Last week I blogged about the results of our 2013 Online Customer Review study that indicated lots of people are skeptical of the information presented at dedicated customer review sites. Since then, there have been some interesting articles about the same topic. Here’s one in the Huffington Post about an entirely fake restaurant being reviewed on TripAdvisor. It also talks about things users should be weary of when reading information at Yelp. Here’s another one at the Time magazine site that talks about the article I discussed last week (Edmunds suing a social media reputation management firm) and it also notes, “The research firm Gartner has estimated that by 2014, 10% to 15% of all online reviews will be fakes.”
Fake reviews are and will continue to be a big problem for review sites, but this isn’t their only problem. In our study we also found that many customers are using retailer sites like Best Buy, Walmart, Lowes and lots of others to read reviews. As reviews are getting to be everywhere the importance of dedicated reviews sites will probably wane. We also found that a surprisingly low percentage of respondents (about 25% to 30%) read reviews at the most popular dedicated review sites and only about 10% post reviews there. Read more about the results here.
I was surprised about the relatively low rate of dedicated review site usage and particularly the fact that 41% of our online sample said they hadn’t even visited a dedicated review site in the past two years. Does that surprise you too? What do you think is going to happen to dedicated review sites?
