With a wealth of knowledge available to us literally at our finger tips, online reviews have become an important part of a business’ online persona. Word of mouth recommendations have always been an important factor in driving sales for businesses and has now taken a new look. Just as the internet has changed the way many business activities are carried out, it has also changed the face of word of mouth recommendations. Word of mouth recommendations in a modern sense can be seen as online reviews.

Most of us agree that when going to try out a new restaurant or trying a new product viewing what other people have said about the company, its service and its products are an important influencing factor in whether or not we take our business to that business.

Since most of our clients for our term project are based on hospitality, I thought this would be a great time to share this content with my fellow classmates. After all, 88% of us regularly or occasionally use online reviews as a source of information for decision-making. Things that should be taken under consideration are how many sites have reviews for your business, the positivity/negativity of comments and the volume of comments. After accessing this we should try to increase the volume of sites and comments that are available about the business. It is also important to address negative comments appropriately as it impacts the image of the company. Here is a diagram that shows the best way to handle negative reviews:

For more information on this topic, I recommend reading this article by Brian Sutter.