I was having dinner with a friend from law school this evening (”Art”). He now runs a legal recruiting firm in Chicago. He was talking about how someone had posted a list of recruiting firms on the site Greedy Associates, which has a site for each major legal market. There’s a great deal of gossip on the site and postings are anonymous.
Art said that a list of legal recruiters had been posted in response to a general question about local firms. He said he was concerned that the anonymous nature of the site would allow for irresponsible or malicious posting. And while he said that he didn’t believe his firm would be criticized, he commented that the absence of real identities makes mischief more likely (recall the Amazon book author scandal of a few years ago). We also talked about how or whether to respond if something negative was posted.
This conversation about his firm, user reviews and online SMB reputation management grew out of another experience where Art was searching, as a consumer, for a local mechanic’s telephone number. He plugged the business name into a search engine and it came up highly ranked with related consumer reviews. The reviews were favorable. Art asked the business owner, who lives in his neighborhood, if he was aware of these reviews and the owner apparently said no.
These real examples, uncoaxed by me, anecdotally show the varying degrees of awareness of user reviews and their potential impact. The mechanic was unaware, Art as an active Internet consumer is highly conscious of reviews and their impact. But whatever the sophistication of the local business owners, there’s no clear way for businesses to respond to them. They can solicit favorable reviews, write their own responses on sites (if permitted) and reach out to disgruntled customers if they can identify them.
The flip side of all this complaining is that reviews of local businesses make their reputations more transparent even as they make them more discoverable. And the information offers a way to help correct or improve service or products.
Some local destination sites permit formal responses from the business owners/representatives; some allow “behind the scenes” contacts between local businesses and customers writing reviews. Even if they’re aware of the phenomenon of online reviews/WOM, most SMBs haven’t really got the time or a strategic sense of what to do about it. It’s almost a parallel problem to that of search marketing; a third party can potentially manage this process for the local business on an outsourced basis in the same way — as an extension of marketing services.
Of course the best thing to do is run a business with integrity and provide good service or a good product. That goes without saying in one sense. But there is perhaps a business to be built around aggregating reviews content on behalf of SMBs (alerts would work too) and then giving them some concrete methods and mechanisms to address negative reviews.
Merchant Circle does the former fairly well now; Yelp is starting to do the latter.
