Reviews Carrying Increasing Local Weight

Here’s an instructive piece appearing in the Sunday SF Chronicle on the impact of ratings and reviews from sites like Citysearch, Yelp, InsiderPages, Angies List and JudysBook on local businesses. Admittedly this is the SF Bay Area, but you can expect these trends to permeate to slower adopting and secondary markets.

The piece explores the positive and negative affects of user reviews and how businesses are now tracking and adapting to this new reality, which is here to stay:

Georgia Kalnin runs a San Francisco fitness studio called Third Street Pilates that doesn’t have a storefront, so doesn’t get walk-in clients. Kalnin said that 95 percent of her business has come from CitySearch and Yelp. “I always say to my clients, ‘If you like it, review me,’ ” she said.

Len Handeland, owner of Utopia Salon near Union Square, revamped his Web site to allow online appointment booking and started advertising on CitySearch in May. He estimates that the hair salon is getting five or six new clients every day from online review sites — enough to hire three additional stylists.

“People see our ad on CitySearch, look at our 9.9 rating, and then at the user reviews,” he said. “We have 36 reviews, and out of 36 there is not one negative comment. We have seen our revenues grow by three or four times the amount we budgeted on CitySearch advertising. It has really, really paid off.”

Newspapers should also take note that these reviews diminish the need for and importance of professional critical reviews (and by extension the print newspaper itself). Internet yellow pages take note: if IYPs don’t help users make buying decisions with in-depth information and sort/refine capabilities and/or reviews, people will flock instead to “social directory” sites like those above.
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Related: SuperPages is placing a great deal of emphasis on reviews and has a weekly drawing to create incentives to review local businesses.