6 Ways to Encourage User Generated Content

AUGUST 23, 2013 • ARMANDO ROGGIO

• Print
 
• Add Comment
 
 
 
• inShare18

User submitted content like product reviews, guest blog posts, and rich media provide online retailers with excellent and marketable resources that might boost site traffic and encourage additional sales.

When online shoppers can choose from hundreds of retailers selling similar or even identical products, it is important for ecommerce marketers to look for opportunities to differentiate. One way of separating a retail business from its competition is to provide content that is either useful — in that it helps folks complete some task, achieve some goal, or make a better decision — or entertaining.

What follows are six suggestions for encouraging your shoppers and site visitors to submit content that in turn you can use to get more site traffic and, hopefully, additional sales.

Let Shoppers Know You Want Content

It sounds obvious, but there are plenty of times when just letting shoppers know that you want content, whether reviews or pictures, is enough to encourage them to submit something.

Consider putting a large link or button on product detail pages that asks visitors to publish a review. You may also wish to put a “Latest Reviews” section on category pages or even on your site’s home page, including a link or button for submitting a review.

You may also be able to get users to post content in social media. A retailer in the northwest, as an example, regularly asks customers for photos on Facebook. The Facebook post might ask for shoppers to post their a picture of their favorite boots or shoes or to show off what they have done with some item purchased from the store.

Reward Users for Blog Posts, Videos, and Photos

Shoppers may be willing to provide content in exchange for some reward.

A multi-channel farm and ranch chain, as an example, gives customers a $25 gift card for published blog posts. A teenaged girl’s posts about horse training have generated hundreds of site visits.

A user-generated blog post and photo about horse training produced hundreds of visits to a retailers’ website.

Similarly, two bikini makers — Malibu Strings and Wicked Weasel — are famous in some marketing circles for encouraging attractive gals to submit photographs or even videos of themselves wearing the company’s bikinis in exchange for free swimsuits. This user-generated content has attracted so many site visitors that Wicked Weasel has even set up a social media network specifically for bikini fans, wearers and watchers. Both retailers employ the user-generated content as photography on product detail pages, category pages, and on their respective home pages. Many visitors come to check out the pictures and buy something too.

In these examples, shoppers get a known reward for submitting the content.

Use Contests to Encourage Contributions

Contests are another great way to get user generated content. Typically there is a single prize offered and users submit something in order to get a chance to win that prize.

A couple of years ago, retailer Crate and Barrel ran an ultimate wedding contest. The promotion garnered more than 7,500 entries and gave Crate and Barrel some good content, including photos of the winners and descriptions of the Crate and Barrel products those winners liked best.

As another example, many stores run photo contests around Halloween. A pet toy retailer might get dozens or even hundreds of photos, which would be great content for product pages, blog posts, or social media sites, with a pet costume contest.

Ask for Product Reviews

Many online shoppers trust product reviews to help them make buying decisions or even choose a retailer. For this reason, it can be a good idea to ask customers to submit product reviews.

Beyond adding links to reviews and asking for reviews on your website, you can invite customers to write a review in transactional emails. When a shopper receives a shipping notification from your store, consider including a short message asking for a review.

Your message might say something like, “Your order is on its way. We realized that you haven’t yet had a chance to open the box, let alone get an idea of how well you like the items you ordered, but we still want to ask that once you have formed an impression about the products or about service you let us know. Your feedback is really important to us. Here is a ‘write a review link’ if and when you want to let us know what you think.”

Remember that you should not offer shoppers rewards for submitting reviews or — worse yet — rewards for submitting positive reviews.

Find Field Testers

Another way that an online retailer might be able to encourage user-generated content is to ask select customers to test new products.

If you have a particularly good customer who has made several purchases, and you have new products that shopper might like, consider asking the customer to test the new product and write short blog post about the item.

The customer may feel special, remember you asked for her to test the product because she is a highly valued customer, and the content could encourage other shoppers to try the new product too.

Ask Shoppers Their Opinions

Another way to get some good user content, especially around new products, is to ask shoppers their opinion.

A retailer of western clothing was considering a new line of women’s jeans last year. The retailer published several photos of the new jeans on Facebook and asked followers on the social network to comment about the jeans. “Should we bring these into the stores?”

You could use a similar approach. If a product is in fact brought in, the customer comments can be used in ads promoting the product or even as copy on the product detail page.

via Practical Ecommerce » Articles http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/57580-6-Ways-to-Encourage-User-Generated-Content

Accor Exec Busted for Phony Reviews Raises the Question: Do You Trust TripAdvisor Anymore?

Go to article

Where: Various Locations

June 12, 2013 at 10:59 AM | by wakeandwander | Comments (6)

We let off some steam a few weeks ago, letting hotels know we think they should back off the throttle a little bit when it comes to their sometimes-annoying persistence in getting guests to give reviews on TripAdvisor.

Given the importance that is being placed upon online reviews these days, we can't really say we're surprised to hear the news that an Accor executive was recently exposed for posting more than 100 phony reviews of Accor-operated hotels on TripAdvisor under an alias. He/she also wrote fake reviews about competing hotels, and Accor has placed the unnamed employee on leave.

"The employee has taken a leave of absence whilst we investigate this situation further," Accor said in the statement. "We value the feedback online travel reviews and forums provide and will take whatever steps we can to ensure their credibility and transparency."

Hmm... this one leaves a bad taste in our mouth. We've always known to take online reviews with a grain of salt, to really dive in and read the reasoning behind both positive and negative reviews when using them as an aide to plan our travels, but this discovery makes it hard to trust anything on TripAdvisor. If one executive was doing it, you can bet the farm that Accor isn't the only company guilty of this fraud. Plus, we've already talked about hotels offering guests rewardsfor positive reviews, so the idea that they care about the "credibility and transparency" of TripAdvisor makes us roll our eyes.

So where do we go from here? Do you still consider the site a valuable resource? One thing is for sure: There's no way we're going to revolve our research around TripAdvisor. Which is really a shame, because there are probably a lot of honest people providing honest feedback out there. We're just not sure where to find it anymore.

[Photos: TripAdvisor]

Hoteliers balance formal ratings, user reviews

Go to article

 

04 April 2013
By Patrick Mayock
Editor-in-Chief
patrick@hotelnewsnow.com

---

Story Highlights

• Hoteliers say formal ratings programs and user-generated review sites share nearly equal importance.
• Forbes Travel Guide provides member hoteliers with its complete set of service criteria, which can help guide day-to-day service excellence.
• Ratings and reviews both provide market clout, especially for independent hotels.

The Little Nell in Aspen, Colorado, has been awarded a Forbes Travel Guide 5-star rating for 18 years. The property is also the No. 4 ranked hotel in Aspen on TripAdvisor.

REPORT FROM THE U.S.—Jonathan Crellin is proud of the Boston Harbor Hotel’s 5-star status. Awarded by Forbes Travel Guide, the badge of success required years of determination and diligence to achieve—a conscious effort to satisfy the critical eye of an anonymous evaluator who grades more than 550 individual standards in 17 different categories.

Far less objective, although no less impressive, is the Boston Harbor’s No. 3 ranking out of 75 hotels in Boston on TripAdvisor, a position assigned by the aggregate rankings of faceless, often nameless online reviewers.

Jonathan Crellin Boston Harbor Hotel

One formal. The other free-flowing. Asked which is more important, GM Crellin said, both.

“When people are online and looking at things and they see we are one of the top hotels on TripAdvisor, and then they learn we’re a (Forbes Travel Guide) 5-star hotel, those really support each other,” he said. “… Both of them are good, validating efforts, and we appreciate our reputation with both and others.”

Crellin’s two-pronged approach toward ratings reflects a broader shift in the hotel industry, according to sources. With increasing transparency brought on by social media and the ability to post instantaneous reviews, more formal programs such as Forbes’s star or AAA’s diamond ratings serve to validate the opinions displayed in user-generated reviews on the likes of TripAdvisor—and vice versa.

“You have to evaluate all the ratings that are out there, and you have to be aware of what’s going on and what’s being said,” said John Speers, GM within the Faena Group’s hospitality branch. As early as March, Speers was GM of the 92-room The Little Nell, which has received a 5-star rating for the past 18 years and is ranked No. 4 of hotels in Aspen, Colorado, on TripAdvisor.

A matter of transparency
But which ratings or reviews programs hold more sway? Executives from both TripAdvisor and Forbes, for instance, make powerful arguments in their respective favor.

“According to the TripBarometer by TripAdvisor, travel review websites are the ‘most useful’ sources of information when researching and planning a trip,” with 49% of respondents citing them in an online survey, according to Brian Payea, head of industry relations for the review site.


But nowhere on the list of available options was an option for “formal ratings program” or “star rating” or “diamond rating.”

Jayne Griswold, VP and GM of Forbes Travel Guide, which in 2009 began licensing the star ratings program from Mobil Travel Guide, said the more objective, formal approach provides clarity in a cluttered world.
“Forbes Travel Guide is actually more relevant than ever because things have gotten so blurry, because the other destination systems in general have made things so consumer-focused.”

The team at Forbes is taking a hotelier-focused approach, this week announcing their Global Star Ratings Program that allows partner hoteliers to receive that complete list of 550 criteria on which they’re judged as well as benchmark their service scores against others in their competitive sets.
Michael Cascone, president and COO of Forbes Travel Guide, was careful to point out that no hotel can buy a star ratings; they have to earn them. The GSRP simply increases transparency and gives hoteliers something to shoot for.

Michael Cascone Forbes Travel Guide

Crellin said his team at the Boston Harbor Hotel has aimed well. After the hotel dropped from a 4-star rating to a 3-star back in the mid-aughts, the property’s owners decided to “move from good to great,” tasking management with achieving the prestigious 5-star rating. Now the Forbes standards are an integral part of operations.
“We talk about Forbes 5-star standards every day, every meeting we go to,” he said.


Marketing excellence
While ratings systems—whether granted by a formal review body or consumers—aid internal goal setting, their primary function is to display a level of quality for would-be guests.

“From a marketing standpoint, it put (The Little Nell) at the top of (its) game in the luxury market to be a 5-star hotel. It carries a significant amount of prestige,” Speers said.

TripAdvisor is just as important, he added.
“I think TripAdvisor is a powerful tool, and more and more customers are using that to gauge the authenticity of the ratings that are out there to see if that’s really what others are saying about it. The people who are staying there, what are they saying about their experience?”

The marketing boost is perhaps more important for independent hotels, Crellin said. While consumers know what they’re going to get from a branded property, ratings and reviews provide an extra level of comfort in unfamiliar territory.

“We’re quick to point out we are a Forbes 5-star hotel because people get it. … Without it, they might not know what is the Boston Harbor Hotel,” he said. “That helps people understand what we are, what they will come to find when they get here from a service standpoint and it helps position us.”
Both the Boston Harbor and Little Nell also tout their excellence as members of Preferred Hotel Group. 

Forbes is attempting to provide even more marketing muscle with its Startle platform, which compiles all its star-rated properties on one website and allows consumers to book directly with them.

“There’s a need in the market for consumers to have kind of a beacon just because there’s so much (information) out there and so many opinions,” Cascone said.

Star semantics
Launched by Mobil in 1958, the concept of star ratings has become so ingrained in the industry that many now assign arbitrary stars as more of a descriptor of hotel class or segment than actual Forbes-approved rating.
When asked if the bastardization of the term was watering down Forbes’ brand integrity, Cascone said far from it.

“When the traveling consumer relies on our star rating to help inform their decisions, our properties deliver the experience that meets, and oftentimes exceeds, the guest’s expectations, as it is based on a consistent application of standards across all of our properties,” he explained. 

John Speers Faena Group

“This is where and how we differ, and why the loose application of star labeling by consumers or others in the industry to indicate quality will ultimately serve us well in the end. Arbitrary or relative assignments of star ratings will continue to disappoint and to confuse consumers and risk not meeting their expectations. And the fact that a star rating, and in particular a 5-star rating system, is universally recognized as best-in-class in hospitality only bodes well for us, too, in the end as we continue to expand and market the credibility of our system globally.”

Forbes currently rates hotels in North America and China. This month will mark the group’s first foray into Europe with hotel star ratings in London.

But while reviews and ratings likely will grow in lockstep with hotel demand throughout the globe, Speers said hoteliers cannot become so concerned with how third parties view their properties from the outside that they lose sight of what matters on the inside.

Guests naturally have very high expectations when staying at high-end properties. “We have to strive constantly to exceed peoples’ expectations. …” he said.  “My feeling is if you’re doing your job well, you’re going to perform well on those websites and people will get a true sense of what the overall experience is.”

10 Common Mobile App User Complaints

Go to article

October 10, 2012 by Lauren Drell7

LikeTweet+1SharePin ItShare

Sure, apps make our life easier, streamlining our calendars and grocery lists, offering entertainment while we’re stuck in line, making it easy to collaborate with your co-workers.

But while apps may be efficient and convenient, a user is not afraid to vocalize (or tweet) complaints about an app’s shortcomings — even minor ones. Here at Mashable (and in the Twittersphere), we had a bit of a therapy session crowdsourced our most common app glitch pet peeves (Note: If you enjoy reading the Mashable staff’s digital and social gripes, also be sure to check out the 20 things your most annoying Facebook friends do. Then take a deep breath. It’s going to be okay.).

For us, it felt good to vent our frustrations and get these burdens off our chests. We hope it will drive greater good, and app developers out there will heed our advice and work around these flaws, avoiding the wrath of petulant smartphone owners. And if you have your own app pet peeves that we missed, be sure to add them in the comments.

1. Too Many Emails

We already spend 28% of the workday dealing with email; we don’t want any more. Someone you haven’t spoken to since freshman year of college joined Spotify! Your old neighbor added you to a circle on Google+! Who cares?

While it is nice to know how late of an adopter your college frenemy is, these notifications can be annoying. Apps should either forgo these notifications entirely or filter them (perhaps just use people from your “close friends” list, if you’re connected via Facebook, or people with whom you interact regularly).

We know you can adjust settings, but sending spammy notification emails shouldn’t be the default.

2. Irrelevant Push Notifications

Yes, many of us put close friends and family into a list on Facebook, so we could stay abreast of what’s going on in their lives. But do we need to know every single time they upload a photo?

Push notifications annoy us even more if they’re delayed — it’s not breaking news if someone else broke it hours before.

What does a relevant push notification do? Look at Foursquare, for instance — when you walk by a venue that’s on your to-do list, the app reminds you that you wanted to go there, so it’s an actionable, contextual pop-up.

3. When Great Apps Are Abandoned

If a developer builds an awesome app but then abandons it, users might abandon it. When seemingly minor bugs persist, frustration builds among users. ExitStrategy is a good example of this — the app is fantastic but can be a little buggy, and it hasn’t been updated since August 2010. And still, it has a loyal following; imagine what would happen with a few little tweaks.

4. Frequent “Rate This App” Requests

Positive ratings in the app store can help to push downloads. But we’re probably doing a million other things and just need to check the weather real quick before heading out the door — we don’t want to be stopped and redirected to the app store to rate the app. And if a user has just deleted the app, you probably don’t want to ask for a review. I mean, he just deleted it — he’s likely not going to give it a good review.

So when are “rate this app” requests okay? We’ll let them slide in the wake of a major update (emphasis on themajor).

5. Connecting to Facebook Unnecessarily

As Chelsea Stark, our resident multimedia editor, says, “Why? You’re a cooking app!”

Personally, I have 88 apps connected to Facebook. And on a regular basis, I use just 15 of them. So why should I unnecessarily open up my data to 73 other apps, especially if there’s nothing to be gained through the connection?

6. Full-Screen Ads

You go to open an app and a full-screen ad pops up. That’s annoying, so a user just Xes out of it. But he accidentally clicks on the ad instead of the X, sending to the app store or maybe Safari. So on top of the frustration that the screen wasn’t receptive to a thumb-tap, the phone — and whatever task the person is trying to do — gets held up for a few seconds while Safari opens. Sounds like first-world problems, but stirring up this animosity by killing efficiency isn’t the best way to convince people your app is worth a download.

7. Video Ads

Video ads can be invasive and interruptive, especially when the rest of a user’s sound preferences are turned off. We know you’re looking for some extra revenue, but is it really worth annoying your extant user base?

8. Non-Wrapping Text

Not everyone can read size 10 font. If a user is zooming, your text should wrap so that he doesn’t have to drag the screen across manually to read each sentence. Responsive design is the way of the future — and we want it now.

9. Non-Retina Apps

The app snob at Mashable (Christina Warren, if you must know), has a thing against non retina-updated iPhone apps. “It’s been over two years, there is no excuse for a new app getting released without full Retina assets,” she says.

10. Desperate Pleas for Followers

If users are annoyed when developers ask for a review, we bet you could guess that we also don’t like it when we’re asked to follow the company on Twitter or “like” it on Facebook. “I don’t exactly want to tell everyone that I have spent hours upon hours playing Order Up! To Go on both my iPhone and iPad just so I can get a free gold coin,” says Warren. “I mean, I will, but come on.”

What are your mobile app pet peeves? Tell us in the comments so developers know what to avoid.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, cosmin4000

Fake reviews, e-wallets and more... (HNN's Technology Pulse)

Go to article

 

04 October 2012
HNN Newswire

---

HotelNewsNow.com’s Technology Impact Report each month features a news roundup from the hotel technology sector. Subscribe to the free monthly reporthere

The cost of fake review
Company-paid positive reviews and social-media ratings will make up 10% to 15% of all reviews by 2014, says a new study from Gartner.

Also, analysts predict the increased media attention on fake reviews will result in the U.S. Federal Trade Commission suing at least two Fortune 500 brands over the next two years, according to an Open Forum article, citing a 2009 ruling that deemed paying for bogus reviews false advertising.

“With over half of the Internet's population on social networks, organizations are scrambling for new ways to build bigger follower bases, generate more hits on videos, garner more positive reviews than their competitors and solicit ‘likes’ on their Facebook pages,” said Jenny Sussin, senior research analyst at Gartner. “Many marketers have turned to paying for positive reviews with cash, coupons and promotions including additional hits on YouTube videos in order to pique site visitors' interests in the hope of increasing sales, customer loyalty and customer advocacy through social media ‘word of mouth’ campaigns.”

Keeping consumers on site
Hotel companies constantly are looking at ways to keep consumers on their own sites for as long as possible. Wyndham Hotel Group, for example, is deploying a range of tactics, such as functional enhancements to improve conversion rates and publishing reviews to be as transparent as possible,according to an EyeforTravel article.

Savvy travelers, the article says, understand the context of reviews better now and realize there is a difference between how a person they know rates a property, what an expert travel authority says about a hotel and what an aggregated voice of the community tells them.

So over the last year, a range of hotel companies (such as Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide and Wyndham) have chosen to feature reviews on their own websites. Hotel companies have approached this in different ways, launching their own platforms to share user-generated content and tying up with review sites as well.


Phone, wallet functions merge for travelers
Emerging "empty pockets" technology is increasingly allowing travelers to use their phones to make purchases, book flights, check in and board planes, according to a CNN report.

Delta, American and United are already big into electronic boarding passes on smartphones, and JetBlue plans e-boarding programs in the near future. If some visionaries have their way, the future of mobile travel will touch virtually every key activity at the airport, including security and U.S. passports. Smartphone technology might improve airport efficiency and help ease the pain from skyrocketing traffic predicted in the next 20 years.

Apple also recently unveiled Passbook, an app which organizes e-boarding passes, flight reservations, coupons and other documents. But Apple has a much more grandiose plan for its empty pocket dreams, according to public U.S. Patent and Trademark Office documents.

Industry experts and government officials say, as cool as these technology ideas sound, extending Apple's technology and influence to airport baggage tracking and TSA security would be unprecedented.

New ‘hotel haggling’ website goes live
GraysEscape.com, launched in early September by Australia’s largest online auction house, GraysOnline, allows travelers to negotiate discounts of up to 20% on Australian and New Zealand hotels, according to a news release.
The site promises to help hoteliers fill empty rooms “via controlled discounting” and help travelers “score exclusive and confidential discounts.”

GraysOnline CEO Cameron Poolman said in the release that GraysEscape.com will boost Australia’s struggling domestic tourism industry. The site features a range of accommodations, from luxury hotels and resorts to motels, B&Bs, holiday parks and hostels. The site allows customers to make offers directly to hotels, with no competitive bidding. Hoteliers have three hours to accept an offer or bargain with the customer for another rate.

Properties featured on GraysEscape include major hotel groups, such as Rydges, Toga, Oaks, 8 Hotels, Best Western International, Stamford Hotels, Golden Chain, Chifley Hotels, Country Comfort, Choice Hotels International and Leisure Inns, the release said.


Best Western revamps brand site
Best Western has completed a major overhaul of its brand website, including a completely revamped design with additional hotel details, more photos and new research tools, highlighted by embedded TripAdvisor reviews. 

By adding TripAdvisor content to BestWestern.com, visitors will be able to view TripAdvisor ratings and the five most recent traveler reviews for every Best Western hotel without ever having to leave the Best Western website.
Other new features on the website include:

• enhanced room descriptions to give travelers more specific hotel details;
• more hotel photos so guests can see more of the hotel before they book;
• specials offering travelers unique hotel deals and packages;
• easier-to-navigate Best Western Rewards management for loyalty program members to track and redeem their rewards points;
• option to save favorite hotels for quick booking on future visits; and
• redesigned mobile and Facebook booking sites.

Compiled by Jason Q. Freed.

The Yelp Conspiracy: How a Group of Businesses Conspired to Get Better Yelp Ratings

Yelp recently busted what it calls a "review-swapping ring," in which partners in a business network posted top ratings and glowingly positive reviews of each other's services.
By BRAD TUTTLE | @bradrtuttle | July 6, 2012 |


Add this to the list of reasons you shouldn’t trust online reviews: Yelp recently busted what it calls a “review-swapping ring,” in which partners in a business network posted top ratings and glowingly positive reviews of each other’s services.

User reviews of products and services carry tremendous weight with consumers conducting research online. It’s become customary to scope out a restaurant’s ratings on Yelp before making a reservation and to hunt for hotels using TripAdvisor. Many consumers consider it foolish to skip these steps, with the idea that you ignore the comments of previous customers at your own peril.

Good reviews and top ratings are important to businesses because they push establishments to the top not only of review sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor, but to the top of online search results as well. These results can make or break a business, which is good and bad for user-review sites: Good because consumers seek out the ratings; bad because there is obvious incentive for businesses to attempt to game the system and boost ratings by planting fake (or at least questionable) reviews.

Yelp, the granddaddy of review sites, goes to great length to root out less-than-trustworthy reviews. It employs an aggressive review filter that incorporates various mysterious factors algorithmically to try to keep questionable reviews from affecting ratings. At times, the filter winds up flagging reviews that are perfectly legit, frustrating the honest consumers posting them.

Yelp also tells businesses not to ask for reviews and bans members of networking groups from reviewing fellow networking business members. But that didn’t stop a group of business owners in California from asking each other to rate each other’s services—all with five stars, of course.

The Los Angeles Times reports that Yelp recently unearthed what it refers to as a “review-swapping ring” among members of the South Bay BNI, a networking group that includes attorneys, insurance agencies, real estate agents and even a D.J.:

“This was a sophisticated effort to bolster the reputation of members of this business networking group through five-star reviews,” said David Lee, Yelp’s user operations manager. “Reviews that have a bias lead to a poor consumer experience.”

Starting in February, the business association agreed to hold a contest in which members would score points and prizes for pumping up each other’s ratings and reviews on Yelp. A few months later, the effort expanded, with businesses actively soliciting Yelp reviews via Facebook and LinkedIn. The net result is that, for example, a small-claims paralegal service in Los Angeles quickly boasted 15 five-star reviews, all from fellow members of the networking group.

The business owners involved claim that all of the reviews they received and gave were legitimate, even though no one revealed their network affiliation in reviews, and the group’s president admitted in an email that “we were all part of a networking organization.”

Yelp caught on to the networking group’s actions, and last month dozens of comments and five-star ratings affiliated with the group instantly disappeared.

Yelp would point to the incident as an example in which its filtering and investigative services worked to perfection. The dubious comments and reviews were outed, and in light of how the controversy played out consumers should have just as much, if not more, confidence in its ratings system.

Then again, consumers might also wonder, rightly so: What other conspiracies, rings, pay-off systems, informal agreements, and questionable ratings of all other sorts are out there and have yet to be discovered—and deleted—by Yelp and other review sites?

Brad Tuttle is a reporter at TIME. Find him on Twitter at @bradrtuttle. You can also continue the discussion on TIME’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.



Read more: http://moneyland.time.com/2012/07/06/the-yelp-conspiracy-how-a-group-of-businesses-conspired-to-get-better-yelp-ratings/#ixzz20EnhOLvH

Analyzing what’s really important in online reviews

Go to article

Do you remember in high school how jealous you felt when you got a B+ on your English test while your friend got an A-? Now that we are all grown up, hopefully we can safely look back at how insignificant that one trivial grade was in the grand scheme of things. Well, apparently the lesson hasn’t been fully learned. A few of us are still making similar comparisons for online hotel review aggregates.

Statistical methods need to be recognized 

Is it really important if your property rating on a review website goes from 4.5 to 4.6 within a two-week span? Why are people micromanaging these tiny fluctuations? It’s statistically irrelevant. In school, real performance changes were denoted by evaluating your report card handed out at the end of each semester. Much the same way, you can’t judge your hotel on a review-by-review basis, but instead should use a quarter-to-quarter appraisal.  

A caveat worth mentioning would be significant jump in rating aggregates. The MBA student in me reasons that a shift of +/- 0.6% or greater would be deemed statistically worthy of note. But does a variation like this occur often within a two-week or even month-long span? Ratings typically move a tenth of a percent at a time, and you’d be mistaken to fret over a drop of this size. In my mind, numerical micromanagement represents another risk of the Internet as we are confounded with more metrics than we know how to handle.

It’s a double-edged sword, though. The solution is not to study the numbers with closer scrutiny, but rather to monitor what the guests are saying. Alas, this isn’t baseball. Embrace the chatter and respond to deficiencies, rather than worrying about ratings points.

Ratings revealed for their true worth

One of the beauties of online review sites is that they give guests an anonymous platform to be honest, rather than just silently dismiss your property for return visits. Word of mouth may be a powerful behind-the-scenes motivator, but word of mouse is open to the public, available for you to study and hopefully learn from. These websites are your opportunity to gain unbiased insight and constructive criticism about your operations. Replying to individual commentators is a great way to broadcast the fact that you are willing to accept outside advice, but all your response efforts will be negligible if you don’t take their suggestions to heart and develop a plan of action to correct said mistakes.  

You have to evaluate the quality of your hotel based on qualitative data. So, you better grab a pad and start reading each and every commentary, taking notes along the way. After a couple dozen, you may start to notice some trends. What are the common criticisms? Was the front desk staff regarded as friendly and cooperative? Housekeeping issues? Room service? Was restaurant food beyond what was expected, or just adequate? How does the customer perceive your value equation?

Outliers: What to do?

From my experience, I’ve found that a small number of reviews may be written from a very hurtful slant. Don’t be frazzled, or worse, obstinate. Every critique is an opportunity to learn, even if that wasn’t the intent when posted. Furthermore, when you assess such negative remarks against the average and the long run of things, you’ll find that they are much like that one D you got on a math test back in grade nine. Within a week, the pain is gone and forgotten. The same goes for any direct assaults against your property. Do not discredit the entire online community based on a few rotten eggs. For the most part, they are here to help, but only if you can listen.

So my emphasis is on the long term versus the short term. But you should still read reviews, group commonalities and then develop your own quarterly scorecard for measuring qualitative performance over the past three months. Then compare this scorecard with previous metric surveys or past critiques. Is the situation improving? Are specific complaints less prominent or absent altogether in the latest series of posts? The benefit of using scorecards is to keep track of particulars over a broad period of time — enough breadth for trends to change in a statistically significant manner.  

Going beyond your reviews

The other crucial tactic is to glance over the reviews of your key competitive set. If your competitor’s restaurant’s food presentation is lauded while yours is just pedestrian, then you best have a meeting with your F&B director and executive chef to address this discrepancy. 

I’ve noticed that most explicit qualms found in online assessments arise from gaps in guest service. Most individuals arrive at your hotel with expectations set by what they see on your website homepage and what’s said on the web. Such people will be more obliged to give you a highly positive grade if you meet or slightly exceed their standards. However, it’s when you slip that your reviews will also fall. That is, your staff jumbled a restaurant reservation, the front desk was nearly oblivious to a guest’s needs or individual requests were never fulfilled, to name a few. Maybe you need to heighten internal communication channels to make sure everyone is on the same page. The point is, take advantage of your hotel reviews to investigate and hone your guest service abilities.

The bottom line

Improving your overall rating aggregate is more dependent on guest service than on large-scale issues that require significant capital investment. 

Read through the Internet review chatter. Address the guest’s issues, not the rating. You’ll know when you succeed because the problem will disappear from the latest commentary; or, better yet, a recurring customer might even praise you for these improvements. Regardless, hotel review sites are here to stay. The sooner you start paying attention to what people are writing, the sooner you will see improvement in your ratings.

5/9/2012