The issue is not with demandforce and their service. I am going to take look at the whole product offering before I recommend it to clients (and see that expand2web is already a partner). I think that dentists have an ability to disagree or stop negative reviews from going through to the certified Google Feed. But, if they are getting the feed from demandforce they know full well how it works and have already approved it.

My issue is that Google doesn’t let a company post reviews for others according to guidelines and demandforce is publishing reviews that are solicited through email. I agree with that practice and this is a great way to get real feedback, but they can’t be the only ones to have that treatment when others could get banned in Google Places. Google needs to address it and I don’t think demandforce should change anything. Google just needs to give the option to others, or pull the review feed.

Healthgrades supplies unstarred reviews without a sign in. But, interesting enough these only feed to individual doctor listings and not business names. So, unless a doctor office is the actually name of the doctor you will never see healthgrades info or reviews on a dental site. Also, healthgrades lists all doctors on their site and you can create a free profile.

Here are a few things that still are odd in my mind…

1. Demandforce is the only reviewfeed that google gets where you have to pay to get your listing in the feed. (correct me if wrong)
2. Demandforce is the only reviewfeed that can gather reviews through email and have the reviews feed online.
3. Demandforce is the only reviewfeed that can give businesses owners the ability to view/screen reviews before they are passed to Google.
4. Demandforce is the only reviewfeed that seems to advertise that their releationship with Google allows you to rank high in maps.
5. Demandforce is the only reviewfeed that if you stop paying, the reviews will only stay around for 12 months.

You are right @earlpearl, unless something changes there is a big reason to refer dentist to use their system. It just seems a bit off that as they grow and move into other industries Google will allow them to become the sole company that can offer review/map optimization with the ease of a datafeed and a policy guideline that doesn’t allow others to do the same thing.

Who at Google is in charge of these partnerships? Are they not bound to the same guidelines as others? If Google wants more reviewfeeds like this, where are they?

Current 7 pac listings show a dentist with 162 reviews ranked first for the town in which the practice is physically located and in the 7 pac for the adjacent town. There is a new first in the 2nd town. The practice is located in that town and has 51 reviews.

Of note the dentist with 162 reviews was the one who had 49 reviews last December. Has that dentist had more than 113 patients in the last 9 months? I hope so for that dentist’s sake.

So that means patients aren’t responding to the communications requests or maybe there are bad reviews. Don’t know.

The dentists with the high volumes of reviews both use demand force. In both cases the reviews from demandforce are more than 90% of all reviews. The demandforce reviews come with a 5 star rating so they show well in Google and of what must be a total of 200 reviews from demandforce virtually all were either 4star or higher.

The volume of reviews from these 2 dentists dramatically outnumbered reviews for any of 18 other dentists whose totals I looked at. Its statistically overwhelming.

Now that service works well in every way possible. Here is what it seems to accomplish with regard to the 7pac.

A) It provides a venue for an enormous volume of POSITIVE reviews. I’m sure there is a lot of interaction between demandforce and the dentists. The dentist with the 162 reviews had comments responding to reviews. Of great interest of the few non-demandforce reviews there were a couple of bad ones. That dentist has dramatically improved its customer service.

B) It appears that in the absence of a similar high volume of reviews the pure volume provided through demandforce’s customer communications package—increases reviews by such a huge total….that it impacts the rankings in the 7pac. The practices with the extraordinarily high volume of reviews–zoomed to the top of the 7pac listings.

A couple of years ago Mike Blumenthal headed a statistical study of a number of different search phrases in a variety of towns covering a variety of types of searches that generate a wide variety of “signals” that can be picked up by the Google Places Team for Maps.

One of the interesting finds was that in an absence of other signals, a very high volume of reviews could impact rankings.

That could be occurring in these cases. The volumes of reviews could definitely be helping the two dentists who use demandforce to get ranked higher in the 7 pac (and within Google Maps).

I’d put the onus on correcting these issues on Google. They need to look more closely at these issues.

In one case Demandforce is being paid by dentists who use them. demandforce is generating the reviews. It also appears that the demandforce filter might be eliminating bad reviews from being seen.

There is a factor of the “pay for review” process in play here. Google’s policy is to not allow that. It seems that the demandforce inclusion violates the spirit of that policy at the very least.

Secondly it appears that in the absence of other factors high volume of reviews versus very few reviews helps businesses rank toward the top of google’s 7 pac.

Hmm…interesting. volumes of reviews might help a business get ranked higher…and it has an element of pay for review.

That is not exactly the kind of data I’d like to depend on.

Having said all this, if I were advising a dentist client right now, I’d suggest they use demandforce. Whether it is appropriately “kosher” or not…it sure as hell seems to work.

The dentists pay demandforce. Demandforce aggregates the reviews and gives a dentist an opportunity to ensure that only the good ones get seen.

Its a process of aggregating positive reviews through payments.

It works. searched for dentists in 6 communities. The demandforce had enormously more reviews than those without demandforce. The difference was stunning, not merely statistically meaningful. The demandforce reviews were positive.

The dentists with higher volumes of reviews tended to show highly in the 7pac.

Hey–good reviews and high rankings in the highlighted 7 pac on the top of the first page of google.com. That is exactly what the dentists want.

One little stickler, as you pointed out Mike R. Google policy explicitely rejects the pay for review process.

Looks like Google is violating its own policies.

Moreover the situation that I see as an issue is that for a dentist, a year from now, to even compete in Google maps they have to sign up with your service to harvest the amount of reviews. Name another place that has this functionality. There were businesses who were gathering reviews through surveys and hand posting them (which is largely the same minus the data feed that Google has with you) and then Google’s policy changed and pretty much made that a “against our policy process” as mentioned here….

http://www.google.com/support/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=187622

“Conflict of interest
Reviews are only valuable when they are honest and unbiased. Even if well-intentioned, a conflict of interest can undermine the trust in a review. In addition, we do not accept reviews written for money or other incentives. Please also do not post reviews on behalf of others or misrepresent your identity or affiliation with the place you are reviewing.”

So the way around this is for Demandforce to have a direct feed that means that they are not posted the reviews themselves. It just seems odd that no other review service has near the amount of reviews as demandforce clients which boosts ranking and you HAVE to go through them to have similar results.

@Mike I think that you should visit this issue again as a new blog post and we can invite Google and Demandforce to give us an idea how they seem to be the leader in online reviews for the dental industry…but the only company you have to pay to get reviews from (and have to use their appointment based system to get the reviews) in the first place.

I think the idea behind demandforce is great. Reviews without sign in and gathered by email! I even think that I would have to recommenced dentists use their service. I just wish there were competitors since demandforce is backed by one of the biggest dental supply companies and a lot of dentists I do work for are part of the other.

Google quality guidelines are only as good as data feeds that play by them to. If not then we should all throw the guidelines out the window and really start ranking companies the black hat way.

Speaking for Demandforce, we’d welcome the opportunity to speak to you and the readers of this blog about what we do. It appears that there is a fair amount of confusion and misinformation out there about our service. Since we always aim to be completely transparent about our review practices and policies, here are some facts about Demandforce.

Demandforce is a subscription service used by small businesses in the service sector–like dentists, auto shops, salons, spas, chiropractors–to automate their customer communications, marketing and business processes. We help them attract new customers, retain their existing ones, and better measure and manage their operations. Our customers are focused on implementing best practices for customer satisfaction, and we believe that as a result they are best of breed in their respective industries.

A byproduct of our service, Demandforce gathers large amounts of data regarding our customers’ operations, including detailed business profile information and customer satisfaction data, such as consumer reviews. Consumers find this data useful–and so does Google and other consumer-facing information services. In this respect we are just like such data providers as Judy’s Book, Angie’s List, Healthgrades and the other data sources you see cited in Google Places.

Demandforce does not allow or enable manipulation of reviews. Our review policy prohibits the removal of reviews from our feeds to Google and other sites except in rare circumstances. That policy can be read here: http://demandforce.com/reviewpolicy.php We take this policy very seriously, and strictly enforce it using both technological and human oversight. In fact, less than 0.5% of all consumer reviews are removed from our external feed, and those are taken down due to violation of our terms (i.e. they use vulgarity, violate privacy, are spam, etc.). Customers who seek to circumvent this policy are subject to having their data removed from our feeds and/or termination.

Moreover, we do not “hold hostage” any customer or former customer. To the contrary–we take pains to ensure that the reviews and other business information a customer develops using the Demandforce listing service remains available in our public feeds, even after a customer terminates their subscription with us. Please note the following excerpt from our standard terms and conditions:

“Demandforce may terminate your participation in the Listing Service, or this Agreement, at any time in the event that Demandforce determines that you are not in compliance with the Public Review Policy. Upon termination of this Agreement, the Business Information will remain in any data feeds provided to third parties under the Listing Service for a period of 12 months following termination, unless you request prior removal of the Business Information from such data feeds in writing.”

The entire terms and conditions are available here: http://demandforce.com/terms.php

Like our customers, we take our business reputation seriously. If anyone has any questions about Demandforce, I encourage you to ping me directly at pbarry@demandforce.com. We would much rather address questions directly rather than having to respond to speculation.

Patrick Barry
VP, Marketing
Demandforce

A summary of total reviews from other sources with a single source dominating those reviews…and prescreening reviews…is a simple lousy, non helpful system. It becomes easy to game.

@Mike B. Please expand upon and explain what you mean when you use the term “hold the reviews hostage to continuing payment” I’m interested in hearing a full description.

It was but 24 hours ago that I was asking the same question. The ability to hold the reviews hostage to continuing payment is also very suspect

Demandforce is the only “have to pay for service” that is sending business owner approved reviews directly to Google’s Places feed. The problem I see with this is in the dental industry, it might get to the point where if you want to compete in maps you have to sign up for demandforce because no other company is getting in Google’s backdoor.

What had to happen for a relationship with Google to come about? Demandforce just seems like such an outlier compared to other places Google is pulling major information from and to my knowledge is one of the very few companies that can manage to pull this off through soliciting reviews from customers in emails and posting them online.

The relationship is fishy and if they are soliciting their own site now as the way to get on Google Places, then Google better damn well give a lot more competitors to opportunity to harvest reviews the exact same way. The results are starting to look ridiculous with seeing dentists with 20 times the amount of reviews as a normal real/unedited/unemailed system.

Very few reviews are ever negative. very few. More information or findings would be appreciated.

We strive to have policies and processes that ensure the highest possible level of review integrity. Our customers, data partners and end consumers demand it. Here is a link that further explains what we mean when we say our reviews are “certified”: http://demandforce.com/certifiedreviews.php