Friday, August 19, 2011

To Review or Not to Review, Is That the Question?

Online reviewing and social media sites are rampant these days. Many of you choose to live your lives in real time instead of on the web. How could reviews impact you if you never use them?

Oddly, reviews, or lack thereof, can make some of your favorite websites slowly disappear. Obviously, places like restaurants and lodging are very dependent on word of mouth to get new customers in the door. (Most of the time, we're pretty sure that once you're actually here we can make your vacation time with us special!)

However, it's getting your attention, grabbing your eyeballs (as the techies say) that we struggle at. And that's where online reviews come in. Word of mouth is now online for many people. You're willing to try something new if your friend's Facebook friend tried it and liked it. And you don't even know your friend's friend!

All of those search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc, take into account how many reviews a site has. Does it get mentioned on Facebook? Twitter? How many times does a new person look at that site. How many times does a new person go further into the site to look for more info. Did you look for directions so you could go there?

Having no reviews (or other online mentions) when everyone else around you has them, makes your (my) site less 'valuable' to future searchers. If no one finds my business important enough to review, then it must not be very important.

Odd, how no news in not good news in this instance!

So, if you're considering reviewing a business online, consider this as well- not reviewing that business may make it slowly disappear from the online world. And online is where a lot of the world lives right now.

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