Online Review Engines
Over the past few weeks, I've been discussing online review sites for real estate professionals and how reputation management is important for careers. Consumers like well trafficked review engines like Yelp.com and Angieslist because:
- they reinforce business accountability
- their love/hate commentary makes interesting reading
- they have attained a critical mass of user contributions to make their "recommendations" credible
Yelp and
Angieslist review a wide universe of businesses, from restaurants to
plumbers, but some specific categories are missing. For example, try
finding reviews on any of the review engines for "senior assisted
living centers" or "day care centers"... there are almost no reviews
for these verticals - odd considering these services are so critical to
a loved one's life.
The reality of the current state of review engines is that it is slow
to build traction across just one niche vertical because the universe
of user contributors has been limited. One only need peruse the real estate agent review engines listed here or check out DaycareReviews.com, a site with an appropriate domain name but showing no reviews in San Francisco as far as I can tell.
Last week, I mentioned Marchex,
a company that just launched location-oriented 100,000 sites, most of
which aggregate local reviews from various review engines. It's an
interesting, grand experiment... the assumption is a certain percentage
of the sites will take off.
Here's one more possible solution - some startup (or even Yelp) should
build a template application website that allows users to build their
own review engines for their selected "vertical" within a given
geography. The tagline: "Create your Own Review Engine!".
User generated review engines would function as the core to building a relevant localized membership base... for example "Title Insurance Companies in San
Francisco" would eventually have many San Francisco title personnel dialoguing
with real estate agent reviewers. The website would house all the
reviews and function like a typical Web 2.0 community business model
characteristic of Yelp or Facebook.
There's a lot of precedent for developing Web 2.0 functionality for individuals - Marc Andreesen's company Ning has developed a template application to build your own social network.
I've often thought of developing a review engine for real estate settlement services. I've written more on that topic over at the Inman News blog today.
Technorati Tags: review engines, review sites, yelp, angieslist, yelp.com, ning, social networking, reputation management, marchex
I am a fan of Angie's List. As an investor I have to deal with a lot of contractors. I work based on personal recommendations when I can, but when I can't Angie's List can help.
One thing to note. Angie's List is good at positively identifying *bad businesses*, which means if a contractor is a jerk, dishonest, or incompetent and a customer labels him as such you can safely steer clear.
However, it's not good at positively identifying *good businesses* meaning that an absense of bad comments doesn't necessarily mean that a contractor is good - it just means that perhaps he hasn't screwed anyone over yet that has bothered to write a review. You might be the first one.
But, vendors with *a lot of good reviews* are generally a safer bet.
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Good topic Pat…
There are several “plug-ins” for CMS systems like Joomla, Drupal, Mambo and others that can handle reviews on just about anything.
One reason, I think that much of this hasn’t taken off for vertical centric review portals is the lack of depth of understanding about those industries. Its relatively simple for a restaurant or nail shop to use simple uncensored reviews, but it terrifies the real estate industry, and other professions where the effect of uncensored reviews or unproven rating methods are suspect by the industry, just look at AVVO.
There is a school of thought, that only uncensored, unedited reviews are credible. Credible for who? Should we apply such logic to credit scores? There is a highly complex system for submitting, updating and removing credit reviews; shouldn’t it be so in industries where unsubstantiated negative statements can significantly impact a service provider’s business.
Real estate is especially scary in this respect. There is lots of competition, low barriers to entry, and at the heart of it, the complicated real estate sales process. Customer satisfaction is difficult at best to explain, much less score. Any site that doesn’t equitably represent the interests of both parties won’t get much traction or trust, it will be shunned by the industry and eventually by consumers.
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Pat, I love the idea of a Settlement Review but most buyer/sellers who pay for these have no real idea who is good or bad. It's the agents who know who knows their stuff and can cut through problems and who can't. So, who would you propose to write the review?
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Settlement review sites would not be used as much by consumers, but by the agents themselves. Most of the reviews authored by agents would be complimentary to the affiliates they work with, a show of support. Any poor reviews would likely be authored by disgruntled consumers who weren't satisfied with aspects of the settlement process.
Again, setting up an independent settlement review site in itself likely won't draw much traffic at all... I am suggesting that there should be a templated review site that allows users to generate their own review engines for their local area. I would expect that if I could cheaply launch SF Bay Area Settlement Services Review Engine, most local agents would check it out to see what was posted.
B2B "review" sites have their precendents... Wired Magazine talks about FilmTracker, a film product review site used by industry insiders to figure out which producers and their projects are getting play. There is potential for these types of sites that begin to replace "old boy / old girl networks".
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Looks like one person has created a do-it-yourself review engine software platform called Red Queen. Might be worth a look. http://tinyurl.com/2pkog3
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