Getting it wrong about review sites

Today TripAdvisor has again been lambasted for having fraudulent reviews and ratings among its 25 million reviews. The warning:

"TripAdvisor has reasonable cause to believe that either this property or individuals associated with the property may have attempted to manipulate our popularity index by interfering with the unbiased nature of our reviews.

Please take this into consideration when researching your travel plans. Frommer suggests TripAdvisor is basically done."

The problem with any user generated site is that you will find a significant amount of the content is utter rubbish. Think of all those useless YouTube videos, the mass of Facebook groups, or redundant bands still with a live profile on MySpace. Unfortunately digital media is far from perfect - so much so that users need to search to find the gems.

For businesses however this could be damaging. The claims in the article that hotels are creating fraudulent reviews, good and bad do not do well for the hotel. If you want to say how wonderful your hotel is, you say it, not someone you've hired.

If you want to have good reviews, request your guests to do it, not your front of house team.

If you want to avoid bad reviews, remember the internet in customer relations.

If you really want more reviews - avoid tacky marketing language, as we agree with the TravelMole piece: phrases like “best hotel ever” or “incomparable service.

Above all, competitors need to give it a break. Posting bad reviews is neither ethical nor worth the time nor money spent on it. Why is a negative review on your competitor going to encourage people to come to you?

When approaching UGC sites like TripAdvisor remember that you are going to come across crap content but among it will be pretty good.