I recently attended the Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Summit in London where unsurprisingly a large focus was the importance of customer reviews in any social media programme. An all too common downfall of many companies approaching a social strategy is that it's a standalone activity all based upon the tools and platforms rather than the content appearing on these platforms. Content created by the company itself and more importantly its own customers. What many companies should realise is that social should form part of the wider marketing strategy and allows them to connect with customers and prospects in a personal and thought provoking way.

How many companies actually look upon customer reviews/ feedback as an early part of their social strategy if at all? Building Facebook pages, twitter accounts etc that sit idle or with no customer engagement is all too common a mistake, to build and maintain these channels takes time, resource and a clear content building plan. Without this they will fail and give a negative perception of the brand. These are not static websites, they need constant updating, monitoring and planning to succeed and allow for greater customer and brand engagement.

My advice would be to start where the real immediate value lies, with a customer feedback platform that allows your customers to rate and review your products or services - (obviously with the understanding that you have the fundamentals in place to gain more positive than negative reviews!). Once set up, ongoing monitoring is needed but the content is all driven by customers themselves. Positive content can then be replicated across all marketing platforms, it can even be automatically syndicated to social media platforms.

The rise of social media platforms allows customer feedback footprints to be left across numerous channels and its imperative that your customer service operations are set up to cope with this demand and respond in a timely and appropriate fashion.

If you can build a strong army of customer advocates that will themselves sing the praises of your brand against any negativity this brings with it the model of customer to customer marketing. So allow your customers to get on their white chargers and knights at the ready.....