1. Good to see you are up early
2. NYTimes was bemoaning the fact that Camby doesn’t play for Knicks. ( again)

3. As an operator I’m only articulating that which has always been an issue. Its critical to get all employees to do a great job!!
Nowadays, the fact that reviews are so widely dispersed and so accessable is the difference. On top of that there are “attack reviews” “spam reviews”, and as Mike wrote, “review businesses” (OMG)

4. Yup. Everyone needs to become more aware of them.

Enjoy the day!!

Yes, Google has always done an incredible job at building up Buzz for all of its products at launch…including mega-flop Buzz itself…it is similar to Apple in this regard. I happen to think that the release of Place Search / Hotpot happened around Google’s own internal calendar and it was just gravy that they quashed a lot of the potential for the FB/Bing hybrid (which should be a big deal).

Not having run a large business (like a hotel) I don’t have a great concept of what it and is not required to ensure excellent service top-to-bottom. Working as a consultant for several smaller businesses, though, it seems that owners who pay people a fair wage/salary and treat their employees well build in an incentive for their employees to go the extra mile. So I would imagine there IS a trickle-down effect to some degree.

Education about the importance of reviews needs to be a two-way street, though. I bet there are plenty of younger folks in large storefront businesses who do recognize how important reviews are (even in-store reviews) but their bosses don’t get it yet.

Your Blazer update: Patty had his worst game of 2011 last night ;( I’m not sold that he can be the starter if we trade Andre as rumored…

Just looked at 2010 and 2009 keywords in visits for 2009 and 2010 for 2 different sites:

They don’t get frequent usage, but in both cases in 2010 there were more than twice as many search phrases that hit the sites that used the word reviews in the search phrases than in 2009.

Reviews have become a dramatically more important part of the search environment IMHO in 2010 than in the past.

Nice overview and excellent article references, IMHO. It was interesting to me that shortly after the Bing/Facebook agreement wherein Facebook references/likes etc would begin to show in Bing Local results….an extraordinary concept in my view…..its significance got lost in the changes that Google made via its change in the currently unnamed UI wherein organic and Places ranking data gets merged. (the OPac has a nice ring IMHO ).

Subsequent to the Google UI changes it has had a strong impact on traffic to smbs that I follow: Stronger sites are getting excellent relevant local traffic; weaker sites are losing that traffic. That is significant.

The review environment is tremendously potent. I’m one who was very saddened by its explosion, nervous about its growth, and careful in its implementation.

We run businesses. We simply don’t optimize for clients and move on. Here is the dilemma we face:

Lots of smbs have lots of employees that are, by the nature of their jobs, less than well paid. They may not give great customer service all the time. In my view hotels are the quintessential example of this: Daily cleaning, desk clerks, people carrying baggage/delivering room service are not highly paid employees. Hotels need lots of them. Its their level of service that could easily impact reviews. Its the responsibility of layers of management to ensure that every aspect of every step of these functions is carried out at the highest level of service to ensure great customer service and wonderful reviews.

That is extremely difficult to implement on an operating basis. The bigger the business with more employees and more moving parts the more careful and expensive management it requires. Its a big job.

It always has been, but now breakdowns in these functions run the risk of creating horrendous reviews.

Anyway, I too agree that the review world has exploded. Most telling and interesting to me is that in the last year, as I read through search phrases that I see that hit the businesses, or show up in impressions….is a growth of this phrase:

(business name/business type) reviews . Its not overwhelmingly enormous but its there and I see it across the board for different industries, smbs and markets.

I never noticed those search phrases before. I’m sure they existed but their frequency was not noticable to me. Lately it appears to be more noticable.

Finally, across businesses we find that customers read reviews. They are potent and important.

Terrific choice of articles and excellent reasoning in your post, IMHO.

Such a thoughtful piece. Makes me want to sit back, drink a delightful “Patty Mills” and ponder things like the wildly famous through the NW, Mihm.