What Are Review Sites?
There are so many review websites popping up all over the place that it’s hard to keep track of them. But some of the familiar ones include:
Trip Advisor – a travel related website where you can rate hotels, airlines etc
Doctralia – where you can rate your experience withy your local GP or doctor
Product Review – allows you to discuss and rate products on the market
Choice – where you can compare products.
Essentially, the list is endless but you can see where I am coming from here. There are just so many websites out there that give you the opportunity to rate and review a product or service that it can become overwhelming. I mean, who do you trust and who should you believe? What comments are real and what are fake?
If for example I want to write a review about Hopping Mad Designs I can easliy go to any reviews website and either post something fantastic or on the other hand if I feel disgruntled I can write something defamatory. It’s as easy as that and businesses good names are getting trashed all over the place cause of 1 or 2 negative comments.
I can only hope that consumers are finally waking up to the realities of these review sites and cherry pick the reviews that are legitimate. Alternatively, I personally would ignore many of these review trashy websites and focus on my own personal experience. Think about it, you just might miss out on staying at a good hotel or not using the services of a great doctor because of 1 bad, fake review that was written by some disgruntled lunatic!
Who are the Type of People That Write these Reviews?
The range and type is endless but the following should give you an idea:
- an employee who got fired may like to write reviews that are untrue about their employer
- a hotel guest who might be in a bad mood and decides to take it out on the hotel they have just stayed at.
- An ex girl/ boyfriend who may want to trash the reputation of her ex partner
- A patient who went to see a doctor and was kept waiting in reception.
- A passenger on a plane who feels like posting something cruel about the airline service
Basically anything you can think of can be written about on any of these review sites.
My advice is to ignore 99% of what is written and go with your gut instinct. There are in fact review websites out there that rely on people to post negative reviews and then charge the business to have them taken down. This is a complete scam but it is happening right now. These are predominantly in the US but one can still post a comment on these US sites, which will get indexed by Google and will end up showing up next to your business name.
There is not much you can do about this type of activity and you can't stop people writing online BUT I urge anyone reading this blog to really take any negative comments they see online that it was wriiten with a dose on insincerity!