Filed under: Community Building, Marketing & PR, Web 2.0, E-Commerce
Rob Lovitt, MSNBC.com’s Travel Writer, has discovered another flaw in the wonderful world of Web 2.0: user reviews are sometimes inaccurate and contradictory: “The beds are soft, but firm; the parking is free, yet ridiculously expensive; and the chain’s signature cookies are very good, no better than Mrs. Fields and hardly ever available.” This isn’t really breaking news to community building professionals - the issue of reliability of information posted by anonymous individuals affects just about every Web 2.0 site, from Wikipedia down to the local restaurant’s blog. Remember the term, “link monkey,” which referred to a low-paid drone who cranked out link requests? Certainly a catalog of Internet jobs for the early 21st century will soon include “review monkey,” someone who specializies in posting favorable or unfavorable reviews of hotels, MP3 players, and any other product or service reviewed on the Web.
Lovitt reports that some travel sites are trying to bolster the credibility of their reviewers:
So, how to separate fact from fluff? Some Web sites, like Priceline.com, only allow users to review a hotel if they’ve actually booked a room on the site. Others analyze IP addresses for multiple submissions or employ editors who read all reviews, flag suspicious ones and reject those that don’t pass muster. Perfect screening is impossible, but progress is being made.
Consider Gusto’s Grabber tool or the Trip Planner from Yahoo!, both of which were introduced last year. Designed primarily to allow users to collect trip-related information (hotels, flights, maps, photos) in one convenient place, such personal itineraries may also provide relief from bogus reviews. After all, it’s a lot easier to plant a positive review or two for a client than to create a full-on (and fully believable) trip log covering an entire vacation.
This could really be the next step in Web 2.0 - after the excitement of user-generated content dies down, figuring out how to improve the value of that content and eliminate bogus content becomes the next priority. I like the Priceline approach - by permitting reviews only by those who have actually booked reservations for a particular site, they can eliminate almost all casual spam. Sure, a reviewer could still be biased, but a review monkey would be out of luck.
Strict limits on review posting would have some major negative effects. What if Amazon only let individuals review a book if they had bought the item from Amazon? I know that the books I review (not on Amazon) come from a variety of sources: libraries, advance copies from publishers, impulse buys at local bookstores, and, occasionally, Amazon.com. I suspect if Amazon did employ that policy, their review volume would shrink to a small fraction of the current level. Not only would volume go down, they would probably lose some of their most valuable “expert” reviews posted by individuals who received early comps or obtained copies from other non-traditional sources.
Part of the evolution of Web 2.0 and user-created content will be striking a balance between totally open posting and restrictive but well-vetted participation. Each site will try to find the best approach to produce that balance, and it will be interesting to see the diverse techniques that evolve for that purpose.
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