Unbiased Reviews, Except More Reviews = More Money

One of my favorite topics in local search is Online Customer Reviews. I think its a fascinating element of local search ranking algorithms as well as for attracting customers to your local business.

I haven’t been to epinions.com for a while, frankly because their reviews are always sparse. The first thing that stood out to me on the homepage was this giant fake bill (see below), advertising how they’ll pay you $10 for 10 reviews (the more you write, the more money you make). Then I saw the headline above it “Unbiased Reviews by Real People”.

epinions-unbiased-paid.jpg

I’m a huge fan of incentives for getting online customer reviews, but here’s why I don’t think this falls into that category:

This ploy will attract people who want a quick buck, not actual customers. Who wants reviews from people who have never used it? This is my complaint about the iPhone AppStore where anyone can leave a review for any application, even a $65 application they’ve never bought. Sure it’s hard to control for most sites whether you’ve used the product or been to the business (except in Apple’s case), but going out of your way to incentivize ANYONE to review, especially in volumes, will significantly hurt the quality of customer reviews.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 8:31 am and is filed under Customer Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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