On January 25th, Alignable, a business networking site, released another installment of their small business (SMB) vendor trust rankings. This based on net-promoter survey data, or NPS for short, on dozens of companies that provide various services, including marketing, to SMBs.
Alignable collects (“would you recommend this business?”) data from “hundreds of thousands” of SMBs on a monthly and quarterly basis. One caveat Alignable doesn’t respondents first as customers of the companies they’re rating. The company argues that its open method provides a better and more complete picture of the reputation of a company.
These new SMB brand trust results are fairly similar to the ones released in Q4 of the previous year. One of the most trusted brand among SMBs is Amazon, while Yelp is the least trusted. PayPal has taken the place of Twitter on the new top 10 list. The bottom end of the list includes some new entrants – Angie’s List, Craig’s List and Web.com.
On the lists, there are some companies whose scores are worse than those that appear in the bottom 10. They haven’t been included in the list since they don’t have a sufficient number of ratings, yet Alignable feels that they’re more volatile and less reliable.
The list below is the most and least trusted SMB brands. They’re based on NPS survey data:
So what’s behind these scores? Greg Sterling reached out to Alignable CEO Eric Groves (a founder of ConstantContact) and CMO Dan Slagen to gain more insight on the lists. Basically, they don’t ask SMBs why they rated they rated what they rated, although the businesses are able to comment if they choose.
A number of the negatively rated companies on the lists were rated the way they were rated because of they share the fact that they’re SMB marketing platforms or providers.