Likeonomics, microinfluence, and time-starved reviewers
5 Comments
Rohit Bhargava used “likeonomics” as his leading trend for 2011, among a very strong list of trends to watch.
“Likes” and microinfluence
In a time-starved world, people want to share opinions but often don’t have a lot of time to take in doing so. The volume of people sharing opinion is quickly increasing, but at the same time, many are decreasing the time they spend doing it.
If we’re going to stay relevant, we need to think through how to leverage this trend.
Microreviews
On the EyeForTravel social media panel in Atlanta, I said I wouldn’t spend more than 15-20 seconds on most retail or restaurant customer reviews.
But if I’m buying a coffee or a quick meal, it’s not likely I’ll spend 15 minutes writing a 3-paragraph review.
That’s why I largely switched from Yelp to UrbanSpoon for restaurant reviews. It’s simpler. One-line mobile reviews. No more time spent agonizing if it’s a 4 or 5-star establishment. I either like the restaurant or I don’t:
A supplement, not a replacement, for long-form reviews
For hotels, longer form written reviews will remain more popular since the experience is much more immersive than a typical restaurant meal. Many people want to describe the different elements of their stay, upload photos and video, and so on.
For management, longer form reviews obviously contain a much richer amount of information to work with. We can extract sentiment with semantic analysis, take action within our organization based on feedback, and even use some testimonials in our advertising.
So what am I supposed to do with microinfluence?
Start with the source that helped this concept gain popularity: try adding Facebook “like” buttons to key pages on your site. (I’ve seen mixed results, so it’s something you’ll have to test for your situation.)
Then as review sites evolve, we’ll have to experiment what this means for us and the future of online reputation management. Right now it’s a bit early, but I wanted to introduce the concept and get your thoughts.
What do you think? How can we use this for hotels?
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This is really interesting.
Especially with Facebook, some day I see people searching for lets say “Goa Hotel” when they plan to travel to Goa and Facebook coming up with results based on their friend’s Likes and the number of Likes in general. Facebook might also choose to aggregate all the comments on Facebook about a particular Hotel and show it on the Facebook Page.
Interesting, no ?
Cheers
Mihir
It doesn’t surprise me that you prefer the simplicity of Urban Spoon over Yelp, it is a low cost/involvement investment to drink a coffee or eat a meal compared to something like a holiday.
When YouTube redesigned their video page in January 2010, they noted that the 1-5 star ratings for videos didn’t work & the overwhelming majority were either 1 or 5 – so they moved to a thumbs up/thumbs down rating system instead.
In terms of what we can be doing with micro-influence, I think you’re onto something with the facebook like button. While it might have no influence on search as an example, amassing a following within facebook has a value, not to mention the echo chamber effect that produces because of the facebook wall.
One thing that I haven’t seen enough about yet is the potential influence Twitter might have – given that Google have stated that they are following social ranking signals of tweets and applying a social rank to users, akin to page rank for websites.
While I don’t know that Google are doing this, it makes sense that they are applying their sentiment analysis engine to tweets. A savvy marketer might leverage that by constantly changing the default tweet text to produce variance in phrase, which might assist with search rankings like link text does now.
Just thinking aloud.
Interesting view point to ponder over !
This is definitely interesting. We already implemented the “like” feature on mostly all of the pages on our new websites. You can see it on http://www.pueblobonito.com. It is a pretty easy thing to add to a website and for your website visitors it is less committed then becoming a fan. For us, it still has a good net effect since the choice to like our page is noted on a person’s wall. Josiah, you say that you have seen “mixed results”. I wonder what the downside of these buttons could be. Or do you mean that in some cases there is just not a lot of response?
Hi Josiah..
So glad to see this kind of article here at HotelMarketingStrategies.com
I have never been a big fan of rating systems. I am just like you, either I like it or I don’t. No big hairy deal.
I can go to a movie that 5 stars and top notch critics and I can find myself bored to death. And sometimes I see a movie that get slammed, and I love it. It is the same with the school system we grade people to distinguish if they will make the cut or not.
Reviews is often tricky if you get a very low review it will take a lot of high reviews to make up for it.
I support going the Social Route ala adding Like buttons reviews. Facebook has it and Amazon has it. I think we will see a shift in this direction.
Though I still enjoy Yelp. Have not checked out Urbanspoon yet, but I like what I see here. Interesting concept, will we see something similar for ReviewPro?
Cheers.. Are