It's interesting that something as old fashioned as trust keeps coming up as the theme for me in a course on social networking. Or maybe it's predictable?
The way I read our ITEC656 readings is by opening a new tab for each reading, and then reading each tab, starting from the right (in effect, reading from the bottom of the list to the top). So I read the older How Many Reviewers... article about Yelp before reading Review Site Yelp Draws Some Outcries of its Own this evening. As I was reading the first article, I was remembering that I'd read of some very fundamental criticisms of Yelp somewhere, and I hoped that this would be addressed.
I was glad to see the trust issue addressed in the second article (which I think I'd read previously). It sounds like Yelp has a lot of potential, but they need to work out a policy where the readers, reviewers and reviewees are confident of the accuracy of the posts, and have a recourse when they feel something has been done unfairly.
Probably something with some transparency would do the most good. I'm thinking of the moderating and meta-moderating system using at Slashdot.org where readers moderate comments about news articles, and other readers rate (meta-moderate) the moderations, as a check that someone's not being overly subjective in their moderations. I think it works pretty well, or it did back in the day when I spent a lot of time reading comments. Perhaps something similar would work for Yelp. It works because it's fairly transparent and people understand how it works, whereas the Yelp system sounds like it's shrouded in mystery.
Trust is required for social media to work: I need to trust Facebook to not sell too much of my personal information before I will join, I need to trust my friends that I add to my profile to not spam me or abuse my declaration of our relationship, and I need to trust the reviewers I read on Amazon (I don't use Yelp) that they are real uninvolved consumers rather than vendors or manufacturers.
I've made purchasing decisions purely based on reviews posted to Amazon - that is, negative reviews have turned me off of an item, if I feel the issue reported is important to me. Funny though thinking about it: I am not as easily swayed by positive reviews. I think I may intrinsically be not trusting the good reviews as easily as I trust the negative ones.
What online service do you trust, or not?(Photo credit HG Rules)
I think that the Internet "trust" issue can be boiled down to two key issues:
ReplyDelete1. Who do you trust?
2. How important is trust in this online transaction?
For example, if you where trying to figure out where to get your clothes dry cleaned in a new city, would you trust a YELP comment? Would that suffice? Even if you did trust said YELP commenter, how much would a twist in fate negatively impact you? Maybe you would get a overly starched oxford shirt back a week later, but I don't think there needs to be recourse for such an issue. Oftentimes we turn to YELP and other help sites for services, etc. which are ultimately extremely circumstancial in nature, i.e. you cannot seperate the place where the service is performed, i.e. dry cleaner from the person who is performing the service. If that person is in a bad mood or you drop off your clothing at the end of her shift, maybe you will not get the best customer service. In this cases and other related cases, there is no recourse for the initial YELP poster. This is the risk we run for taking advice from others....from those random, some arguably legitimate sources on the Internet.
Hi CaroLyn -
ReplyDeleteGreat post about trust in the digital age, and how such a basic concept is still incredibly important to the way that we make decisions as consumers, or the way we interact with our customers as businesses.
About your statement, "Trust is required for social media to work." - I am entirely in agreement with you about this. And for many yelpers (and for myself, personally) I find that I gravitate most toward reviews of friends and acquaintances that I have met, and that I've compared many of my own opinions against reviews that they have shared to determine if we have common tastes.
When it comes to people who are new to the world of social media, whether to Yelp or another reviewing website, how do you think people can assess what information to trust? What responsibility does a site itself have for creating a trustworthy space? And how can a site go about ensuring trustworthy content is presented to visitors efficiently and effectively?
I thought that the suggestion for meta-rating reviews is a great idea, and not being terribly familiar with how slashdot works, it's definitely something I'll look into to share with our management team. But then the question becomes... who moderates the moderators? Meaning... how does one prevent a moderating war between people who ardently love a business vs. people who ardently hate a business and vote up or down on any given review, whether they approve or don't approve?
Thanks for bringing up a potential solution - it's always great to have extra ideas to bat around to see if they make sense to implement!
Thanks,
-Kevin L, Yelp DC CM