The Basics of Blogging Search Optimization
Want to know the one thing that every successful digital marketer does first to ensure they get the biggest return on their marketing budget? It’s simple: goal-setting. This is an absolutely essential practice for any digital marketer who knows how to execute their campaigns in a productive, cost-effective way. With a few. With a few simple tips, you can be doing the same in no time! In this blog, we’ll walk you through the first steps every savvy digital marketer takes to ensure that they’re on target to hit all their marketing objectives. Get ready for revenue!
Remember: even if the channel you’re considering is all the rage right now, it might not fit your brand. Always make informed decisions that directly relate to your company. Otherwise, your message won’t be delivered to its intended audience and you’ll have wasted time, effort and money.
Know Your Digital Goals
The first step is clearly identifying which goals you want to achieve. Get specific. Do you want to increase brand awareness? Are you all about locking in leads? Do you want to establish a strong network of influencers that can help you be discovered? How about pushing engagement on social media?
Get Specific
A useful tool for narrowing down your goals to ensure they’re viable is the SMART mnemonic. It’s important to get specific to understand exactly what you’re working towards, and help you break down the process of hitting your targets. This is exactly what this mnemonic helps you to achieve.
- Does the channel reach my intended audience?
- Is the channel sustainable and affordable within my company’s marketing budget?
- Will I be able to measure the success of the channel?
- Does the channel allow me to express my brand’s intended message?
- Do the channels I’m considering work together to convey my message?
Always Remember Your Goals!
Establishing a solid vision for your business is the first step to planning your digital marketing budget. Always keep your final goals in sight when organising anything for your company. When deciding which steps to take next in your business, ask yourself how they will help you achieve the goals you outlined in Step #1. This will ensure that you stay on track and prevent you from spending your budget on anything that won’t help you achieve.
Cum et essent similique. Inani propriae menandri sed in. Pericula expetendis has no,
quo populo forensibus contentiones et, nibh error in per.Denis Robinson
As your budget progresses and evolves, continue referring to your SMART objectives. Stay focused and remember your goals – they will always inform what your next step will be!
Reshaped Leadership Team to Emerge Shop Buyout
Want to know the one thing that every successful digital marketer does first to ensure they get the biggest return on their marketing budget? It’s simple: goal-setting. This is an absolutely essential practice for any digital marketer who knows how to execute their campaigns in a productive, cost-effective way. With a few. With a few simple tips, you can be doing the same in no time! In this blog, we’ll walk you through the first steps every savvy digital marketer takes to ensure that they’re on target to hit all their marketing objectives. Get ready for revenue!
Remember: even if the channel you’re considering is all the rage right now, it might not fit your brand. Always make informed decisions that directly relate to your company. Otherwise, your message won’t be delivered to its intended audience and you’ll have wasted time, effort and money.
Know Your Digital Goals
The first step is clearly identifying which goals you want to achieve. Get specific. Do you want to increase brand awareness? Are you all about locking in leads? Do you want to establish a strong network of influencers that can help you be discovered? How about pushing engagement on social media?
Get Specific
A useful tool for narrowing down your goals to ensure they’re viable is the SMART mnemonic. It’s important to get specific to understand exactly what you’re working towards, and help you break down the process of hitting your targets. This is exactly what this mnemonic helps you to achieve.
- Does the channel reach my intended audience?
- Is the channel sustainable and affordable within my company’s marketing budget?
- Will I be able to measure the success of the channel?
- Does the channel allow me to express my brand’s intended message?
- Do the channels I’m considering work together to convey my message?
Always Remember Your Goals!
Establishing a solid vision for your business is the first step to planning your digital marketing budget. Always keep your final goals in sight when organising anything for your company. When deciding which steps to take next in your business, ask yourself how they will help you achieve the goals you outlined in Step #1. This will ensure that you stay on track and prevent you from spending your budget on anything that won’t help you achieve.
Cum et essent similique. Inani propriae menandri sed in. Pericula expetendis has no,
quo populo forensibus contentiones et, nibh error in per.Denis Robinson
As your budget progresses and evolves, continue referring to your SMART objectives. Stay focused and remember your goals – they will always inform what your next step will be!
Design-Nation Publishes ’20 Makers, 20 Objects’
Want to know the one thing that every successful digital marketer does first to ensure they get the biggest return on their marketing budget? It’s simple: goal-setting. This is an absolutely essential practice for any digital marketer who knows how to execute their campaigns in a productive, cost-effective way. With a few. With a few simple tips, you can be doing the same in no time! In this blog, we’ll walk you through the first steps every savvy digital marketer takes to ensure that they’re on target to hit all their marketing objectives. Get ready for revenue!
Remember: even if the channel you’re considering is all the rage right now, it might not fit your brand. Always make informed decisions that directly relate to your company. Otherwise, your message won’t be delivered to its intended audience and you’ll have wasted time, effort and money.
Know Your Goals
The first step is clearly identifying which goals you want to achieve. Get specific. Do you want to increase brand awareness? Are you all about locking in leads? Do you want to establish a strong network of influencers that can help you be discovered? How about pushing engagement on social media?
Get Specific
A useful tool for narrowing down your goals to ensure they’re viable is the SMART mnemonic. It’s important to get specific to understand exactly what you’re working towards, and help you break down the process of hitting your targets. This is exactly what this mnemonic helps you to achieve.
- Does the channel reach my intended audience?
- Is the channel sustainable and affordable within my company’s marketing budget?
- Will I be able to measure the success of the channel?
- Does the channel allow me to express my brand’s intended message?
- Do the channels I’m considering work together to convey my message?
Always Remember Your Goals!
Establishing a solid vision for your business is the first step to planning your digital marketing budget. Always keep your final goals in sight when organising anything for your company. When deciding which steps to take next in your business, ask yourself how they will help you achieve the goals you outlined in Step #1. This will ensure that you stay on track and prevent you from spending your budget on anything that won’t help you achieve.
Cum et essent similique. Inani propriae menandri sed in. Pericula expetendis has no,
quo populo forensibus contentiones et, nibh error in per.Denis Robinson
As your budget progresses and evolves, continue referring to your SMART objectives. Stay focused and remember your goals – they will always inform what your next step will be!
Tips and Ideas for Takeout During Coronavirus Slowdown
Tips to grow your restaurant during the Corona virus Slowdown
More than ever restaurants need to be able to think outside the box when it comes to expanding delivery. Just the other day my family experienced contact-less curbside pick up. Everyone was using a mask, no customers were allowed beyond the front door, every single employee had masks on with gloves. What was most important and appreciated to my family was receiving a notification saying that our meal was ready. This allowed me to walk up, pick up my bag from the front table and leave. There was even a wonderful note saying, “thank you Michael, hope your family is well”. Every business and restaurant should be doing the same thing by offering contactless curbside pick up. It is an absolute must to the survival of your restaurant.
Food subscriptions
Recurring revenue is one of the most profitable models for any business especially when it comes to setting up subscriptions for food. It’s a great way for consistent income.
With food subscriptions, families can order meals consistently, if not weekly. A great example for this would be a subscription to “Taco Night“. A family can get delivery four times a month every Taco Tuesday. You can expand on this with several family packages for anything else on your menu allowing families to choose from your menu delivered to them on a specific date weekly. Recurring revenue, nice!
Meal for a friend
What’s the best way to tell someone that you care? Send them food! This gives your customers a way to gift your menu to their family and friends. You can also set this up with the above suggestion of subscriptions making sure that mom and dad enjoy Taco Tuesday as well.
Donate a meal
Meal donations to those in need especially during the corona virus slow down will help the homeless, the unemployed, nurses on the front lines, first responders etc. Today is nurses day, what a wonderful gift your menu could be.
Mark Plumlee wrote for QSR Magazine with some additional suggestions that were spot on… https://bit.ly/2zcPDnY
Unconventional Takeout Foods
Don’t be afraid to think outside the box when appraising your potential takeout options. Most items in your restaurant’s pantry that would otherwise spoil—eggs, bulk meats, cheeses, condiments, etc.—can be repurposed into unconventional takeout options, such as charcuterie boards, BYO omelettes, dough, sides a la carte, signature sauces, and more.
Creative Corona virus Specials
Speak to your customers’ current experience with specials and promotions tailored to the lock-down. Everyone needs a bit of levity right now, and specials like Quarantine Kits, Lock-down Lunches, Social Distancing Desserts, and Stay Home Hors D’oeuvres will help distinguish your takeout. Some restaurants have taken it a step further by including toilet paper and other essential supplies with their orders.
Heat-and-eat dishes
Not all dishes work well for takeout. Some meals can’t be easily packaged, and certain foods will lose their heat or texture in transit. Restaurants have adapted to the problem by creating heat-and-eat dishes. These dishes can be frozen or refrigerated, prepared en-masse ahead of time, and sold via delivery or carryout. They’re a great workaround for restaurants who never considered takeout when planning their menu.
Meal Kits
Other restaurants have taken the heat-and-eat option a step further. They’re deconstructing their favorite dishes, packaging the ingredients with instructions, and delivering them as meal kits to their hungry customers. Not only are meal kits a fun divergence from typical takeout fare, they’re generally more cost-effective for the average family looking to feed four to five people.
“To boost our takeout we’ve added something called ‘Family to go for 4,’” says Gwen Holtsclaw from ScrubOaks Restaurant, Fayetteville, North Carolina. “We’ve taken our top entrees and now you can get Chicken Alfredo, enough for four people, for what it would cost for three people in the restaurant.”
Your restaurant is needed more than ever, thank goodness we all need to eat, and you have an opportunity to grow your business.
Hey GrubHub, Uber eats, Postmates, lower fees during the coronavirus
Grubhub, Postmates and Uber Eats during normal times are absolutely essential but we need help.
Share your views on this on Twitter…
As a small business owner offering delivery, I know from personal experience that Grubhub, Postmates and Uber Eats during normal times are absolutely essential to the business. We used Uber eats and GrubHub primarily, and although we lose 20 to 30% on all of the orders, it helped quite a bit by raising our income and reaching more customers within a 10 mile radius. But now, during the coronavirus it’s a little bit different because many small businesses and restaurants are barely staying open and we now depend on their services more than ever to deliver to our customers safely. Not all of our customers cannot just come by and pick up.
Twitter Hashtag #Pausefees gathers comments and signatures supporting lower fees
We started a Twitter Hashtag #Pausefees to gather comments and signatures supporting this idea of lower fees, whatever we can do to keep small businesses afloat over the next 2 to 3 months could be the difference between them closing all together or staying in business until the Coronavirus is under control. We want to know what the general public thinks about Grubhub, Postmates and Uber Eats giving small business and restaurants a chance. By gathering enough comments and signatures we will begin to petition many of these companies to help us at least lower these fees during the coronavirus.
A Maryland chef is urging customers to call restaurants instead
Michelle Basch writes
A Maryland chef is urging customers to call restaurants instead of using delivery apps that take a commission while local businesses struggle during the coronavirus outbreak. “Delete every food delivery app that you have on your phone whether it’s Uber Eats, Postmates, Grubhub, whatever it is, they’re killing restaurants,” said chef Ashish Alfred, owner of Duck Duck Goose and George’s Chophouse in Bethesda and Duck Duck Goose in Baltimore. He said those services take a commission of about 30%, so he’s asking people to order directly from restaurants.
“This is a huge way that you can help restaurants out right now. The tip goes directly to the restaurant. All of the money goes directly to the restaurant,” Alfred said.
Alfred continues:
Alfred posted his call for customers to delete their food delivery apps on Instagram, asking people to call restaurants directly instead.
“As the owner, restaurants are suffering. We’re all really, really struggling to stay afloat,” Alfred said.
“Every time you call Uber Eats or Postmates or whatever it is, they’re hitting the restaurants that are already hurting for 30%. We’ve all reached out and asked them to lower their commissions; they’ve all said no.”
Michelle Basch | @MBaschWTOP
Corporations, lower your fees so we stay afloat and you’ll have loyal customers
Any one of these companies stepping forward and helping the smaller restaurants will get my business exclusively. Why? Because they’re willing to extend their resources and help us. Share your opinion, tell us what you think and let’s try to save restaurants all over the country, that 30% could go a long way.
Yelp to stop auto-creating fundraisers after outrage from business owners
My opinion on Yelp Practices & the GoFundMe Fiasco
I’d like to share my opinion on this Yelp story because I think it really speaks volumes to what’s happening in the review industry. So remember, this is an opinion, but I think it’s an opinion that is shared by thousands of businesses all over the country.
Yelp sets up a partnership with GoFundMe to add donation button to businesses without permission
Yelp decided to set up a partnership with GoFundMe for small businesses in a failed attempt at assisting businesses with the coronavirus epidemic. Yelp made the decision to allow people to support their favorite local businesses by donating to the GoFundMe fundraiser directly on the yelp pages of “eligible businesses”.
According to The Verge: “On Tuesday, Yelp announced a partnership with GoFundMe to provide a fast and easy way for people to support their favorite local businesses by donating to a GoFundMe fundraiser directly on the Yelp pages of eligible businesses. In an effort to get businesses help quickly and easily, a GoFundMe fundraiser was automatically added to the Yelp pages of an initial group of eligible businesses, with information provided on how to claim it or opt out should a business choose to do so,” a spokesperson said in a statement.
Later, a Yelp spokesman says there is a pause to the automatic roll-out of GoFundMe
You bet you pause a program that is launched without permission, no matter the intention. Businesses sound off and demand the removal of the GoFundMe donations on their profiles.
“However, it has come to our attention that some businesses did not receive a notification with opt-out instructions, and some would have preferred to actively opt-in to the program,” the statement goes on to say. “As such, we have paused the automatic roll out of this feature, and are working with GoFundMe to provide a seamless way for businesses to opt into the program moving forward, as we have received a great deal of interest and support for the program from both consumers and businesses alike.”
According to The Verge
Businesses on Yelp demand removal of GoFundMe
You’ll see some comments from business owners like me below that are outraged by the latest happenings at Yelp. It astounds me that companies are still trusting their businesses to corporations that don’t always consider the ramifications of corporate decisions on small businesses. As a Brick & Mortar Business owner, nobody makes decisions on the business but me, especially when it comes to reaching out to the general public and my customers. I am the owner, the manager, the janitor, the bookkeeper, so I should be the one to decide what and how I communicate with MY customer base.
Now is the time to make the switch to Rating Bee
This should motivate businesses all over the country to begin making the switch to Rating Bee. We focus on small businesses getting better reviews and happier customers. Rating Bee would never misrepresent your company in this way. Thankfully because of the outrage of many businesses reaching out to Yelp, this Donation program has now ceased, but with arduous steps for businesses affected. I’m trying to be gentle here… but I have to admit it infuriates me for small businesses and many are making the change to Rating Bee, you should too.
A Foodie shares tips for Restaurants dealing with the COVID-19 Virus
Social distancing will affect your favorite restaurants
There are a few suggestions that all businesses should consider, to reassure their shoppers that they’re safe, especially in the food industry. The new social distancing standards are now forcing restaurants to move solely to delivery and takeout. Let’s face it, it’s not the most appealing concept to consider that going out to eat at any restaurant could actually get you sick. Let’s NOT go out to the pub or take the family to crowded restaurants, as suggested by Rep. Devin Nunes. The CDC as well as the latest government guidelines suggest avoiding groups of 10 or more!
So here are 3 suggestions from this Foodie that all restaurants can use to make customers feel a little safer.
Reassure your customers on food preparation from farm to table
As a foodie, lunch and dinner are often when my family eats out. So it’s been quite an adjustment for us retraining our patterns like everyone else in America.
Cafe Rio is one of our favorite restaurants. They connected to their customers by sending out notifications on how food preparation is being handled going forward in the midst of this Coronavirus COVID-19 epidemic. What’s crazy is that there’s only one or two other restaurants that I have frequented that have created emails and text messages to customers something like this!
Click for larger image
Take a Foodie’s suggestion!
Share what you are doing to ensure that your customers are safe in food preparation. Follow the lead of this email attached below and you’ll see an absolutely brilliant way of reassuring your customer base of your commitment to their safety.
Understanding how food is prepared, and what steps have been instituted to ensure the proper handling, preparation and delivery to your customer from farm to plate, reassures your customers and keeps them ordering!
Customers LOVE TAKEOUT! The CDC will require this anyway very soon
Consider offering pick up and delivery exclusively, current guidelines in New York and San Francisco are following those requirements.
Social distancing has become part of our daily lives now, and one of the scariest parts about going out as a family is that you could be using unclean utensils, or brushing up with people that are sick or what’s scarier, people that are asymptomatic and look totally fine! If I knew that a restaurant would allow pick up through a window and I trust them with an email as suggested above, I would greatly consider frequenting that restaurant. For a foodie, you need your Food fix!
With your new standards of safety in place, ask your customers to share that and review your preparation
So you’ve instituted all these changes in your business, your restaurant now is creating a safer environment not just for the customers, but also the employees, employees have been retrained on the new standards in place by the CDC. That’s wonderful, but if nobody else knows that then you’re still stagnant. As a small business, now more than ever because of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) we have to enlist our customers and our marketing plan. Reach out to your customer base and ask them to share their experiences with your new changes in food preparation and delivery. Send out a blast to your customers saying.. “We need your help, share your experience about our company, let your friends know what we’re doing, and what we are changing”.
A little personal responsibility saves lives and businesses
Safety is everything during the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, as American citizens, we’ve gone through trying times that only bring us closer. In the midst of all this, everyone should know that personally, we’re responsible to ensure that if we are sick, that we should self quarantine for the sake of our families.
Although our leaders are not the best examples right now, we can be ourselves, for our community, and for the small businesses that depend on us within our cities and towns.
Remember, we are the ones that will save small business, not a bail out by the government. Small business loans will be used to simply survive. It is the community that will keep a business running. Help them with suggestions that you feel will make it safer for you to continue to support them.
So, if you find a restaurant that’s taking the steps to ensure our safety and going the extra mile, share what you know about that small business.
How many Online reviews does it take to gain customer trust?
What’s the magic minimum number of online reviews?
If you are a small business, online reviews can be the life blood of your revenue. But the question is always asked, how many reviews do I need before customers begin to choose my business? This is an important question, so I will try to break that down in this article and show you what we found.
Online reviews, what’s the number?
There are many variables to this question, so before saying a number, we should consider:
- How competitive is your industry?
- How many reviews do they have?
- How do you stack up to Ratings within your genre?
- If you are a local business, how are customers finding you, is it on Yelp, Google Maps, Rating Bee?
As an example, although we say an average of 10 reviews are needed, if your local competition has a rating of 4 Stars and 100 reviews, well, your 10 reviews may not stack up well, and 1 bad review bumps you down in ratings. The stats below do not always apply to every business, it is an average.
So we write this article considering that it takes on average 10 (4 Star reviews) to begin to see positive results and to have customers responding to your business. You can also see an Online Ratings Calculator here to help you understand how revenue is affected. What’s important here is that you’ll see that these 10 reviews from your customers will help potential customers to not only trust your business, but also they begin to pay close attention to the comments in these reviews. If they’re spending 3 minutes plus reading reviews, we have to make sure that those reviews are positive and if they’re not, then focus on responding to the negative reviews with an emphasis on customer satisfaction.
As you know we’ve written tons of blogs on online review responses, we find that responding to good or bad reviews can really help the customer to get a sense of your commitment to their satisfaction. Customers would much rather frequent a business that focuses on customer service!
According to Bright Local’s “Local Consumer Review Survey 2019″
The study also found that the average consumer reads 10 reviews before showing trust in a business and spends an average of 13 minutes and 45 seconds reading reviews.
Shelley Polansky is president/CEO of BBB Serving Northern Colorado and Wyoming.
More Yummy Stats for Online Reviews
According to the survey’s key findings, there are some interesting statistics from the past year:
- 90% of consumers used the internet to find a local business.
- 76% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
- 52% of 35- to 54-year-olds always read reviews, compared to 28% last year (and compared with 82% for all age groups this year and 86% last year).
- 97% of consumers read businesses’ responses to reviews.
- 91% of consumers are more likely to use a business after reading a positive review.
- 84% of consumers believe that online reviews older than 3 months are no longer relevant.
- 53% of consumers will consider using a business with 3 or fewer stars.
- 27% of consumers will contact a business after reading positive reviews.
Click here to view original web page at www.wyomingbusinessreport.com
Reviews older than 3 months become irrelevant… except for Ratings!
So this may be true that customers don’t go past three months, but I will say that every single review that shows up on your profile is a reflection of your overall history of reviews and can cost you money. Granted, your potential customer will probably look at the last couple months of reviews and read through them, but your overall rating is affected from the reviews from years past. This is one of the failures of the online review industry
84% of consumers believe that online reviews older than 3 months are no longer relevant.
Shelley Polansky is president/CEO of BBB Serving Northern Colorado and Wyoming.
How long do bad reviews stay on?
So this has always been a major problem and one of the reasons why we created Rating Bee. We wanted to make sure that online reviews are never more than 3 years old. It is important to us that every small business gets a chance to improve, and also to potentially keep the customer, even if they had a bad experience, businesses change. A business listed on Rating Bee will demonstrate improvement on going by responding to all reviews. When someone leaves you a bad review on Rating Bee, they have the opportunity to solve the issue through a resolution process or they can leave that bad review. However…
Bad online reviews are renewed YEARLY
Customers leaving a review of 3 stars or below must return to that review one year later to keep the review posted. During that time you have the opportunity to respond to the reviewer. They will see your improvements, and your desire to solve the issue with them. If that reviewer does not renew that bad review every year, it is then removed.
The bottom line for you as a business: We believe it is the responsibility of the poster to manage bad reviews YEARLY.
We do not allow reviewers to just tag a business….
Bad reviews happen, we understand that, what we don’t understand is that a business should pay for a bad review for 10 years. Companies change, management changes, entire business plans change, Rating Bee makes sure that you as a small business will have a chance to improve and get better Ratings.
Get signed up to begin getting the kind of reviews that help your business
Yes it’s important to have your profile in other review websites, but quite frankly they’re not doing you any favors, they often decide what are good reviews and bad reviews. Some businesses actually leave stickers on their door inviting customers to leave reviews in with these companies. I’ve said before on other review blogs, they’ll put the bad reviews up no problem, but the good ones… they’ll question whether or not they’re good reviews and possibly archive them. Amazing.
Your good reviews stay up with Rating Bee, we vet these good reviews as well as bad reviews manually, it is not automated. Nothing replaces the human eye when deciding the future of the business and their online ratings.
Don’t wait, list your business on Rating Bee now!
Google, Facebook users face lawsuits over defamatory reviews
Small businesses rejoice! The days of anonymous reviews are almost over.
As you know, being a small business owner means that you’re going to have to deal with those anonymous “hit-and-run reviews“. Well things are changing in the courts, happy days are on its way. Rating Bee takes anonymous reviews very seriously. We’ve taken steps to ensure that any reviewer on our system can be identified and not anonymous.
NO anonymous attacks, now customers that leave reviews will be accountable and identified.
Yes we’re making the case for you to start asking for reviews on Rating Bee instead of the other website review companies. We believe that small businesses get a fair shake and apparently, the courts are beginning to agree with our philosophy!
Later this week we’ll have a blog about companies suing reviewers that are leaving negative reviews with private and personal information of the company owners, their private conversations etc.
Small business wins the negative online review battle after all…
Here’s a posting by business reporter Nassim Khadem of what’s happening right now in the courts.
Google has been ordered to identify the anonymous reviewer of an Australian dentist. Online giants Google and Facebook are likely to face further court orders forcing them to identify people behind potentially defamatory statements made on their sites, lawyers warn.
Last week, a Melbourne dentist who claimed he was defamed in an anonymous online review convinced a Federal Court judge to order Google to unmask the disgruntled customer. Dr Matthew Kabbabe claimed the potentially defamatory reviews, written under a pseudonym “CBsm 23”, had cost him a significant amount of money
Court forces Google to identify the reviewer
After Google refused to identify the reviewer, Dr Kabbabe went to court and succeeded in getting an order that now forces Google to identify the reviewer so that Dr Kabbabe can launch legal action if he chooses to.
The dentist’s lawyer Mark Stanarevic said that the tech giants were failing to adequately self-regulate and that his law firm, Matrix Legal, is now looking to launch a class action against Google on behalf of businesses potentially defamed in reviews.
“We are arguing there is a duty of care and misleading conduct,” he said, adding that the class action would involve about a dozen small businesses and would be launched within four to six weeks.
[Google] should not let those reviews remain for months.
“Where Google has clearly failed is, not only are these profiles a breach of Google’s own terms and conditions, but when someone self-reports and says this is not a proper review, they [Google] should not let those reviews remain for months.”
He said anonymous profiles “could be quite easily picked up” if Google and Facebook invested time and effort to reveal fake or malicious reviewers.
Click here to view original web page at www.abc.net.au
Protecting Restaurants from Botnet Manipulation of Online Reviews
Fake reviews are killing the review industry
Every business has to face it, there’s a harsh reality on the internet for fake reviews that will plague your good business on going. As a business owner, it helps to identify these review bots and report them. This can be a difficult task especially if these reviews are bot generated. There are hundreds of reviews being generated as I write this blog on review websites everywhere.
One of the biggest problems for review websites is the constant battle to be a trusted source for online reviews. It’s very difficult to manage reviewers coming in and leaving reviews that are not only fake, but in some cases not at all relevant.
Here’s how to sniff out fake reviews
I am a software geek that loves anything that simplifies our world, automates tasks, gathers information and helps buying decisions. Every so often I come across some really brilliant software ideas and today is one of those days. We recently came across a very powerful piece of software that allows for a consumer to analyze for fake reviews.
The bottom line, review bots are real, they exist, and your competition can destroy you using them. As a business, we help you to manage reviews that come in from all the major review engines including Rating Bee Reviews so that you’re always in the know when any review is written. In addition, we follow strict guidelines in the review process ensuring that anyone that writes a review about your business is also helping you well beyond just simple flaming reviews, that will definitely weed out review bots.
Also, the following article is a powerful reminder especially for restaurant owners managing these negative reviews.
I’ve gathered together some excerpts from an amazing article written by Diane D. Reynolds here that I think are the most important points and below, you’ll see a link to the entire article below.
Non-chain restaurants with low or middling Yelp reviews were more likely to go out of business
According to a 2017 conducted by Professor Michael Luca of Harvard Business School, non-chain restaurants with low or middling Yelp reviews were more likely to go out of business than those with positive Yelp reviews, as demonstrated by the fact that after San Francisco increased its minimum wage, restaurants with 3.5 star average ratings were 14 percent more likely to close, while those with five-star average ratings were no more likely to close. A 2016 study conducted by Professor Luca also found that a one-star increase in a non-chain restaurant’s Yelp rating aggregated from all user reviews led to a five percent to nine percent increase in revenue.
Restaurants whose economic viability often hinges on their Yelp and TripAdvisor ratings now face a grave threat in the form of Botnets
Botnets capable of manipulating a restaurant’s average rating in a matter of seconds or minutes. Botnets are networks of computers or devices infected with malware that places them all under the control of a single hacker who can command them all to act in unison with a single keystroke. For example, if a hacker controlling a Botnet consisting of 20,000 computing devices “likes” a post on Twitter, all 20,000 computing devices will immediately “like” the post in question.
Botnets suspected of being controlled by Russian agents were famously used to disseminate political propaganda on social media in the days and weeks leading up to the 2016 United States Presidential Election.
If a hacker controlling a Botnet consisting of 20,000 computing devices ‘likes’ a post on Twitter, all 20,000 computing devices will immediately ‘like’ the post in question.
Click here to view original web page at www.modernrestaurantmanagement.com