Last week I wrote a post where I briefly touched upon the point of the value and credibility of recommendations. Today I would like to add a story to this topic that I think is relevant for the discussion. Just now I read about a local restaurant in the Netherlands that calls out local students to fraud on comparison websites in order to fight the “terror of anonymous reviews”. They give away free bottles of Rosé wine to students who give two (non-anonymous) positive reviews on comparison websites.
Their rationale is that they comparison websites draw people that like to complaint. They say that they want people to tell them when they are unhappy about something so they can do something about it, but just complaining for the heck of it is in nobody’s interest. They felt that happy customers don’t have enough incentive to give reviews and they also want to show how easy it is to manipulate these kinds of websites.
Now, you can wonder whether these paid reviews will really affect your score or the attitude that people have towards your restaurant. When there is a commercial benefit for people to review or recommend, it usually loses its credibility. A review is not trustworthy when a company is telling the reviewer what to tell. Actions such as these can really hit a dent in the trust that people have in online reviews. The honest reviews of restaurant Manna have now turned completely worthless because if this, and their online score will be unreliable for a long time. And how does it affect the scores of other restaurants on the same site?
This was a public stunt. Everybody could read about it on their own website and they did it to show that “comparing sites are easy to influence and therefore unreliable”. They wanted to make the negative evaluation of their restaurant worthless by adding a lot of fake positive ones in to it. From a marketing perspective, I don’t think that they will get the results they were hoping for. People use and rely on these websites, it has become an important part of the decision process, and you make them feel stupid by saying it is all nonsense. What they should have done is finding the right response to their negative evaluations. Compensate or explain using the same social media, learn from the feedback they received and work on a more positive online brand sentiment.