The internet has truly become a word of mouth marketing haven. There are tons of social network sites, review sites, and product theme sites that offer free word of mouth opportunities. If you make an effort to search the internet carefully, you will find an entire marketing campaign available to you. But as with anything that’s free, there can be issues. Here is a true story that just happened last week.
My daughter’s drum teacher Kevin has a nice small business going. He has built his business strictly on word of mouth. He is a great drum teacher! As with any business, he would like to continue building his business so he looked to the internet.
There is a website for reviews called Yelp. They have become a leading review site in cities throughout the U.S. and the world. They promote the site as “real people, real reviews”. While I have never added a review to the site, I have used the site to see what other people think of a business. For example, I read Yelp reviews for the casino boat company I worked with. It gave me a pulse of what our customers thought of the product.
Kevin decided to use Yelp to help with his word of mouth marketing. He asked all his clients to write a review on the site. Yes, he was taking a chance that someone might say something bad but that is what web 2.0 is all about. After just a few days, about a dozen of his clients had already written reviews. All of which were good reviews.
Yelp decided that too many good reviews were coming in for Kevin and shut him down. They even sent emails to some of the reviewers accusing them of being fake. A ironic twist on this is that one of the “supposed fakers” was a potential advertising client of Yelp. Do you think Yelp is going to get any of the marketing budget now?
Does Yelp want only bad reviews? No, I don’t think so. However, if they are going to be in the review space they need to have a better system. They need to except the fact that businesses are going to use them as a word of mouth marketing tool, especially if they have a good product.
Tags: free internet marketing, online marketing, online review sites, word of mouth marketing, Yelp
