Joe Troyer 1:07
Welcome to show me the nuggets today we have on I just found out we were basically neighbors, Eric Herman on and Eric is from do corporate and do Reputation Marketing. And we're really going to be doing a deep dive today on reputation and his experience in reputation. And we want to focus in on how you turn your reputation into really a customer building asset in today's training. So before we go too deep into things, though, welcome, welcome, Eric to the show.
Eric Herman 1:37
Thanks, Joe. Thanks for having me. SoJoe Troyer 1:41 get to know each other where we've close. Yeah, like, we could probably throw a rock well, not maybe that close. But I mean, it was, you know, five minutes away, and we didn't have to meet. So that sucks. I will definitely look you up that I was just in Miami and South Beach. And when I get back to West Palm or back to gardens area, I'll make sure and
Eric Herman 2:00
very cool. Appreciate that. Yeah, look forward to it.
Joe Troyer 2:02
So um, before we get into reputation, like the core topic of today helped me understand how you ended up in this crazy digital marketing world today, and how you're in this agency market? How'd you end up here.Eric Herman 2:17 So as I told you, you know, prior week, I have a payment processing business, it's about 20 years old. And originally, we were looking to just build our processing revenue, figuring, hey, the, the more that we can do to help our customers, the more it affects our bottom line.
So years and years ago, the payment business was, you know, we had an office full of support salespeople, and it was chaotic, because like, the equipment at the time didn't really work the way it does today to today, you get a merchant account, it just works. And it didn't work that way. So we were looking for ways to enhance the relationships because it was so expensive and time consuming to build the business.
But the one aspect of it and truthfully, I've been trying to get back to this point is, you know, people talk about like, you know, passive income, residual income. And really, like, the best I've been able to achieve in a digital event, digital agency is recurring income, but it's not passive, right. But my, but my, my, my payments, business is passive, I still get paid on business I generated, you know, 1520 years ago, because once it's set up, you're like the bank, right? You're getting a piece of every transaction.
But so that's how this digital agency part started. We didn't separate the services, but we said, hey, how can we help you? You know, it. So one of the things that happens is, you know, like, if you don't respond as a business to your customer complaints, they result in chargebacks, right, and have a financial impact from a processing standpoint, or a banking standpoint. So that's where it began, we help them with that.
And certainly, you can't ignore these, these are going to come back to bite you. And then said, Well, you know, it's also impacting them on as the customers come through the door, either, you know, physically or online. And we started to break the business out, I would say, about 1012 years ago. And then we start so originally our concept our branding was, we had this do brand, right? So we said, oh, okay, you do business, we do your process. And then we expanded it, we'll do your reputation, we'll do your email marketing, and then it became a like a communication infrastructure.
Joe Troyer 4:29
Gotcha. All right, that was all right. I think I think that one, okay. Awesome. So when you think about reputation, and you think about selling a prospect or serving a prospect with reputation, like what does that? What does that mean? In your eyes? I think, you know, when I've talked to different people and interviewing different people, everybody's concept of reputation management, and what they believe is involved or should be involved or important, seems to be vastly different.
Eric Herman 6:44
Very much so. So the way I look at it is, you know, I mean, I'm dating myself, but you know, when I was in business early on, it was truly referral marketing, right? There was no online component. So you would, you would ask people to refer you around. And it was always, even today to try to get someone to refer you without a program is difficult. But what I try to explain to businesses is you no longer have to do that.
What you need to do is spend your time and effort in making sure what somebody sees, because whether you keep it up or you don't, you're you're everybody's comparison shopping, right? They go right down Google, and they can see what other people say about you. So it's, it's like an additional salesperson that needs to be accounted for in your business, you just can't get away from it.
And I think what people that when they get it that way, they you know, the problem they have is how do I do it? How do I do it without having to have a full time person supporting that part of my business? But they get it at when you say it to them that way?
Joe Troyer 7:50
Yeah, it makes perfect sense. You know, so many businesses were built on referrals. And I think people can certainly understand that, that that analogy. And you know, nowadays, it's not done that way, right? It's done through reviews, and instead of getting a referral, you ask for a review, that's going to boost your reputation that's going to get you better reviews more, you know, highly seen on Google more sought after, I think that makes a whole lot of sense. Yeah. Yes, absolutely. So when you sell reputation, I'm curious. Do you sell it on the merit of helping them get reviews? Right, helping them kind of manage reviews? Market those reviews, right?
Eric Herman 8:30
what's the way we do it is we give them a platform, but we don't focus on the platform, which is very different than what we used to do. We used to struggle with. Okay, do we use the term marketing? Do we use the term management? What, what we've found is most people, what they really want is they want help in getting reviews, right? And then, so we really do two things, we help them get reviews as part of our communication structure.
So we come in and say, we're going to give you so what we have is basically an automated platform that's customized and we say, Look, if we can help you increase your your communication with your customer, be at a restaurant, a practitioner, really doesn't matter. Most of them at most, really, the only communication is the order. Right? Right, that they have order communication or reminder communication, like if they're a practitioner, but they don't have any other communication at all.
So we say, look, we'll we'll boost up that so maybe you're speaking to them, or having a chance to speak to them multiple times through the month, you know, 468 10 times and in that communication cycle, we do some things like review generation where we ask them for it. But what we try to do is say look, we'll do this communication, but what you should do if you're an in person, brick and mortar business is asked them that's the best thing you can do. You know, a lot of businesses, they put a sign up, right?
So you know, we've asked Google review, but as part of the correspondence, they should do it at that point and just ask, right? Or they have like a form that will say, How did you find us? If they even asked which most don't? They'll say, oh, did you find us online? Or, you know, through our ad or whatever? Yeah. But one of the things that we we kind of stumbled across is taking that ask one step a little bit further and saying, you know, did you find us online? And most people are gonna probably say yes, because they, at the very least, they probably Googled your address.
So at that point, you say, did the did the did our online reputation? Or did our online reviews influence your decision to come here? Oh, that's really good. Right, then it kind of leads to the next thing is, would you do us a favor and do the same thing so other people could find us the way you did?
Joe Troyer 10:56
That beautiful? Yeah, I think you're right, like, so much of it is and having a good ask. And that was an excellent ask. You know, in the past, what I found to be really, really effective is, is, is helping the person understand that your your business is suffering, because you don't have the reviews that you want, right? And it's just, again, a different type of ask, right? Like, but if somebody just gave you a good service, and then you say,
Hey, I just came across this problem, I really need to get, you know, in the next week, you know, 10 to 15, five star reviews, could you help me? Like how are you going to tell them? No, right? If they just did a good job, and if they were just a good service to you.
So I think that's super important. And nobody really talks about that. They just talk about, like, yeah, just start sending out the requests, you know, via email and SMS to to get the reviews. But I find as well, if you just leave it at that, and you have a bad ask, yes, you'll get some, but it won't be nearly as effective as it could
Eric Herman 11:56
be. Right? Right. I think if you do it that way, you'll get the people like I'm I'm not the review person, I'm really not the person who will leave a review. But I know plenty of people that more so than leaving a positive review. What if they're going to leave a review? It's going to be negative? Right? I would be swayed. If someone asked me in a way that was unusual, you know, like not not because I got a text message about it as part of a routine. But somebody just actually asked me, I would do that, right? Because I know the importance of it.
Joe Troyer 12:26
For sure. Yeah, the human aspect really helps. Oftentimes, we run with with a business owner, or one of the main sales reps, will will run like a kickoff campaign as part of our onboarding. And we will do a personalized outreach strategy with them to their top customers, right, and it kills it, we get like a 75 80% review, like take rate, right meaning 70 to 80% of the people, we send a message to actually respond and give a review.
Because of that, ask because that ask is really good. Right? And that oftentimes gives them kind of the massive bump that they need to be able to compete in the marketplace. And then we can put into effect, you know, kind of the drip campaigns for all the new customers going forward.
Yeah, I agree. 100%. Perfect, man. So I love something that you said, and I just wanted to bring it back up as you help with the communication. I really liked that. Because at the end of the day, like, you're not selling yourself short of just doing reputation, right, you're kind of putting your foot in the door. But what other kinds of communication can you do? And there's lots of other opportunities.
And we know obviously, that most businesses aren't communicating effectively, with their, their current and or past clients.
Eric Herman 13:43
Yeah, you know, so it took us a long time. And we've struggled with this for years, truthfully, because we used to do this years and years back. And then we were, you know, we got into like, so for example, we got into social posting as a standalone. So, but in and of itself, social posting doesn't do anything if you don't communicate after that, right? It's great. But you want to take the person off of social media, right?
You want them calling, you're doing something. And if you don't have anyone communicating, it's you just wasted your effort. Right? So what we do now is we we, we focus in on on like, it's a mix of customization and automation. So I'm not telling you we're responding, you know, specifically to each of your patients or customers, but we're giving a communication vehicle that uses a little bit of automation to to warrant an ongoing conversation that drives them with a call to action to doing something could be reading your newsletter.
It could be a review, it could be coming in. It's not offer laden, it's just a mix that goes out throughout the month. And because of our ability to automate it with the tools that are out there now. We give some on a platform, we plug in more or less of these other parts, and it, you know, it's a good service for us because it's affordable. It's kind of like, you know, what social posting is? Well, if I'm going to social posts, can I hire a high school kid to do it, but if you're going to do it and do it professionally, you know, it's, you know, for a few $100, I'm gonna let you do it.
This is that same sort of mindset, it's a little bit more expensive, but we're handling communication very effectively. I'm, you know, I'm not saying I'm gonna blow somebody away with our copywriting. But you know, but by the same token, I'm not breaking the bank. And from our perspective, and I learned this from my processing business.
So what I used to do, when we first started was, I gave out my cell phone number to everybody. And then that was a nightmare, then what I started doing was I only gave it to the people that were my like, you know, my top 10 20%. So if I get a phone call from them, I dropped what I was doing, because I knew this was a big impact on my bottom line, if they left everyone else, like I knew their name, but if something came up, and you know, businesses tend to, you know, they play their value, and they want sometimes business owners get threatening, and
I knew that if anyone else called or there was an issue, and we couldn't resolve it to our mutual benefit, it was okay to let them go, maybe weren't the right fit, and it didn't kill me financially. So I wanted to come back to that with marketing services, saying, you know, I'd much rather like I don't want to be the guy billing and 20 grand a month, because if they leave, you know, that's a big endeavor, don't replace them.
But if I'm doing them 400 500 600, and they leave, I can easily make that up. And it's not breaking the bank from their perspective.
Joe Troyer 16:41
Yep. And when they looked at it, and they're like, man, the value that I'm getting, right, like, it's
Eric Herman 16:45
Not even comparable, and how are you gonna do it? And then
Joe Troyer 16:49
what am I going to do, I'm going to hire a high school kid to run this, I'm going to hire, I'm going to ask somebody on my front desk to do this, I'm going to ask my admin to also take on this, like, it just becomes
Eric Herman 16:59
and I see, like, I see a lot of agencies, what they're doing is they're mishmash in the whole thing, because they're going into, they're creating a CRM of their own. And now they become a SASS platform. And so we have a lot of sass partners in our payment business. So I learned that a long time ago, I don't want to be like, if I'm going to be a SASS company, I want to be a mass SAS company, you can't fiddle around, because you still have to provide the support. So the last thing I want to do is provide support.
And now I've just transitioned my support from digital support to SAS support. So we don't, what we do is we say here, here's the platform, here's a platform, and we put everything into this platform, right? It's got our brand on it, but I'm not selling you that you're free to move away from it. But this is how we manage if it works for you, you're in our ecosystem, and you're free to go at any other time.
But they look at and say, Well, if I just bought the software, it's going to cost me probably not much less than than, then these guys are giving it to me with everything included. For sure. And then we'll take it one step further, which is kind of cool. So like, we will both on additional services, like we'll say, hey, you know what, let's, let's roll out more, we'll give you a more comprehensive, social or give you a more comprehensive review, then we tied into reviews, now, you know, referrals.
So we say, you know, if, if you refer some business, we'll include these extra things, or you've been you've been a customer for a year, let's we like we do things that are unusual, because we'll come back and we'll cut their cost. Right? So if I say, hey, look, you know, we've got this dialed in, it's all automated, you know, refer me a customer, whether it works out or not. And if I could take part off your bill. Yeah. Like nobody does that. So blows them away.
Joe Troyer 18:47
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, you stamp out big time. Why would you do that? Yep. And then they're even further retain, because they know that they can't really get that song, you know, for anywhere. Close.
Eric Herman 18:57
I mean, we we totally understand the cost of acquisition. So if I can offset that in any way possible, you know, so like, we don't even look to have like annual agreements, I want that consistent payment coming in every month. Right? It gets they know that they're paying it, it's consistent. And it's like, it's better than hitting someone annually. Because then the payment comes in, they start thinking, Oh, should I really get the value of that at the end of the year?
Joe Troyer 19:26
100% 100%. Yeah, that's, that's fantastic. I have a buddy that is that is for his clients. He has access to their, to their CRM. So he started now just I think it's 60 days out from when a client makes first contact. All that he's doing is sending a series of emails and text messages, just asking him if they got the job done that he knows that they didn't do and if they're still interested in doing it, and And he's, uh, he's in the home services space, and they're just freaking killing it. Like, you know, they're turning over, you know, five to seven new jobs a month that are getting purchased from like this one, you know, as you said it communications campaign.
And it's just, it's brilliant, you know, and the value that that that's making for his clients like they're never gonna leave. Right. And this is just an add on thing that they started doing that's that's just working so well.
Eric Herman 20:28
Yeah, it's, you know, it's so people hear a lot about automation, but you still have to, you have to program the automation and you can't rely too much on automation, right? If you have too many, like, you know, if this then that it breaks, right, you want to keep it simple and supplement the business, not make it so that there doesn't need to be a human being present.
Joe Troyer 20:48
Right? Yeah, completely agree. Yeah, you can you can automate things too much, and then then become non human or just non effective. So how many clients I'm curious, do you guys have or locations or businesses? Do you guys have that you have set up Reputation Marketing
Eric Herman 21:06
I will say, I would say probably about 50. Right.
Joe Troyer 21:12 And when you think about those 50, like, what do you think are kind of the maker break things to their perception, right, of being successful with their reputation strategy.
Eric Herman 21:24
So the biggest thing that we've had is it correlates in art and what we do or what we've done directly to their GMB. So, I know, you know, a lot about GMB. So in our in our realm, we, so we've been pretty successful at GMB. But one of the things that we've done is that we tie the social posting and reviews to GM B's, because when we first started doing it, it really stood out. And depending upon the industry that you're in, you might see posts on GM B's are typically not. And now the software's out there to do it anyway.
So you might as well do it just doesn't, it's not you're not physically doing, it's just going out there, but it enhance that two things enhance each other. So, um, so from my, from my position, the biggest thing that we were able to do is say, Look, can we if we can give you a way to get a steady flow of of reviews coming in, that does not take your personnel. Is that attractive to you?
Yes. Okay, so, and we did a few things that we've gotten away from, we used to deal with incentivization. And we stopped, because what happened was, we would speak to the business owner. And so part of our business is in like the self storage space. So it's very, it's a absentee owner, largely. And it's gotten even crazier, because there's a lot of REITs in that space now, but for sure, but what would happen is you'd speak to the owners, and like the top group, you know, the management group, but it was sort of trickled down to the, to the employees, particularly if it was like it was a resident person who'd been there a long time, yes.
But if not, they would ask her away. And they would ask for reviews instead of an incentivized ruse, you know, in a way that could get the business into trouble. And I think, you know, particularly with the way staffing is for a lot of businesses now, it's gotten even worse. So we stopped that. We also stopped review gating. Okay. Right, you know, so for anybody that doesn't know, you know, that's where you have the option based on their response to either send them directly to Google, for example, or gate it. And we didn't want to have any problems with that, either.
So we figure if we, you know, we have not like we were not the, the the reputation cleanup, guys, you know, so we weren't taking somebody from one star to get into four stars that are kind of thing was you were hovering around four stars, maybe over four stars, and we're helping you just keep boosting that, but we weren't a cleanup shop. Gotcha. Yeah, so that was kind of our that's been our niche. So our big thing was, originally we'll help you generate them in a in a semi automated manner.
And you have to do the follow up and response. Then we started to take that over by taking over their the management of their GMB profile. But then that became K, could you help me with my website? Could you so that's where we started getting away from things that were scalable. So that's where we were able to plug in the agent support to do that.
Joe Troyer 24:42 Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Okay, I gotcha. So talking about GMB. Then, how much of a ranking factor do you think reviews are for GMB?
Eric Herman 24:50
I think, I think I think the activity of between that and the social posting are What does assuming that you have you know, your elements all done your you know, your descriptions, your photos, if everything is comparable to everyone else, and I don't know any business now, that's not extremely competitive in GMB space. If you're there and you plan on staying, you better have an active, you know, doesn't you don't have to have the most reviews? But you do have to be consistent.
Joe Troyer 25:17
Yeah, for sure. No, I completely agree. And sometimes you want to ask the question, people are like, I don't think there's any correlation. I'm like, Okay, you must not do maps very often, I believe there's, there's a large correlation. But I've also had, and what I mean by that is, you know, you need to have reputation. And I would agree social posting now on Google business in order to rank well, but you can brute force it in other ways.
And I've gotten clients ranked in the three pack, right in maps for their primary search phrases. But when people looked at them and their reviews and their overall rating versus the competitors, they didn't look good, right? Yeah. And so even though I was able to get the job done, that doesn't mean that my client was able to get the outcome that they're looking for, which is their phone ringing off the hook, right.
And so we did a test. And we helped one of those clients become what I what I call, like, the go to expert or the go to brand in this space, and they're the flagship, right, they got the most reviews, right in terms of quantity. And they got at least a four and a half, if not a five and overall rating, just so that they're the ones that jump out when you look at the three pack. And we had a four and a half times increase in call volume. As soon as we became that, that go to brand that go to expert.
Eric Herman 26:35
Yeah, I believe that. I believe, you know, so on a typical Google page, right? Like everybody talks about, you know, being on the 10 spots, there's no 10 spots anymore. I don't even remember what last time there were 10 spots, right? There's three spots, are there advertising, then map is even now? At least one ad in the maps, right. And now you've got three ads on the bottom. So potentially LSAS in there, too. Right? So I remember, you know, my, my first real SEO stuff was in the storage business, right?
And I remember, you know, we had exact match, you know, location domains, and my customers would would, you know, would basically have 10 paid, you know, the 10 the whole page was that, you know, I, you know, I would take review videos, they're actually David's review videos, and they would rank you can't get those ranked anymore. You know, not without a lot of work. But you don't get like in the same space.
They're not getting 10 spots anymore. They're lucky to get to a GMB and maybe they're organic listing depending on how competitive right, but now what's happening is, in order to get that extra listing, you have to run it, you have to run a Google ad to get the extra listing. Yeah, just just to keep your positioning,
Joe Troyer 27:48
Completely agree so much has changed in the SERP landscape, as of last couple of years is crazy. Like you said, you know, we used to do a ton of video marketing back in the day at a company called sin wire. I mean, we submitted anybody I ever knew. And I mean, we had so many first page rankings, it was ridiculous for all of our clients. We were doing a million successful submissions a week. Right? I mean, just crazy.
But you know that that the game isn't quite played like that these days, it's very different. And it's harder to get rankings. It's harder to get multiple listings on one page alone. You know, but what's crazy is, when I look at, like calls that I can get a client versus calls that I got them before, like years ago, let's say five, 710 years ago, the quantities more than it ever has been as well. Right? And so like, yes, the page, the SERP experience keeps getting like diluted, so to speak. There keeps being more positions on the page. But there's also more search volume than there ever has been
Eric Herman 28:55
no doubt. But like your GMB listing is really now it's effectively a site because your customer can get to you without hitting your site. Yeah, for sure. And a lot of people don't you know, for most businesses, right? If you go into a restaurant and you don't have your menu connected, okay, they'll look at your menu, but for a lot of businesses, if you know what the service is, you don't have to go to the site at all.
No, right? You're just gonna call you're gonna look to the GMB to get the directions. And then you already know what to it's pretty much expect when you get
Joe Troyer 29:23
There. 100%. So let's talk about let's talk about Google business posts. What's important when thinking about Google business posts, what do you think is important?
Eric Herman 29:34
So we what we do is, again, we kind of custom, not custom, but customized so what we do is, we take a mix of we kind of have our own little formula, but we created a mix of posts, and then we customize them to your color scheme, whatever. So it's nicely branded. But we take we take reviews we so we make a post review image essentially, right now you're you're doing Wouldn't you? Maybe other people have done this on social media?
But you know, so we used to do that on Facebook years ago, right? People do it a little bit on Instagram. But then again, it's not the direct connection, because you got to go to the bio. But yeah, Google, my business is a perfect place for it. Right? You sure you intermix testimonials type things, there's some other things that other people don't know is.
And I haven't checked on it recently, but you should be able to get Google's marketing kit, you know, I'm talking about when you create your own materials in there. So you know, I don't know too many businesses to turn them into posters, but they look great. And they've got the Google insignia on them. So we turn those into posts, right?
And then, so if you post a, like, you know, we just just for simplicity sake, we post whatever, we're posting just the other social properties, but then we mix in specific reviews, image picture reviews, so So we'll take like a, you know, like, even a snapshot of a video and then put the text of the review on it. Very simple to create. And then we take offers and intermix them. Gotcha. And they typically stand out.
Joe Troyer 31:07
Yep. Yeah, I mean, I find even today, I'm surprised not that many businesses are actually using the Google posts.
Eric Herman 31:15
Well you know, you don't yeah, they're not a lot of them are not. But it's become like, you know, people used to get crazy. I don't know if they still do. But like, when when you were ranking a lot of videos people get kind of they try to go over the top of the thumbnail to make it stand out. Yeah, that's what that's what you can kind of do with a post on on Google My Business now. You know, and, and since it only stays for seven days, if you have one that doesn't really hit okay. It's no big deal. Because seven days later, you're gonna get a new one.
Joe Troyer 31:42
Yep. Have you seen any of the Google betas lately or partaking in any of them?
Eric Herman 31:50
We did one where I became one of the contributors to it. But I didn't, I was trying to see if there was really some additional value to that. Because they have a point system. Yeah, there you bring up a good point. I don't know if this is true. My partner thinks this is true.
But he thinks that point system. So if you are leaving a review through your Gmail, your through your Gmail address, and you are more of a participant in I forgot the terminology they use, you know, as a Google reviewer, that your review carries more weight.
Joe Troyer 32:25
I could see that for sure.
Eric Herman 32:27 Yeah I would think so. But you know, it's like one of their things where you know, they publicize it as a very active then you don't hear about it. But that makes sense to me that that would be a contributing factor. Right? If I'm much more, if I'm leaving a lot of reviews, there's my review. When I leave you a review, does it does have more weight?
Joe Troyer 32:48
I would think so for sure. Yeah. So I saw a couple of months ago, and I haven't seen it lately. But I saw that, you know, when Google does like the not the auto suggests, but they say like you searched for and this website contains right. That's why we're showing you these results. Like yeah, so I saw for a little while, and I haven't seen it lately, but I have to go look, again, I saw that they were doing it with the social posts with the with the Google posts. So you could literally rank for longtail keywords. Right? By what was in your social posts.
Eric Herman 33:24
Interesting.
Joe Troyer 33:27 l
et's say you got you know, you know, 10 services that you offer, if once a day, you're throwing up a post about one of the services that was keyword loaded, right, that was actually coming in was ranking? No page on the website to your point. Right. It was just the GMB listing. And it was just a post on the listing.
Eric Herman 33:46
Yeah, that makes sense. You know, because they know the value of that of that property. So if, yeah, so if you're standing out even remotely, and now you've really got you found a way to put keywords in there. I just can't see how that's not a dramatic factor in a competitive market.
Joe Troyer 34:04
100% man has been really good, I guess, I want to zoom out. We've covered a lot of different topics. But when you think about reputation marketing, specifically, do you think that there's anything that we missed, Eric that we'd want to make sure that that we shared with with people that kept this interview?
Eric Herman 34:23
No, I think we I think we went through most of it. You know, I I think you know, as we were talking earlier, I think, um, what I've seen in platforms that people use, they're all the same. You know, I know Zack cashed out for reputation loop. I haven't attached myself to whatever the company is, but they're all the same right there.
They're, like, I don't think people care about, like having a SAS reputation platform. That is a dashboard of metrics nobody really cares about but to me Keep really easy for someone to communicate reviews and obtain them, at least in my case, what I would love to just like, include in our communicate, so what we do in our communication is, you know, we want to get a review request, you know, review generation as part of the next early on, right, as close to the order, but then, you know, trickle it out.
So, you know, from my perspective, any tools that I could fit in that make that experience easier or better, I think there's a big market opportunity there and get away from the the SAS component, which nobody really cares about anyway.
Joe Troyer 35:36
I think so too, I think they're largely most of the system these days are largely the same. And I think most of them haven't really done any invention or reinvigoration or, you know, added features or really any, like core improvements, right. Any big features are core improvements for years. So I think that it's a, it's a reputation. Management is core, it's critical for everybody, but I think, for the last couple of years has been largely neglected, I think, by agency owners, and I think it's something that people do need to focus on it? Well, I think it's right,
Eric Herman 36:14
what I see as a, you know, from my perspective, of tremendous opportunity is to figure out how to put the impact of reviews into a platform like Instagram, because look at how local focused, Instagram could be. Right? I mean, it is, but a lot of businesses don't really fully utilize it that way. But if you had a way, so you know, in our case we're posting, we're posting a post of a review. But if I could take that, and, you know, and figure out a way to make that more dynamic, the way you would kind of see a Google experience, I think that, you know that that would blow people away, because it really isn't that, right?
Joe Troyer 36:59
There's no conversion mechanism with Instagram for a local business. It's kind of broke, right?
Eric Herman 37:05
it's because you're not going to go from Instagram, you know, you got to click the Buy or hit a comment. You're not gonna go to the GMB page the way you conventionally would if you found a search. And now you're, you know, you're seeing an experience, but you're missing that component of is this business credible? Is it good? Is it you know, how do I measure it the way I would on
Joe Troyer 37:24
Google? Yeah. 100% Yeah, they need that conversion, the conversion elements missing, so to speak. Yeah. 100% agree.
Eric Herman 37:32
Yeah. But I think that, that and you know, these quick video platforms, Tik Tok, whatever, are, are certainly the wave of the future. You know, and I think reviews are extremely everybody cares about it. I don't think reviews of the future necessarily are going to look the way they do now, you know, exactly that same star rating that everyone associates to, but in whatever capacity, just a referral is a review.
Now, it just was a different, it was different structure, but there's going to be something that's going to be easier, where you're going to look and say, okay, comparatively, do I want even bother spending my time with this business or not? And how do I do it at a faster world?
Joe Troyer 38:11 Y
ep. Yeah, I mean, look at like user generated content, and like E commerce and user generated content, you know, content. You know, I have a brand that we work really close with, I can't call them a client, but I advise with them. They do mid eight figures a year, huge, b2c apparel brand. And for a couple of years, they were doing really, really well with influencers, right? And influencer marketing, like everybody was, but then what they found was that like, the, that they needed too many influencers to get their message out, right, it was just severely bottlenecked.
So now what they're doing is they're using the user generated content, right? They're getting all of the people that are opening up the boxes when they get home, and they're videoing it, and they're putting it on Instagram. And they're advertising that content, right. And that's the content that's performing, right, because it's real, it's natural. It's not an influencer. And the net is so large, it's all of their customer base ordering every single day already from that.
Eric Herman 39:11
So I agree. I think I think that and the next big opportunity is how this plays in the metaverse. Yep. You know, you know, this is not the right platform, but we're doing some stuff in Metaverse, even with politicians, and that's we're tying our payment business into it. But just as we're speaking, it's the same thing. You need a credibility factor. And a review mechanism is is what's needed. Right, especially as you start moving away from physical into these, you know, you know, unknowns right now. You need a way to validate,
Joe Troyer 39:46
Yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah, that's a big problem. And I think there is no standard way to validate right now that I think you got a lot of big brands that are trying to play in that world, but don't know how to yet They're, they're afraid to, because they're afraid they're going to do it wrong, they're going to mess up. And you know, it's going to be a shit show, right? It's going to be a big problem.
Eric Herman 40:08
We've even seen this as reputational risks for banks. So banks and on the payment side, they it's part of their, their KYC procedures, you know, so they're looking, what is their social profile look like? What, you know, are we so, you know, if you're looking at a bank underwriting process, and they say, Wow, this, this business is like a 1.3 stars, and they're getting tons of crap reviews? Do we want to approve them? Right?
Because when you're doing any sort of payment, you're essentially getting a credit line? Do I want to extend that to you? If if look at the mess that that I'm getting myself into, right? So from a loss perspective, it is a big factor. You know,
Joe Troyer 40:50
that's a cool tie into from you like having the merchant company, right is like, we're gonna help you build a better reputation, so that when we're underwriting you, and we're taking you to the banks, that you guys look better, right? Like, if I showed you, it's gonna be cheaper, it's, you know, they're, they're not gonna give you a hard time. Like, that's, that's actually really, really smart.
Eric Herman 41:10
So what's interesting is a lot of people don't know. Are you familiar with a company called plaid? Have you ever heard of it? Yeah. Okay, so plaid connects. So if you go get a Stripe account, where you don't typically provide your bank statements anymore, you connect your bank account through plot route plot, right? Yeah.
So it's giving, it's connecting the processor to your bank, through your your authorization, what's happening is, that's just the beginning, there's a lot of KYC, that's done, it's going to happen more and more in the mortgage space, anything where, and particularly with these, like alternative lenders, you know, now you can pretty much finance anything, the way they make those decisions is based on these protocols that are instantaneous.
And part of those protocols are what the business looks like so or you as an individual, what does your profile look like? So this is going to happen more and more through algorithms. So if your presence as a business doesn't look good, you're not even going to have a chance to have a discussion about it. You're going to be declined, because you come up negative. Yep.
Joe Troyer 42:11
No, I completely agree. And for anybody that didn't catch that plot is just like the, the handshake between software fine for financial specific. So if you log into Xero, or QuickBooks, and you go to add your bank account to link them together, right? They're going to be using Platt and like almost everybody under the sun is using plaid. So yeah, as they're, as they're providing more and more data points, it would only make sense if they're doing a business lookup that they're going to pull in their reviews and any other business history that they have.
Eric Herman 42:41
I mean, it's similar to the way like now when you go to a job interview, right, you're, you know, part of your thing is like, the HR departments looking at your your social profiles, right? What are you posting, but from a business reputational risks, the banks and the credits, you know, they're, they're doing the same sort of thing.
Joe Troyer 42:58
Man, this has been awesome. So glad that we had you on. I want to wrap up in asking one more question. I've become quite the avid reader. I always hated reading. And I think it's because like, it took me way too long to give myself permission to like, put a book down and say, I don't want to read that I'm not interested. Right. I thought I had to read it like cover to cover.
And so whenever I have, like super smart people in front of me and people, I admire people that I like, like you, I got them on the podcast, and I have their time and attention. I always like to ask like, what's the one book that you'd recommend that you think has made like the biggest impact on the way you do business, the way you see your life, the way you see the world and why?
Eric Herman 43:37
So Martha Rodgers has had a book that came out years ago, I believe it was called one to one marketing. And what that did for me, I wouldn't say it was necessarily the best book I've ever read. What it did for me, though, was it put the customer front and center I realized at that moment, it's, you know, you know, they said a real estate is location look, is your customer, right? Your customers your asset? Yeah, right.
From that point on, I just everything was how do I, how do I create businesses and you know, in everything I do, so that I make sure that asset is well nurtured. And that's been kind of my guiding principle ever since. Yeah, that's great. That's a new recommendation. We don't get those often around here. So I appreciate that.
Joe Troyer 44:28
We always get the the same books, and I understand they're great books. But I do appreciate the unique one because it gives me something to read so much appreciated that. I'll definitely check it out and let you know what I think. And thanks so much for coming on the show. Eric. If somebody wants to link up with you personally, we'll make sure to put links to do corporate and do reputation inside of the show notes. Somebody wants to reach out to you personally though, what's the best way to do that?
Eric Herman 44:53
The best way is to just text me I'm on my phone 24/7 My name version 917331017
Joe Troyer 45:04
Perfect, Eric. Thanks so much, man. I know people are jealous.
Eric Herman 45:07
Yep. Thank you. Appreciate it.
