Podcast appearance
The Reputation Strategy That Turns Reviews Into Real Growth
How reviews, responses, sentiment analysis, and AI become a reputation-management growth engine.
How reviews, responses, sentiment analysis, and AI become a reputation-management growth engine.
Brad Friedman treats reviews as a strategic growth asset rather than a weekly task, drawing out how visibility, response quality, sentiment analysis, personalization, and competitor evidence fit together.
Terminology note: this conversation uses the earlier word “facts.” RightResponse now calls the verified business knowledge used in a response “messages.” The transcript preserves the language used in the original recording.
A reputation strategy extends far beyond collecting Google reviews. The episode connects visibility, personalized review requests, public responses, review intelligence, and local competitor analysis to customer acquisition and retention.
It is the connected system of local visibility, review acquisition, public responses, review intelligence, competitor analysis, and the operating actions that follow.
It helps more people find the business, gives prospective customers stronger evidence at the point of decision, and identifies issues that affect retention.
Yes. AI can classify phrases by topic and sentiment, track changes over time, and compare locations or competitors using a consistent analytical framework.
They show how competing businesses perform on the topics customers care about and whether a local visibility problem reflects review cadence, service perception, or another factor.
The original episode and publisher show notes are available from The Digital Slice through the source link on this page.
Explore the Review Management Platform
This transcript was generated from the original episode audio and lightly formatted for readability. Minor speaker or wording errors may remain.
[00:00:00] And it's a really critical to driving your business outside of paid advertising. Google ad and social ads and things like that. If you do this properly, you can drive growth dramatically through reputation management. Hello, friends, and welcome to episode 235 of the digital slice podcast brought to you by the Friedman Group LLC. I'm Brad Friedman. The digital slice podcast is the podcast that brings you a slice of the digital marketing news, tools, and tactics you need to succeed. Be sure to read the show notes to learn about our partners and all the tools we use to bring you the digital slice podcast.
[00:00:51] Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with George Swetlitz. George is the co-founder of RightResponse AI, a reputation management platform designed to help location-based businesses drive customer growth. RightResponse AI uses advanced AI to help businesses grow through better review management, deeper review insights, and a stronger understanding of the competitive environment, all focused on driving customer acquisition and retention. George's approach to AI is grounded in operational experience with a focus on creating practical solutions that deliver measurable results. George and I had a great discussion about the importance of reputation management to
[00:01:40] growing businesses, but before we get started, I have a quick question. How many AI subscriptions are you paying for right now? If the answer is more than one, I want to introduce you to Magi. It's the platform I switched to that gave me access to 30 plus of the world's best AI models. Chatchy PT Cloud Gemini Deep Seat Grock and more, all under one riff at one monthly prize. Check it out by clicking the link in the show notes or go to FreedmanSocialMedia.com forward slash Magi. That's Magi M-A-G-A-I. And if it's your first time purchasing, use Brad 30 at checkout and get 30% off your first three months. Hi, George. Welcome to the Digital Size podcast. How are you
[00:02:36] today? I'm doing great, Brad. Thanks for having me. You bet. Thank you. I appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today. I want to dive right in because this is a great topic that we're going to talk about today. Many of my listeners are small business owners who are doing their best to show up in Google search results and a lot of that focuses on them, asking for and receiving reviews from their customers and clients. How important do you believe these reviews are to customer acquisition and retention? I think they're critically important and I'll tell you my and alluded by backstory. Before starting right response, I was the CEO of a consolidation
[00:03:26] of audiology clinics and we had about 220 clinics. And so managing reputation to drive organic growth was one of the most important things that we did. And it's really critical to driving your business outside of paid advertising. Google ad and social ads and things like that. If you do this properly, you can drive growth dramatically through reputation management. And when you say reputation management, you're talking specifically about the reviews that we leave on, say Google, for example. Yeah, so I call it the review ecosystem. And that's often also called reputation management. But it's everything from generating reviews to analyzing them for sentiment and understanding
[00:04:27] how to improve your business to do better, to responding to reviews, to doing competitor analysis around reviews and understanding what your what your competitor strategies are. All of that can be facilitated or enhanced through a really thoughtful use of what I call the review ecosystem. Okay. What would be what would that ecosystem be made up of? So we can we can talk through each piece of it. So one piece of it is this notion of, you know, being visible, right? You have to be visible on the Google business profile for people to call you. That's the first step. People have to see you. In order to see you, you need to be at the top of the listings when somebody Google's
[00:05:20] dentist near me. If you're number one, you're more likely to get a call. If you're number 10, they may never get to you. So the first part is being visible. And a lot of that is just getting reviews. And so getting reviews is driven by review generation asking. But as I'm sure you know, I know I get lots of review requests all the time. And most of them I ignore. And so the real challenge is how do you get people not to ignore them? How do you get people to actually convert that into a review? Yeah. That's very true. I get lots of requests from, well, you mentioned dentists and my dentist just last week was sending me text messages asking me to leave a review. And
[00:06:12] I am one of those tough customers. I don't always do it. Yeah. I'm the same way. I'm in the review business and I don't leave a lot of reviews. Yeah. But the key there in our view is connecting with that customer. It's personalizing the review request. There's a huge difference between getting a review request that says, Hi, you were in the office. Would you leave a review? Versus high, high bill, we're really proud that you've chosen us now for the last six years to be your dental provider. Mary really enjoyed seeing you last week for your annual cleaning. And it was great to have you there. You know, it really helps us to get the word out when our
[00:07:08] loyal customers tell other people what makes us special. If you wouldn't mind doing that, we would really appreciate it. That has a much higher probability of connecting with someone. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense, matter of fact, when you were saying that, I was thinking that just last night, I bought a little product on Amazon, a book. I bought a book. And the book seller sent me an email and said, Thank you for purchasing this book. And they gave the name of the book and everything. And they said, We're a small bookseller. And reviews are really important to us. And if you would take a minute, you know, tell us how we did, I'd appreciate it. And I actually
[00:07:50] clicked on that one and did that one. Yeah. You see, because it connected with you. There was an emotional connection. I don't know that I can say all, but the vast majority of systems, that produce these review requests, use templates. They've been using templates forever. And our system uses AI. It's a much more complicated thing to build. It's, you know, it's complicated to pull together, but AI is really terrific at creating these highly targeted, highly emotional, highly connecting messages. We incorporate photos. So there are industries where photos make a big difference. If you're a real estate agent,
[00:08:38] you know, include the photo of the couple or the people standing in front of their house. If you do events or parties, take a picture of the group and use that picture when you send a request out to everyone in that group. Those are things that build the emotional connection drive. We have customers that use photos, have upwards of 75% conversion rates in these kind of group settings because of that connection. The typical email conversion rate might be somewhere between 10 and 20%. And so when you think about that, especially a small business, doesn't have that many customers. If you can go from 10% to 40%, that's a big increase in your
[00:09:24] reviews per month. And so that's what drives visibility. So I imagine that AI does help you to personalize the message because then it's not me sitting there looking at the file and seeing who the person was that you've worked with you and crafting a message, but the AI can do all of that and make the message more personal. That's right. And AI is a great intern. So you may have to set it up and provide the, you know, that the customizing details, right, the details that add the richness, but AI is great. And we spend a lot of time building the chain of prompts that actually works with that and makes it emotional, but AI is terrific
[00:10:16] at pulling all of that data together in a way that it tries to spark that connection. Okay. So we have visibility in this ecosystem. What else do we have to be concerned about? Well, the next thing that happens with reviews is that you get a lot of them and every one of them is a view into your business from a dissent, disinterested third party. Right. I mean, they're just putting it out there. This is what I think. And reviews, even though they're generally short, they're very complicated. I love the burgers. I hated the fries. The floor was dirty, but I love the ambience. You know, a lot of messages in there in a very short amount of
[00:11:08] space. And it's virtually impossible on your own to make sense of 1,000 reviews or 500 reviews or even 100. No, no one running a business has time to go in and make a little spreadsheet and say, you know, this is what was said, nobody has time. AI again is really incredible at pulling those threads out and mapping them against topics. And so what we do is we build a set of topics that is essentially unique to your business based on your description and your Google business profile. We deliver a set of topics. So for a restaurant, it's, you know, it's going to revolve around food quality and service, but there may be if you have a bar there, you know, there may be
[00:12:01] a section on a bar. If you don't have a bar, it may not be a section on bar. So it's very tailored to your business. And then we deconstruct that review and we map it against all those topics. And then we roll it up for a long period of time and it allows you to understand what are people saying? What are people saying over time? What do people say in a five star review versus a one star review? What is the thing that drives satisfaction in your business versus dissatisfaction? So we were just looking the other day at a air conditioning business. And it's one of our clients. And we were looking at this analysis of how do these sentiments roll up by star?
[00:12:47] And the thing that really jumped out on the low end was price and value. And now so they have a policy about how they charge for things. And we could look into those reviews, but it really jumped up when people are dissatisfied. It's about price and value more than anything else. And we could see it instantly. And that's another benefit of the reviewing, the review ecosystem, because it allows you to take this massive amount of unstructured text and turn it in to highly structured data. That's quite unique. Yeah. I bet the AI can also help with that competitive analysis that you were, that you mentioned. Yeah. No, absolutely. We, we have a feature where you can identify your
[00:13:38] competitors. And we then go in and analyze. We have the ability then to analyze the company. We, we pull all their reviews down. We analyze their performance over the last two and six months. We do that because, and this is kind of an interesting aside. But when you go to Google, when you look at a business on Google, Google tells you the all-time rating and the all-time number of reviews. But that's actually much less important than what's happening in the business now. The fact that you were a five-star business seven years ago is pretty irrelevant if you're a two-star business today. Right? So we analyze the reviews for you, for our clients, our customers,
[00:14:28] from their competitors over two and six months. And we can analyze their reviews using the same topic that you analyze your own. So you can sit down and you can understand what are, are my competitors making an effort to get reviews? How are they doing? What are customers valuing about them? Where are they missing? What can I highlight in my business? And, and that's what big companies do. Right? Big companies have staff and they have marketing agencies and they do that. But for small businesses, we don't have that and it's difficult to do on your own and you need a tool. You need somebody that can help you get that. And that's what we provide. Yeah, yeah, that's great. That's
[00:15:15] really interesting. I would imagine, well, I wouldn't imagine. It's probably true that there's a lot of this that's really on me on the business owner to actually be performing and delivering on whatever their promises, their services, in order to help those reviews along too. I can't provide study service and expect good reviews. So some of it's on me. Right. I mean, you know, when you think about, if you have a single location and you're the owner, you're there every day. You talk to your customers, you know what's going on. Sentiment analysis might help you a little bit. But probably not that much. You even get to four or five locations. Now you're an owner,
[00:16:08] you're, you know, going back and forth from these locations. It's hard to keep track. You're not there all the time. There might be locations where you're not there at all for a week or two. The reviews give you an insight. But even more importantly, when you have an issue, let's say review ratings drop, you go to the manager and you say you're rating drop. The manager says, okay, so what do you want me to do? Doing the best I can. If you have this kind of system in place, you can say, look, it dropped in particular because people are saying your staff isn't friendly. Your food is great. But the staff, you have a problem
[00:16:54] with the attitude. You got to solve that problem. Well, now you're giving that manager something to work with. We dealt with this all the time at my old company. 220 locations. Stuff going wrong, stuff going right everywhere. How do you very quickly get a handle on it? So we do the sentiment analysis. We also have a tool where we then we use AI for the AI, right? So the AI generates this sentiment analysis by review. We roll it up. We can then, if a customer wants, feed that into another AI agent that analyzes that and summarizes it. So a manager can get every month. Hey, this is what happened in your location last month. This is what's going right. This is what's
[00:17:41] going wrong. Interesting. Interesting. So I think a lot of people, including me, are not skeptical, but concerned about using AI because people sometimes know it's AI. And when I'm trying to scale my efforts and I'm losing that human touch, how do we deal with that? It's a great. I hear that a lot. And I talk, you know, in our business, people can just schedule calls with me. And I show up to the calls and people talk and they talk about what they're excited about and what their fears are. And that's a common fear. You know, you talk a lot about AI on your website, but am I dehumanizing this interaction? And my response to them is I'm actually doing the opposite because when we
[00:18:37] personalize things at right response, when we personalize things, it's not fake personalization. If I'm personalizing a request, it's because I know something about the customer. I know what because you know what you told me. The AI is just assembling it into language, but that personalization came from the business. The same thing with our review responder. A generic AI review responder is easy to spot. And it is completely unpersonalized because all it can do is repeat back what was in the review. And in my view, it's almost like a waste of time. Like why even do that? I didn't like the burger. Sorry, didn't like the burgers. You know, it's just in my view, it's almost
[00:19:28] worse than a template. But what we do is we allow the business to create a library of facts. So when somebody joins us, we download a thousand reviews, which is more than most people have. Well, we download up to a thousand. We analyze it and we look at what are people talking about. And so a fact is like an if then, if somebody talks about the fact that you give away these three things, respond with some statement, right? So we had a car wash customer that gave away free things. And so they had a really clever fact. And the fact was if somebody mentions any of these five things that we give away, in the response, talk about the ones they didn't mention and tell
[00:20:20] them to take advantage of those three things next time. That's a really sophisticated response, right? So somebody says, Oh, I came and they have a math cleaner. And the response is, and glad you enjoyed the math clear next time. Don't forget, we also give away window cleaner, towels, air freshener, you know, and all the other things. That's a very, that's not the personalized. It's actually very highly personalized because the business created the fact of a restaurant. Everyone talks about the lasagna. If you were talking to them, you would say, yeah, it's a secret recipe. It came from my grandmother, which used in Italy, you know, it's like
[00:21:06] this family jewel with ours. That's exactly what you say. Somebody when somebody talks about lasagna, you say, glad you loved it. It's actually a family. You know, it's a family recipe that came from whatever you could say, whatever you want. And so it's a very personalized way of engaging with your customers. As a business owner, should I be replying to every review, even the negative ones, 100% absolutely, absolutely. And you're not necessarily doing it because you're, you feel like, you know, you'd be, you're, well, let me say it this way. One reason you're doing it is to show respect for the person who took time to leave a review. People want to be heard.
[00:21:58] In this day and age, people want to be heard. They have microphones and microphones. And they want to be heard and respected. And so one reason to respond is that. But the more important reason is because all the people that are trying to decide which dentist to go to next are reading the reviews. And if you are engaging in that conversation through a helpful or informative response, you will, you have a higher likelihood of connecting with that potential customer and getting them to call you first. So I'll give you an example back from the my audiology days. If we had a clinic, that was kind of in like a, a New York, you know, that has a main street. And we're on
[00:22:53] Main Street, but it's hard to find parking on Main Street. All right. So you have people who need hearing, anything might be 80 years old, 75 years old. And they read a review that says I had a hard time finding parking. They're not going to, those people reading that review are not going to come to you because they don't want to fight with that. But if your response says, hey, really apologize. Next time you come, there's a parking lot behind the building off of Beat Street that has 60 spots. There's always spots available. And there's actually accessible parking right by our back door. Now, you're saying it for them, but you're also saying it for every other person that
[00:23:39] has mobility issues that's trying to decide where to go. And they look at that and they go, wow, there was a concern. The business responded. It was very helpful and thoughtful and kind. That's the kind of company I want to work with. Yeah, that makes great sense. Okay, George, give me, give me one or two takeaways you want listeners to take away from our discussion. Well, I would say the first takeaway is people need to reorient their view around the value of that review ecosystem, reviews, responses, all of that. It can be an engine for growth as opposed to a task that needs to get done every week. I think that's probably the most. In fact,
[00:24:28] I'll leave it at that. That to me is the most important takeaway. Yeah, yeah. All right, tell us a little bit more about your company and what you do and who you do it for. So we, I told you a little bit about the back story before we struggled with this issue when we had 220 clinics. This is back in 2021 before chat GPT. We had people in contact centers responding to reviews, all sorts of craziness as you can imagine. And we had a very difficult time finding technology that would actually help us in the way that we wanted to be helped. And so we ended up selling the business in 2021 or yet, 2021. And then in 22, chat GPT came out. And I got the team together and said,
[00:25:19] you know what, I think we could use chat GPT to solve this problem. Let's build the company that we wish we would have had when we were doing this. And so that's what we did. And so we spent about a year, year and a half building it. And then we went to market kind of end of 2023. And we've, you know, been, you know, going and going and going since then. But that's, you know, what we've tried to do is build a company that we wanted. So for example, we don't have subscription tier. You know, you want to review, you know, you sign up for review response and then you want to do review request. Well, you know, you have to go to this other tier and you have to buy this package
[00:26:05] and with our system, it's one price gives you access to all of our features. And then you essentially just pay for what you use. They will review to respond to the cost money. And if you're a business that gets 10 reviews a month, that's $2, right? It's not, you know, it's, it's not crazy. And so it, we built a company that we thought was fair. And we serve all sorts of businesses. We serve single location businesses. We serve, you know, we serve groups that have hundreds of locations. Or we have different kind of micro features that are helped like brands and regions and all of those things. We have that for the larger companies. We, we work with agencies. So agencies will
[00:26:56] white label our platform and offer it to their clients. So we have a lot of different ways. But we essentially serve, you know, everyone, we work with businesses that don't have locations. We have a business. It's like a travel agency businesses. And most of their reviews are on trust pilot. And so we enable them to literally deal with thousands of reviews a month on trust pilot. So, you know, it's across the board. Anyone that deals with reviews has this issue and we, and we help them. Excellent. Tell me where the best place is for people to find you online. The best place is right, right response AI, right response AI dot com.
[00:27:45] All the information is there. People can sign up for a free trial at that location. They can schedule a call with me or one of the other members of our team. We are very, we have a very high level of service. And doesn't matter how big or small we were there. Off of that site to help everyone we can. Okay, great. George, thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me today. It was great to be here. It was a lot of fun. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to this week's podcast. I'm incredibly grateful you were here and would be very appreciative if you would take a moment to subscribe
[00:28:29] and leave a review. Be sure to read the show notes so you know how to connect with George, those show notes along with all our other episodes can be found at thedigitalslicepodcast.com. I'll be back soon with episode 236. In the meantime, visit our website freethmansocialmedia.com. Sign up for our email newsletter to receive bonus tracks, sneak peeks, insider fun, and even more digital marketing tips. Subscribe to our YouTube channel freethmansocialmedia. A few days after this podcast goes live, we release the video podcast on our YouTube channel. Until next time, thanks for listening. Do something nice for someone else today.