Superpages.com Adds User Reviews

Posted: November 2, 2005

Superpages, one of the larger IYPs on the net has made a bold step toward becoming a community portal - allowing user reviews.

User reviews are hailed as some as the new online community. Allowing a customer to see what other’s thought of a business, before contacting them, is the new wave.

Others consider user reviews to be amateurish at best and to provide no real value.

Personally, I think user reviews are perfect - Amazon has shown us what kind of value they can provide. However, the real trick comes with providing quality user reviews.

One of the most used tactics right now in local marketing is to write your own reviews. And then switch user IDs, and write another one. And then log into a public computer (different IP address) and write yet another one. Soon, you can have 30 great reviews without someone even seeing your listing.

There is very little quality control in the user review market by the portals as a whole.

However, and I can only speculate that this is how Yahoo and other’s are viewing their overarching goals, when a portal has enough individuals using reviews, they start to control each other. Such questions as ‘Was this review helpful”, ‘Report Abuse’, etc can’t just be pretty links, they have to be used. With enough users, they do provide some quality. With too few users, they just provide a way to manipulate the system.

Superpages does have upto a 48 hour wait period before reviews go live - so let’s hope they are providing only quality reviews to their users and reviewing the reviewers before the content goes live.

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