A FUNNY thing happened on the way to a new restaurant the other night.
An email pinged in from a reader, about the very restaurant I was heading to, complaining that a review they had posted about it on Facebook had instantly disappeared. Apparently, the review hadn't been exactly flattering. I pulled up the Facebook page and checked the reviews to discover three startling things. 1) There wasn't a single review that wasn't five stars 2) There was a surprisingly high number of reviews considering it had opened about five minutes ago and c) it had literally thousands and thousands of likes already. My first thought was this guy shouldn't be wasting his time with restaurants; he should be standing for parliament given the most popular politician on earth is said to struggle to amass 3000 personal votes or likes - for him not for the party.
Secondly: when did Facebook get in on the incredibly lucrative review business? And thirdly: can page owners really remove non-flattering reviews from there? Uh-oh. Don't get me wrong. I have no idea whether what the reader was saying was true. And..I love online reviews and haven't bought a thing on Amazon for years without spending hours reading through the lies, paid-for-lies and absolutely genuine gems that make up their review section. As for Trip Advisor, I'm often tickled by how well reviews are written even though a writer may have been nowhere near the venue and their ranking system is, in my view, completely and utterly worthless. Personally, I'm convinced there is at least one restaurant in Scotland whose success - and it is now very successful - owes a lot to getting in early on the fake review market. Anyway, I was so spooked by this possibly missing review, which the reader sent to me by the way, that I decided to postpone my visit and watch what was happening online. It's been obvious for years that the whole system is wide open to abuse whether it be fake positive reviews (from owners and their chums), fake negative reviews (from rivals) or just all round mad stuff. In fact so prevalent does the problem seem, to me anyway, that anyone who opens a restaurant and doesn't do some TripAdvisor massaging runs the risk of putting themselves at a serious competitive disadvantage. Uh-huh. I'd note that down for your defence if you've been doing a bit of tweaking because the authorities who have snoozed through the whole issue so far have suddenly woken up. Indeed the Competition and Markets Authority has just published a report and opened an investigation into a number of companies and individuals. Prosecutions may follow, it grimly warns. Frankly? Punishing the little guy while ignoring the corporate giants? Come on. I know thats the British way but the problem obviously lies with Trip Advisor and the rest who, if you ask me, seem to have skipped responsibility by claiming they only exist in web-land or somewhere very far away and therefore it's-legally-not-their-problem. As for their claims they effectively weed out fake reviews? Lol, as we say in cyberspace.
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