of how to conduct the therapy. They’re very real and relevant scenarios, too, created by the experts. No scripts, no actors, and no big bucks. Here’s why role-plays by experts beat scripted, acted scenes just about any day of the week when it comes to effective, affordable training.

For this training project we videotaped eight role-play scenarios in one day, ranging from 8- to 25-minutes. Pre-production was virtually non-existent—no locations to scout, no scripts to write, and no actors to find, screen, hire, and prepare to play doctor or patient. Mind & Media has a beautiful brainstorming room that served as our therapy office so that was kind of a lucky break, but the decisions about script and actors were as much about efficacy as about budget.

The trainers, who served as the actors, loosely developed the scenarios during their travel to our office. That was all the prep time they needed because they knew the content, techniques, and even typical patient behaviors like the back of their hands. The familiarity with the subject made the acting all the more realistic. While we were shooting one trainer told us of at time they had used professional actors for a similar project and they ended up with bad overacting by folks more interested in their careers than the task at hand. Not to say all actors would derail the project, but if your luck does happen to go bad on shoot day, how would you recover?

The production itself went fast, too. Quality assurance for each scenario happened on the fly since all “actors” were subject matters experts. They could prep a scene in a few minutes and complete it in one take. We rolled two cameras to capture the whole scene in real-time whenever possible. We did use a production assistant to keep track of details during any multi-take scenes to make sure we kept continuity, since there was no script or storyboard, but in general the group of trainers and production staff at Mind & Media, just worked smartly and kept things rolling. The scenes were so real that at times I felt uncomfortable watching the fictional husband and wife spar in front of their therapist!

While the trainers may conduct some role-plays during the classroom training, having video role-plays online may be even more effective. They’re not limited to just that one classroom, and if need be the learner just clicks rewind and watches it again, any time of day, any place with an Internet connection. And the bonus, since the videos will be rolled into the larger community learning site, is that viewers can watch the scenarios and then discuss them with peers and the trainers in the forum to keep the learning environment current and ever-growing.

UPI – Taking the Pulse of Health Care Trailer from Mind & Media, Inc. on Vimeo.

On March 22^nd, United Press International will be launching a video journalism series produced by Mind & Media called “Taking the Pulse of Health Care.”  These documentary style interviews will focus on individuals affected by the shortcomings of America’s health care system.

This isn’t a standard news editorial piece, but rather, it is an interactive news feature.  Viewers will be able to post video feedback on the piece using a standard computer webcam and microphone using an interface that is as simple as clicking one button!  Countless news sites allow text responses following articles, so we’re taking that idea one step further.

Health care reform is an emotional topic for many. We’re aiming to let participants in the discussion communicate their emotion by sharing their voice, body language, and eye contact with the audience, instead of just posting text.

At Mind & Media, we’re always looking for new and creative ways to inspire action in our audience.

See the trailer here: http://www.vimeo.com/9507346 and check out the series on www.UPI.com on March 22

I’m really excited to be supporting some of the leading minds in the treatment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Mind & Media has always strived to work on projects that affect positive change in this world, and the project with which we’ve been engaged over the past year has probably been the most positively impactful of any I’ve worked on. We’ve helped disseminate information to families dealing with PTSD, to therapists treating PTSD, and most recently to therapists helping couples cope when one partner is struggling with PTSD. Each project has been different in its own way, but they have all been equally rewarding to me personally.

Make no mistake; it’s not just the end goal I’m passionate about. I’m a geek for the technology and aesthetics of the communications in general, but to apply my years of geeking to efforts like the treatment of PTSD is amazing. Sure marketers or designers everywhere worry about web usability or word choice in when trying to sell a product or push an agenda, but all the same communications best practices hold true no matter what communication effort you undertake. It doesn’t have to be sexy, but it has to be clear, easy to use, and it must give the audience what they need.

For a public-facing presentation about reuniting with family members returning from a war zone, we got to put ourselves in the shoes of stressed out, nervous family members waiting at home. How could we write this content so it’s easy to understand? What questions could we answer, via video interviews with other families, that would show these folks they are not alone? What images would connect them to the material, and what, ultimately, do they want from this presentation? Not cool animation, not a widget, not a text message, nothing from the bag of new communications technology. They just want to know what to expect, what to look out for, and where to turn if things are not going well. Our work moves them from anxious to reassured, from unsure to confident. Positive change I remember long after the work ends. It was a pleasure to bring Returning From the War Zone: A Guide for Families to life for all the families that need it.

Is your organization offering “online courses” that are merely PowerPoint presentations, with or without audio? Are they slow to download? Do they lack interactivity? Veterans Affairs’ National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder had such a series, called PTSD 101, offering web-based refresher training for clinicians. However, the courses were PowerPoints with audio that were extremely slow to download, and lacked interactivity and visual interest.

Rather than simply revise the PowerPoints as the government’s solicitation requested, we proposed to develop all courses in a Section 508-compliant Flash-based player that allows download of audio on a slide-by-slide basis for near instant playback from any point in the presentation. An interactive table of contents allows the user to watch straight through or click to a section of interest so that material can be reviewed at any time. The unified series now has a visually appealing interface as well, and interactive exercises to provide checks on learning and enhance the learning experience.

The PTSD 101 series is a great example of how easily clunky legacy training can be reformatted to provide just-in-time learning to an organization’s customers or stakeholders. See one of the courses here.

Often organizations make a mistake in thinking that all they have to do to create a web-based presentation is to create a link to a PDF file.  If budget is tight and something needs to be done immediately, this can work.  But if an organization wants to truly persuade an audience, they need to do better than that.

Recently we had the opportunity to work with the National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder to turn a static PDF into something that truly engages soldiers and their families.  The original PDF was designed as a printed pamphlet and it served that purpose well: rich in content, well laid out, and full of pictures.  But NCPTSD knew that a good design for print does not translate into a good design for the web, and they wanted something that their viewers would watch and be inspired by.

We created “Returning from the War Zone: A Guide for Families,” an on-line presentation that uses a simple user interface, transparent navigation, friendly narration, colorful graphics, and video stories that put a face on the serious issue of posttraumatic stress disorder.  Though the content was derived from the PDF version, we revised it dramatically to work in an on-line environment, chunking the information, rewriting it for narration, and providing much of the information through video storytelling.  Check out the finished product and notice how much more compelling this is than a static PDF.

Do you know what your organization’s online brand is? Potential and current employees, clients, and partners, as well as competitors have most likely all searched for your organization online. Your online brand is established via your own website of course, but it’s more than that—it’s everything that anyone else says about your organization elsewhere on the web as well.

So what are people saying about you? The simplest way to find out is to do an online search. A number of sites allow individuals to review a variety of organizations across industries, such as these:

• Zoominfo.com (offers  comprehensive information on both organizations and key personnel)
• Glassdoor.com (offers employee reviews of organizations’ compensation and work environments)
• Yelp.com (rates organizations based on customer reviews)

Take a look, because no matter how wonderful your own website is, if others are painting a very different picture of your organization, you need to know, and if it’s negative, do what you can to mitigate that.

In follow up posts I’ll talk about how to analyze these search results and determine what if anything, you should do to respond to negative comments or reviews.