Reputation Management Online

We live by five star ratings to just about anything you can buy or do in the online world these days. To plan a holiday or buy a best-seller we go by ratings and reviews online on TripAdvisor or Amazon. Real people telling you their joyous experiences helping you decide it all. Or NOT! This New York Times article lifts the lid on fake rave reviews. Here is an excerpt…

“For $5, I will submit two great reviews for your business,” offered one entrepreneur on the help-for-hire site Fiverr, one of a multitude of similar pitches. On another forum, Digital Point, a poster wrote, “I will pay for positive feedback on TripAdvisor.” A Craigslist post proposed this: “If you have an active Yelp account and would like to make very easy money please respond.”

As Reputation Managers we are constantly approached by people, firms and other service industry people about negative reviews. Negative reviews are scary for anyone and usually or mostly always done with malicious intent in our experience. If you look at it really how many times have you written about a hotel experience you did not particularly like or restaurant not having met your expectation? Its usually the good experiences one blogs or writes about with a couple of constructive criticism thrown in.

However, 5-Star reviews that we see everywhere from Amazon to TripAdvisor and review sites are being fed by the growing need to provide rave reviews to attract more customers. It is not as easy as spotting spam and people tested could not identify the fakes. The NYT article talks about Cornell researchers trying to make an algorithm to sieve out the fake rave reviews from popular websites.

There are sites that now offer positive reviews and ratings on books to music to hotels and restaurants. The more credibility and value that can be converted into hard cash will soon find an industry to alleviate the demand for them.  It will be interesting to see what the hotel industry or online shopping sites do to tackle it when this problem gets rampant and loses credibility.

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