removed<\/a> most of the reviews as of noon today. Interesting that they left 3 new reviews and removed the one review from a year ago. The 3 reviews they left are all somewhat suspect.<\/p>\nIt would appear, although it isn’t certain in Google’s case, that most of the review sites have not removed these reviews.<\/p>\n
It certainly raises some interesting questions:<\/p>\n
Should review sites be used as a political forum?<\/p>\n
Should these obviously political reviews be left to stand regardless of the fact that they never visited the business?<\/p>\n
Does it make sense, as a political act, to use reviews as a forum?<\/p>\n
What should the review sites do in response to a situations like this?<\/p>\n
I certainly have my own opinions on these issues but I would love to hear yours. So before you read on, take \u00a0a moment and think about what you think makes sense in the review world for readers, for the sites themselves and for any political\/social movement that might think about using reviews in this way\u2026..<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Let me respond to the political issues first. For the most part I think that while anybody has the right to use a review forum to express their social views, in this case I think it is counterproductive. Once the story went viral the world was able to see that Big Earl and his staff were remnants of the stone age. But by carrying it forward into an ongoing protest on the review sites, Big Earl’s continued to receive publicity that in the end will increase his sales and will, amongst his target audience, improve his standing and not diminish it. The votes using reviews are likely to have\u00a0the exact opposite affect on Big Earl than the reviewers would hope. They may send a signal to other establishments about the collective desire of society to not see this behavior and that might deter a few places from behaving the same in the future but it is just as likely to incent those that see it as an opportunity to rise above the noise to garner publicity. Generally a fail.<\/p>\n
From the point of view of the review reader, having one real and negative review may be all that they need to see to decide that this isn’t the place for them. The rest just becomes entertainment for voyeurs and trolls.<\/p>\n
From the POV of the top review sites themselves, they each have a different agenda when it comes to reviews so maybe their different behaviors are consistent with that.<\/p>\n
Facebook wants engagement. Apparently any kind of engagement. This certainly leads to that with a \u00a0tit for tat review and comment stream that speaks to the basest of human behaviors. At some point Facebook might decide that a quality review corpus is a benefit to their readers and their ranking but for now, it appears that is just one more way to garner interaction.<\/p>\n
For Google, who view reviews as a data point as well as content that helps their readers and who is slow to curate reviews, it is likely that many of the off topic reviews will be removed at some point. They haven’t been yet. That could be because it has yet to have the algo hit the page or perhaps the curation is slow. We shall see. Regardless it seems not in their interest to fan the flames in this situation.<\/p>\n
Yelp who treats reviews as curated content and staunchly protects their view that a review should be a first hand experience implemented their standard “pull it down” policy both via algo and obvious human intervention very quickly. I, for one, laud both the quick take downs AND the fact that the reviews that are removed are still visible.<\/p>\n
I think from a ecosystem point of view, the interesting tidbit to me is that Facebook has made such a strong play in reviews while essentially being under the radar. I realize that Big Earl’s case is but anecdotal but amongst a number of my clients I have seen a similar increase in local reviews there. One wonders how FB plans on using and highlighting these in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
OK Big Earl and his staff are cretins. That can be agreed. They have managed, by virtue of being outspoken, bigoted and unthinking, to have put themselves in the middle of a media maelstrom\u00a0and a subsequent flame war in the world of reviews. The story, first reported by KLTV on May 27th, noted that a …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-google-plus","category-reviews"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16669"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16669\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16690,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16669\/revisions\/16690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/a>I was curious to see how much activity there was on the review sites about this and given Yelp’s response, to get a sense of whether the other sites themselves had responded to the issue in any way.<\/p>\n