Billion Dollar Bully is a documentary film about Yelp that “examines the claims by business owners of extortion, review manipulation and review fabrication.”
That is the description posted on the filmmakers’s Kickstarter page, through which they are trying to raise the funds needed to finish the film.
We have discussed the ways in which Yelp and similar review sites can imperil your business’s reputation, and we’ve had quite a bit to say about how to protect against that possibility (essentially, through online reputation management). But Yelp can also be an extraordinary tool for a young business. Yelp is among the highest-ranked websites by search engines. So by creating a Yelp profile, a business immediately has a prominent presence online.
Yelp is an important component of online reputation management. That doesn’t mean it is immune to experiencing a reputation crisis itself: Shares of Yelp’s stock fell 4.7% after the release of the documentary’s trailer.
Customer reviews on sites such as Yelp and Angie’s List have long posed major challenges to companies in industries like retail and hospitality. But now—especially with the advent of Google My Business— customer review sites reach every industry, and are a potential concern for every company.
How your company lands on review sites
If your organization is listed in public telephone directories, information about it is most likely published on a variety of content aggregators as well as on consumer review sites like Google My Business. Those sites often make the decision for you. In some cases, you often can’t opt out.
There are numerous consumer review sites on the Internet. Many work to maintain the integrity of their forums, but often their primary interest is in driving reader engagement—not protecting your company’s brand. The more businesses they have listed, the more visitors they attract. The more clicks they receive, the more advertising revenue the site can charge.
Fortunately, there are steps you can take to ensure your business is represented better on review sites. The most proactive is using a review management service.
What review management services do
Review management services work by monthly subscription. They provide clients with a dashboard where they can monitor over numerous online review sites in real time as well as with aboveboard methods to invite customers to review your company or services.
As positive and legitimate reviews come in, you can amplify their exposure by publishing them on many online platforms after establishing a profile about your business on them. This does not prevent negative reviews from appearing on review sites. Instead, it simply posts the reviews you choose to emphasize on social media and review sites—providing an effective counterbalance to reviews that may be biased, or have low credibility but high visibility.
Review management services also work to make your company’s website more visible to search engines. A key way of improving a website’s SEO (search engine optimization) is to increase the number of highly ranked sites that link to it. By allowing you to easily create profiles for your company across many review sites, review management companies also allow you to create many such inbound links from high-ranking platforms.
Review management sites aren’t right for every business. Many companies do not have storefronts and do not actively market their services and products to widespread groups of consumers. They are less likely to utilize review management services and more likely to remain detached from the online review space.
If your business would benefit from taking more control over your brand, though, it is a service worth looking into.
Customer reviews on sites such as Yelp and Google My Business (formerly Google Places for Business) are a growing concern for most companies. They often have little choice whether they are listed on these sites. Then one day a review appears at the top of a Google search of their company’s name. And it stays there, whether it is authentic, verifiable or anonymous.
In response, services have emerged that help companies track and manage their online reviews. They offer tools to monitor reviews, multiple ways to attract positive feedback from customers and the ability to publish those positive reviews on several websites.
Birdeye is one such company offering these services. We interviewed co-founding CEO Naveen Gupta, a Silicon Valley veteran, on the state of the industry.
How many review sites now exist online? We track more than 100 review sites. I believe there are thousands, but only about 100 are influential. Of those, 50 or so are applicable to every type of business. The rest are in vertical markets — niche sites dedicated to specific industries like dentistry, law or finance.
Which do you consider the most important? Tier 1 directories like Yelp, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo have the most traffic. In Tier 2 are the verticals – sites devoted to specific industries. Avvo, a site that ranks and reviews attorneys, is in this tier. Tier III sites are general business listings such as Yellow Pages, Insider Pages and Super Pages.
What do you consider the most common misunderstanding of business owners about online reviews?
What we see across all verticals is that businesses small and large have been caught unaware of customer feedback because of the proliferation of review sites. As a result, they don’t know which sites to participate on. Depending on your type of market, the importance of the sites differ. Often, business owners don’t know where, and when, their reviews have appeared.
Authenticity of reviews is a concern. Many sites are not good at validating the identity of users. Or the customer’s review does not include the full issue – just their take on it.
Remediation is another big issue we see. Most review sites are not remediation vehicles. They are just one-way venting platforms. Studies show that happy customers generally don’t write reviews – only the unhappy ones do. Unless business owners actively encourage their feedback, satisfied customers don’t provide it. Proactive services enabling business owners to attract them have become necessary to succeed in this environment.
Review sites are often accused of manipulating results so that only negative reviews show up unless businesses pay a fee to the company. What advice do you give to business owners in such situations?
Not every business owner feels they have the time or resources to invest in managing their online reviews. Yet, your brand is your #1 asset. Don’t outsource it. Pay attention. Rather than focus on ratings, invite and focus on the feedback from your customers. Then address it. Use tools to automate the process. It’s about providing great service, correcting any problems and turning your customers into your advocates.
Larger enterprises and franchises are more concerned with monitoring reviews across the spectrum, comparing customer satisfaction across locations or regions, then feeding the data into their systems so they can make customer management adjustments.
There are new tools to help business owners manage all of this. It has become nearly impossible to handle manually. Fortunately, that is now unnecessary.
Naveen Gupta has had senior executive roles at RingCentral, Monster, Yahoo and UTStarcom. He studied in the Executive Education program at Harvard Business School; has an MBA, Finance from NYU Stern & London Business School; and a B.S.in Electrical Engineering from BITS Pilani.
This is the first in a series of interviews with experts whose work relates to online reputation management.
Felony extortion charges were recently filed in Dallas against a man who purported to provide online reputation management (ORM) services, but threatened to undermine a client’s reputation as a way of demanding payment. It isn’t the first such incident. The episode highlights the unregulated nature of this industry, and some of its dangers. While protecting and managing one’s online reputation is becoming increasingly vital for businesses and individuals, it’s necessary to proceed with caution and discretion when seeking help. Read more
Some companies offer to remove explicit photos or phony reviews from websites like Google Places, Yelp and Angie’s List—a promise that is often impossible to keep. Even Yelp itself has faced (unverified) accusations that it “filters out positive reviews and allows negative ones through, particularly if the restaurant in question has refused to purchase advertising,” according to Eater.com.
How to Avoid Such Practices
How to avoid such deceptive practices? Be sure to focus on trusted and verified sources when researching a firm with a specialization in online reputation management. We offer helpful advice in, How to Hire the Right Online Reputation Management Firm.
I encourage consumers to check the provider’s online information to see if they address your specific goals and are experienced in servicing your sector. Evaluate whether they specialize in a niche – including your area – or are generalists. Understand what ORM is and whether the goals you want addressed are possible – or can be guaranteed. If not, make sure you know what to expect.
Be Wary of Guarantees to Remove Content
“If an ORM company contacts you directly offering to delete or eliminate a bad review or demote the review for $X dollars, don’t take them up on the offer,” advises interactive media agency Small Screen Producer. It is very unlikely they can make such content simply disappear. Instead, ORM firms focus on reducing the impact that negative or misleading information from third parties will have on your online image. Such strategies can include moving down unwanted content onto lower pages. But it can return to prominence within weeks if continuous maintence is not applied.
In a world of waning industries, online reputation management is booming. So are consumer misunderstandings about what the practice entails and what results you can expect.
More businesses are suing Yelp to unmask anonymous users, reports the Wall Street Journal. One such case is heading toward the Virginia Supreme Court this month.
As Angus Loten reports:
The Federal Trade Commission has received more than 2,046 complaints filed about Yelp from 2008 through March 4, according to data reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, following a Freedom of Information Act request. Yelp shares fell 5.7% in Wednesday trading, after the tally was posted on FTC.gov.
Most of the complaints are from small businesses that claim to have received unfair or fraudulent reviews, often after turning down a pitch to advertise on the site, according to a separate spreadsheet of complaints to the FTC about Yelp, reviewed exclusively by the Journal. For instance, a business owner in Montclair, N.J., whose name was redacted said: “I was contacted by a Yelp salesperson to advertise, which I declined, and since have only had negative posts on their site.”
The proliferation of anonymous writers online is the result of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which frees website owners from any responsibility for what users post on their sites. Critics of the law, passed in 1996, say it has not kept up with the widespread use of the Internet. Free speech advocates also support anonymity online. As the WSJ observes, such cases are increasingly the topic of lawsuits.
Recently the New York-based hedge fund, Greenhorn Capital took legal action to reveal the identity of an anonymous blogger at an investor website. Like many such companies, they plan to sue.
Fake reviews on Yelp and similar sites are an integral part of Internet culture. (Yelp is an online guide to local businesses worldwide. Its listings are based on consumer reviews. Anyone can write them, using their real name or a false one. Over 30 million reviews have been posted since its founding in 2004.)
Yelp is an invaluable research tool for consumers. It is also an important marketing resource for businesses that rely on positive word of mouth to attract customers.
Anyone can post a fake positive review, just as anyone – including the competitor across the street – can post a bad one. But Yelp allows businesses to create their own profiles with photographs and respond to reviews publicly or privately. That helps level the playing field. It also enables businesses to acknowledge their faults and build relationships with customers who give them bad reviews, should they want to. (A customer who cares enough to take the time to write a bad review may be one who cares enough to give you a second chance. Their critiques can help you make your business a better one.)
Today technology reporter David Streitfeld writes about Yelp’s new strategy for reducing inaccurate listings. Yelp’s action is a signal that the Internet is entering a new development phase: one where the drawbacks of fake reviews are addressed by the platforms that host them.
The more one utilizes the Internet for researching businesses, organizations and people, the more it becomes clear what a game-changer it is in terms of consumer empowerment. Reading Yelp reviews, it is clear that 30% (or, in some cases, all) of the overly effusive ones might be fake and that 30% of the bad reviews (or, in some cases, all) might be due to a bad day on the part of the reviewer. (Or that the reviewer is a competitor.) The rest provide a middle ground from which readers can draw their own conclusions. It isn’t perfect, but it is a rich mosaic of opinions which provide us with the best resource for helping make well-informed decisions: each other. That’s why Yelp’s step forward is a positive one.
About You(Online)
Reputation Communications publishes You(Online) to help educate CEOs, C-Suite executives, rising stars and high net worth individuals about online reputation management.
Reputation Reboot addresses real-life online reputation management (ORM) challenges faced by CEOs, executives, VIPs and their organizations. Unless they are public figures, their names and related descriptions of all individuals and companies discussed are changed to protect their privacy. For a quick look at the types of situations facing many professionals, scroll down and check out the headlines.
Online reputation management enables you to take more ownership over what appears about you on the Internet.
Without it, the world controls how you look online.
Here are ten examples of the ways online reputation management is used by individuals, companies and organizations.
To ensure up-to-date and accurate information dominates search results for an organization or individual’s name.
To ensure that factual, credible reference material is readily available online.
That reduces the chance that fraudulent information will impact a brand.
To remove unwanted or inappropriate information, photographs or other content from the first few pages of Google search results.
To monitor social media and online forums for red flags signaling potential on- and offline threats against high-profile individuals and their organizations.
To create a strong online presence about a topic.
That presence acts as a barrier against potential distortions from third-party content, including anonymous and defamatory material. Without it, such items can go straight to the top of searches – and stay.
To ensure that your story is told by you and not by former partners or other potentially biased parties.
To establish a reputation within your area of expertise on multiple online platforms.
To create an online legacy for a VIP who is preparing for retirement or to exit an organization.
