And that is that anyone today has the power to severely damage if not destroy a business simply by sitting at his or her keyboard. I have heard a few local news stories recently about the devastating effect bad reviews on internet services like Yelp have had on busiensses, particulary smaller businesses.
I have read recently of the increasing number of busiensses--- restaurants I think--- which refuse to partcipate in star ratings because of the potential for attracting bogus bad reviews.
I'm in a pretty good position to comment on this specifically as it relates to marinas and boatyards. I'm in contact with 1-2 facility owners/managers every day complaining about reviews. At any one time, there are about 10 investigations open. I handle all of them.
A few facts at least as far as ActiveCaptain goes:
- The number of fake positive reviews dwarfs the number of fake negative reviews or reviews meant to "get even". We've removed fake positive reviews 10:1 over negative ones.
- Any website that cares about their data will investigate complaints of unfairness.
- No quality website will allow a reviewer to write a review with the specific intent of hurting a facility. Rants and crusades shouldn't be allowed. At least for us, we specifically talk about this in our Terms of Use and I have removed reviews that have violated this.
- No single review is ever going to cause a "devastating effect". But if 40% of them are negative? The problem isn't that people are writing about the negative experiences. The problem is that there are too many negative experiences. It's like the marina who complained to me that multiple reviews wrote about how dirty their bathrooms were. "So are they dirty?" I asked. "Well, yeah, but I don't want anyone to know." Sorry, that doesn't cut it any more.
- Review systems should provide information to the reader about the review writer. We never show a review without the number of "points" the reviewer has earned in ActiveCaptain as a way of showing how involved they are. If you see a negative review from a boater with 10 points, that shouldn't hold as much weight as a review from someone with 500 points. Nothing like that is perfect, but it gives a little more info to allow the reader to determine truth.
- The facilities, "restaurants" in the example quoted above, don't get the choice of being involved or not in star ratings. I'm personally threatened a few dozen times a month with legal action from marinas who want their listing removed from ActiveCaptain. We've never removed any facility unless they were no longer in business. We will never back down from that type of bully technique even if it involves real legal action. Some of that has cost us thousands of dollars so far but in every case, we haven't changed a thing and we've prevailed legally. There is tremendous case law about all of this including some specific federal laws specifically protecting websites from attack. Imagine how often deep-pocketed Amazon would get sued otherwise.
There are a lot of misconceptions about reviews and to be fair, there are some review sites designed to be unfair to businesses (ripoffreport.com, I'm talking to you). Done with care, there is tremendous value to the consumer and the facility. And it ain't going away.