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Reliability of Online Reviews
By Julie | June 13, 2007
This one’s for the Funk King of Minneapolis, Paul Jahn.
There’s a Salon blog post today on the reliability of online reviews. Here’s a choice bit:
Online ratings are beset by one main flaw, something pollsters call “response bias.” Because people are more likely to rate products that have moved them in some way — either positively or negatively — ratings for most items brim with extreme opinions. On Yelp everyone is above average; company CEO Jeremy Stoppelman told me that 85 percent of local businesses on the site get a three-star or better average rating.
The article is pretty good, so I won’t rehash it here. One thing that notably isn’t mentioned is ‘business owners posting wretchedly fake reviews in some mad faux-SEO urge.’ I’ve seen some awful, awful fake reviews — no real human writes like these reviews, or would say these things about a business such as that reviewed.
The visual range depictions discussed in this article won’t do much about those written reviews, although they’ll show the bias in the starred reviews a little more strongly. On the other hand, Paul and I have discussed that if a reasonable person found these fake reviews, they’d make a sane reader less likely to go to a business. Even though there’s massive response bias in even real reviews, at least they’re real.
Topics: advertising, directories, dumb techniques, lead generation, local search, marketing, paul jahn is funk king of minneapolis, search results, social media, spam, web 2.0, yahoo |
June 13th, 2007 at 9:02 pm
Amen on the fake reviews.
BTW, put up an SEG piece and stole your “it makes the Internet cry” quote.
My bad, but it seemed appropriate.
June 14th, 2007 at 5:57 am
That too makes the Internet cry. You cad!