Hyderabad: With companies hiring review writers to post negative comments on their competitors’ products, some e-commerce companies have started hiring people to write positive reviews for their own products.

There are close to 100 online forums that feature product reviews and comments, and are referred to by social media users before they make a purchase. Negative comments including those put up by rivals could easily affect a purchase decision.

“It is very easy for people to communicate with the brand as there is more and more data penetration. This is putting the company’s reputation at stake, and this is exactly why companies are looking at social customer relationship management,” said Vishrut Chalsani, vice-president of Akosha, an online reputation management company.

Mr Chalasani said a large number of companies are now looking at social customer relationship management (CRM) and e-commerce companies are at the top of the lot. “As e-commerce firms are affected by the activities of online opinion makers and competitors aggressively tainting the image of companies, these firms are the ones that hire CRM professionals,” he said.

Right from tracking what is being said about a company online by screening forums and blogs, to interacting with customers, reputation managers help bring in goodwill for the company. They also set the tone of communications and pass on feedback to the company in real time.

“This way everything is in-built, everything has a log, so I know exactly who has responded to what tweet or what Facebook comment, how have they responded and when they responded,” said Mr Ankur Warikoo, CEO, GroupOn, India.

“This is immensely powerful for me as a tracking mechanism and helps me be supre-mely efficient to do the task at hand, which is to reply to social conversations real time” Mr Warikoo said.

“It’s good to have a custodian on the social media front who has real time interaction with the customers and helps us give a face to the brand,” said Dhiraj Chadha, marketing, Voltas.