Judys Book Announces ‘Respond to Review’

Seattle-based social directory site Judy's Book announced a new feature that will allow local business owners to respond to (negative or disputed) reviews, called "Respond to Review." The service allows any registered business on Judy's Book to set up alerts so that when a customer writes a review about that business it receives a notification. Kudzu.com (only in Atlanta, GA) has a similar option to let local businesses respond to reviews. Citysearch and Yahoo! allow anyone to write reviews (and theoretically respond to reviews), but there's no formal category for the business owner.

Judy's Book's move is smart for several reasons. First it's fair. The importance of user-generated content online cannot be underestimated and if there are only a couple of reviews of a business that could directly impact the bottom line, one way or another. A spiteful customer now has a powerful vehicle in ratings and reviews to harm a local business.

Another reason this is smart is because it will potentially create a "dialogue" between local businesses and their customers. And local businesses will start to see Judy's Book as a kind of CRM/feedback tool (especially given the alerts notification). That boosts Judy's Book as an actual and perceived facilitator of local community dialogue. (Merchant Circle is seeking to do something similar by hosting local business blogs as part of its site.)

Finally the functionality will also encourage local businesses to register and start to use Judy's Book as an advertising vehicle (currently PPCall).

Judy's Book some time ago implemented a system called "Trust Score" to protect against "review fraud." That would include local business owners (or their surrogates) writing false positive reviews of their own businesses, which is a potential problem also. Other sites also seek to ensure the credibility of local reviews in different ways.

These social directory sites (and maybe more "pure-play" social networks) are the yellow pages of the future. Plan and simple, they're vehicles for online word of mouth and will be trusted — and used — more than Local Search sites that simply have contact information. Community or ratings and reviews will be an essential feature of all directory sites at some point very soon. To its credit Verizon SuperPages has taken the lead on this for the traditional yellow pages industry.

There was once skepticism about whether users would review more than movies or restaurants online. That debate is long since over. The question now is how to efficiently get user-generated content onto the site in as many categories as possible. And for those directories that are worried about alienating advertisers, Judy's Book has just handed you the answer in "Respond to Review."