User-Generated Reviews and Their Impact on Local

We talked about reviews and the ability for businesses to respond to them last week. Today on Valleywag, there was some discussion of a company possibly offering to push negative reviews to the bottom if businesses bought a paid ad with them (I'm not mentioning the company's name here, because Valleywag thinks this was just a rogue salesperson, not a real policy of that company).

However, this brings up some of the complexities of reviews and serving two masters: users and businesses. For users to really find the reviews content useful, it has to be real information that cannot be "bought" by businesses. Of course, if this is the case and a business already has significant numbers of negative reviews on a given site, it will make it more difficult to sell paid products to that business.

On the other side of the coin, there have been stories about consumers/users threatening businesses with negative reviews if they don't get what they want (which many times includes them demanding free product or the like). This is the downside of user generated reviews. While they give users the ability to provide information to others, there will always be some that abuse them.

So how can businesses solve this problem? To me, the answer is twofold:

1. Do the best you can to keep your customers happy. This may seem simple, but if you want good reviews, provide good service.
2. Promote your customers' involvement on the sites where you advertise (and for sites, this means give businesses the means to promote you on-site). Put up stickers in your window letting consumers know where to post reviews. Tell your staff to promote this (especially to happy customers). Happy customers will go out of their way to send you more business, but you need to give them the means to do so.

Finally, as we talked about last week, it is important that sites provide businesses with the means to respond to negative reviews and even challenge their validity from time to time. The purer the review system the better, but as local Internet companies, we always have to balance the needs of all of our constitutents.

Commentards: Yelp protection racket alleged by anonymous cowards