Comments on: How customer reviews swayed my lunch plans

By: Erik Neu

Erik Neu — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:37:29 +0000

I have found generic consumer reviews (Yelp, etc) to be too wide-ranging to be very useful, for quick decisions like where to have lunch. Even for bigger decisions, like what vacuum cleaner to buy, it takes an awful lot of reading to maybe get some useful guidance. I think reviews coupled with social networking would be somewhat more helpful.

By: Jeff Meier

Jeff Meier — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 00:24:22 +0000

I liked this article very much, but a person who reads reviews with interest, I am often struck with the wide ranging view points that our society has on everything these days. Sure if the service sucks for one customer, you then read a comment about how great it was in another. Does one negative cancel one positive? I will bet it takes 10 postive comments to overcome one bad review. So if I was a competitor and wanted to hurt someone, well only a few negative posts could seriously impact a business. Plus does the review actually lead to an improvement? I would appreciate the business answering the complaint, and being allowed to show they have addressed the problem, instead of the post being left to there to cause someone to change their mind, simply based on the power of one persons opinion of a service or product. If however you read a general trend, then I give the review much more credence. Is this not just a version of Cyber-Bullying??

By: Justin Rosenthal

Justin Rosenthal — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 21:30:29 +0000

Dave… totally agree & love the post.

Jeff… Wise consumers of social media will need to know how to distinguish between a one-off comment from a pissed off customer or competitor and the voice of the masses. For example, reading the Yelp page for Agave (in Dave's post) shows 4 of 5 stars (based on 8 reviews), versus 70% who like it on UrbanSpoon (based on 20 votes), versus 80% for The Med in Boulder (based on 676 votes). I'm much more likely to trust the percentage for The Med, because of the sheer number of votes.

Social media sites are giving us the number of votes for a reason; so we know how reliable their numbers are.

That said, newbies could definitely be thrown if there isn't much data for a business on a given review site.

For smart businesses, this means that (if you're confident that your customers like you, which is far from a given) you can insulate yourself from negative comments from the very occasional pissed off customer or from your competition by encouraging your loyal customers to review you.

For dumb businesses, this means that (because your customers almost certainly don't like you) you are screwed whether you have a few or many reviews, which, in the end, is good for the customer and good for the economy. B2C therefore is increasingly a sink -or-swim situation, thanks to social media, and that makes me, as a consumer (and a producer) very happy.

By: Next to Last

Next to Last — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 17:19:28 +0000

There are no brick and mortar businesses anymore. Everything is connected. Ad dollars are wasted and poorly directed if retail owners don't keep an eye on the net and social media realities. This is only the beginning. When smart phones reach 50%+ and location based marketing rule consumer spending, things will change again.