With so many online review sites out there, consumers are now empowered to voice their opinion on practically everything. Personally, I rarely leave the house without checking a review first -- whether it's what I should eat at a local restaurant, or where to find the most trustworthy car repair shop. And I'm not alone in this. According to a recent Nielsen study cited in The Washington Post, seventy percent of Internet users trust online recommendations and reviews. Online review sites are virtual word-of-mouth machines with people spreading the word about products and services they love, or warning people about the bad experiences they've had. You no longer have to try something blindly - the opinions and recommendations of others are at your fingertips.
Businesses are getting more and more involved in these forums, not only getting the word out about their products and services, but also managing what people are saying. Some review sites such as Viewpoints, SheSpeaks and Smile.ly work with companies to distribute products and associated messaging to consumers in order to generate reviews. While other sites like Yelp and Trip Advisor offer advertising and sponsored results to affect brand awareness. Several of these sites are actually giving businesses the opportunity to get involved by responding to reviews directly. In all cases, the lines are now blurred between what is perceived as an open marketplace of opinions and what is a business-influenced product/service push.
Yelp is a good example of this, recently under fire for allegedly manipulating the placement of positive and negative reviews based on a company's ad spend. I'll admit, I'm a bit of a Yelp-aholic, so I thought I would take a deeper look at what this site is doing both right and wrong in the online review space.
Let's start with the positive.
- Creating a community - Yelp has many tools that allow people to communicate with each other, form relationships and feel like they are part of something. You can become friends or fans of other reviewers, and give them compliments of all sorts with fun badges to boot. There are also talk threads where people can ask and answer questions about almost anything.
- Authorship - Yelp requires that you use your real name to sign up. I'm sure there are ways around doing this if you really want to be anonymous, but for me, having my name associated with reviews has made me a bit more judicious in what I say.
- Rewarding frequent reviewers - If you're named Yelp Elite, you know you've made it in the review community. Yelp strokes the egos of its reviewers by designating those with the highest quantity and quality of reviews as "Elite." This system encourages people to write tons of reviews and in return, Yelp gives them a badge and invites them to Elite events. I'd say this deal works out a little better for Yelp but hey, I've bought into it. Yelp also highlights reviews of the day and "Featured Yelpers" to give even further recognition to its best Yelpers.
- Search options - Yelp does a great job of letting you search reviews by all sorts of categories from neighborhood to price to type of service. You can even find places by whether or not they're BYOB, or good for groups.
- Features and partnerships - Yelp continuously innovates and adds features to its site and mobile apps, helping to keep it relevant and ahead of the curve. For instance, they were the first iPhone app to implement augmented reality. You also can now book a reservation directly from a restaurant's Yelp review through OpenTable. These are both super smart value adds that have enhanced the user experience.
Now, the not so great.- Manipulation of review placement - As a fan of Yelp I hope this is not the case, but as mentioned before, there are allegations of Yelp allowing businesses to buy their way to more favorable rankings. If this is true, it will certainly erode trust about the validity of Yelp as a real source of consumer opinion.
- Authentic reviewing - While Yelp requires that you use your real name, ratings could easily be skewed. For instance, a loyal employee of a business could easily post rave reviews, just as a disgruntled employee could post scathing remarks - both holding the ability to skew perception of businesses. Online platforms like this give people with chips on their shoulder a forum for filter-less complaining, which often negatively affects the integrity of the site.
- Bandwagon jumping -Yelp continuously makes enhancements, but one recent change to the iPhone app that I'm not so sure about is the location "check-in" feature similar to Foursquare. They recently announced that you can earn badges and titles based on how many times you check in. Foursquare has already established this system, so will people really want to keep score on multiple networks? Guess we'll find out when Yelp rolls this out over the next couple of months.
Yelp and other online review sites are a great way of - at the very least - sharing initial opinions about products and services, helping to make life a little easier and often guiding final purchase decision. It only makes sense that businesses monitor these sites, but how they continue to get involved in this process remains to be seen. The sites themselves must also commit to a high degree of integrity and enforce standards that preserve the authentic opinions and recommendations of consumers.
So, I ask you, what role do you see these forms taking as the world of social media continues to expand? Will they last?
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