The South Park episode You’re Not Yelping (s19:e4) put words to the feelings of many small business owners who in the last few years have been enslaved by Yelp and other online review services like TripAdvisor, Zomato and even Facebook and Google. These words did of course have a lot of feeling:
It’s one of those scenes in South Park where the rates of swearing are just off the charts, but it voices the frustration of small business owners who now must submit to ever whim of the customer under threat of a negative review. What’s more, is that Yelp reviewers are not particularly reliable. Almost every business has had one-star reviews from customers who are completely unreasonable and mistaken.
You’re not a food critic Dennis! You’re a ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒ mechanic!
— South Park
So we are all hoping that online review systems will improve in the future. Businesses want a fairer reflection on their business. Consumers want a more accurate way to find good businesses. The only parties who don’t want change are the big companies who are paying for fake online reviews.
Businesses will teach customers to lose faith in current online reviews
Most businesses have a supreme interest in teaching their customers how inaccurate online reviews are. It’s happening as we speak, and soon consumers will want more than just a Yelp review. They will want something more credible.
There are three avenues that we see for online reviews to become more legitimate in the future:
- Review aggregators
- Social reviews
- Blockchain reviews
We will look into the beautiful future of these advances and then tell you what small businesses can start doing right now to take back control of their online reputation.
Review aggregators
Review aggregators are systems that collect reviews and ratings from across the entire web and add them together into a review system that is more credible than a single review platform.
The main thing that makes review aggregators more reliable is weighting. More credible review sites receive a higher rating, therefore TrustPilot ratings will usually make more of a difference to your aggregated rating than Yelp ratings. This is despite Yelp having more ratings, and showing up higher on most Google searches.
Social reviews
It’s a testament to the power of social recommendation that people ever even began putting their trust in online reviews, let alone anonymous reviews. And yet, reviewers with no info or name or profile picture can hurt your business with a one-star review.
It’s time to stop trusting reviewers who can’t be verified, and review sites whos ratings include anonymous reviewers. Social reviews solve this problem completely.
For a Facebook review, you can click on the reviewer and see their actual Facebook profile. This makes it infeasible to generate multiple fake reviews, for you would need a mafia-like ring of paid Facebook reviewers who are sworn to secrecy under a fear of something ‘unfortunate’ happening to them (or a large supply of purchased Facebook accounts).
On a related point, we will see Facebook becoming far more of an online shopping service in the future. In fact, they have already started going down this avenue. The number one thing that will make Facebook successful at this is social validation. People want to know what their friends are buying, because this gives them the best idea of what they themselves should buy. Essentially, people are already actively seeking social reviews on Facebook, and this is why Facebook has the potential to trump all the current reviewing services in coming years. Social network-dominated reviews are something to seriously look forward to.
Blockchain reviews
Blockchain technology is what Bitcoin is built upon. It’s a distributed ledger—that is, a data set that is verified across a vast network spanning multiple computers. This means that single or even multiple points of failure are quickly mitigated.
A review platform can be built on the blockchain, so that it can have the same bulletproof level of security. There is actually one in the early stages of development right now called Lina.review.
Lina aims to be a completely transparent and immutable review system. I.e. anyone can see that it is not performing any trickery, and, once reviews are submitted, they cannot be manipulated.
If Lina was combined with AI technology, a review system could be created that is actually trustworthy and fair. Right now, Yelp has a filter that removes unreliable reviews, but there is no way to see whether the filter itself is fair, and many people hold suspicions that it filters out your positive reviews if you don’t pay for Yelp advertising. We think it’s not likely that Yelp does that, yet, there is no way to be entirely sure, because Yelp is not a transparent system.
What can your business do in the present?
You actually don’t have to surrender to the mercy of Yelp and Google if you don’t want to. You can take control of your online reviews by having a review aggregator on your own site.
We provide a review aggregator called Metareviews that aggregates all your reviews and ratings from across the web. It is weighted towards reliable reviews, so your actual business rating will probably be far higher than what it is on other review sites. Online reviewing has a negative bias almost always, and our aggregator filters this out.
If you would like people to see a more reliable, more positive rating when they visit your site, you should consider a Jetsite, which includes our Metareview technology.