In January of this year, I wrote about online reputation management and how hard it was becoming for firms to address the need for them to manage this. Driven, in part, by large internet brands stoking an obsession with public feedback, it has inadvertently created a fertile ground in which bad actors can thrive.
In my earlier article I wrote:
The problem with this is that it lays bare the current fixation the larger real estate owners such as Google, Amazon and Facebook, have with reviews.
They argue, quite compellingly, that you can’t disagree with the ‘voice of the crowd’. If a lot of people are leaving bad reviews for you, your service or products must be poor. QED.
Logically, this makes sense. If you’re getting lots of poor reviews you probably need to do something about your product or service levels.
But their confidence in this system and their belief that this process is fair is predicated on two assumptions.
First, they assume that all reviews are genuine. Second, they assume that all reviews are equal.
And they are wrong in both cases.
The current obsession with reviews is driving, and rewarding, entirely the wrong behaviours. It puts power into the hands of consumers, power to hold businesses publicly to account irrespective of how they choose to exercise that power. The problem arises, however, when their aim is not to help businesses improve their performance. What can a business do if the objective is far more sinister than that?
This becomes even more dangerous because reviews are becoming essential if you want to rank in the search results. If you search Google for whether customer reviews help SEO, the top search result is an American company, 1SEO, who say “online customer reviews send a strong signal to search engines that communicates expertise, authority, and trust”. We know that Google’s recent updates have been focused on Expertise, Authority and Trust and that these factors are becoming essential to rank websites in search, particularly e-commerce, which further reinforces the desire to get more reviews.
Google use reviews as part of the algorithm for deciding who goes where in SERPS, especially in the local results. In fact, there is a very strong correlation which has been identified in research, that reviews are a ranking factor in local search results and that is where the majority of small businesses get their sales leads from.
But are reviews always fair? In an interesting article on Local reviews and Ratings, Moz states in their summary “No ethical, dedicated business owner needs to feel dread of user reviews.”
But is this true? Can every business feel this way?
The answer lies in the power of numbers.
In the early days of my Marketing career I was taught that 1063 was the minimum sample size to get a meaningful result in any research, but today ask Google the Question “sample size to be statistically significant” and the answer comes back 100. Whether you pick the larger or smaller figure, no one seems to suggest that a number smaller than 100 is statically significant. Bigger brands can easily fly past this number of reviews and once there are more than 100 reviews about them and their products available online, you should be able to form a picture of what they are like as a business. But where does this leave small businesses? In truth, they are up a creek without a paddle. They absolutely need to take notice of reviews but have neither the time nor inclination to do so. Business owners, hard pressed for time already, have better things to do than spend time every day searching online for what people have said about them.
So, why the obsession with public feedback?
Google’s original patent is, in part, at fault. The original idea was rather then just look at the content on a page, look at the number and quality of backlinks to a page to determine its value in any search query. At scale, this ‘voice of the crowd’ was effectively using a link as a vote, with the most votes getting the coveted number one slot (caveat – this is a very oversimplified assessment of the search algorithm, made to illustrate a point). In short, the more votes, the more reliable the result.
The concept of ‘online reviews’ as a relevant tool for measurement seemingly started with Amazon in 1995, but it took almost 20 years to gain its current importance, when both Facebook in 2007 and Google in 2005 introduced their own review mechanisms. And as these three digital behemoths continued to grow, so did the importance of reviews.
By 2012, business were actively beginning to use reviews as a tactic to improve their online presence and larger brands made a point of promoting them. The value for them was that at scale it provided a valuable feedback loop, identified firms that are performing badly (or well) and provided reassurance for consumers. According to research in United States, 70% of shoppers read reviews before purchase, so seeing reviews are essential.
But what about service based businesses? And what about SME’s?
A fascinating October 2020 report from the UK Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (DBEIS) states:
There were 6.0 million private sector businesses in the UK at the start of 2020.
This consisted of:
- 94 million small businesses (with 0 to 49 employees).
- 36,100 medium-sized businesses (with 50 to 249 employees).
- 7,800 large businesses (with 250 or more employees).
That’s 99% under 49 employees.
Look at number of firms by turnover band and you can see that the majority of these businesses, around two million of them, turnover under £250,000 a year