Mpact Magic Reviews the “Glowing Reviews” Flare-Up in Reputation Management Battle
Las Vegas, NV (PRWEB) July 25, 2013 -- The reputation management world is all in a flurry today because Edmunds.com, an automotive research company, is claiming to have filed a lawsuit against Humankind which, among its varied activities, has a proxy posting service called “Glowing Reviews’.
The Glowing Reviews service claims to take customer comments delivered legitimately to the operators of brick-and-mortar businesses and, using proxies, posts them online. Unless the business owners craft the reviews themselves, the words being published online are legitimate comments by legitimate customers. If the business owners are lying, that is another matter, but not an issue for which Glowing Reviews can be held responsible.
“There are any number of examples where a tool (or drug) sold for one purpose is misused for another,” comments Roger McManus, president of Mpact Magic. “To single out a single company for unwittingly being misused is a bit of a stretch.”
“Just to be clear,” McManus continues, “Mpact Magic does not endorse the use of fake reviews. But, we see far too many legitimate businesses battle against third-party review sites who take the word of whomever wants to start typing. They create rules and policies that can literally drive a small business out of existence. Any processes that can help businesses who have happy consumers express themselves more frequently are legitimate.”
McManus admits his position is not without a bit of bias. Mpact Magic produces systems that proactively facilitate happy customers getting reviews posted online and unhappy customers to engage a business’s management on the spot.
Damages?
News reports suggest that Edmunds is going to seek damages for the actions taken by Humankind in posting to the Edmunds site. The math will be interesting.
First, what is the damage in dollars for having a third party pass along something nice said by a customer?
Then, there is the “spitting in the ocean” factor. Edmunds claims to have found 76 reviews posted on the sites for 25 dealerships. They have determined that they can prove these are fake reviews. That would represent three allegedly fake reviews per dealership. They don’t say over what period of time.
And, there is “spitting in the ocean, Part 2”. According to the Los Angeles Times, Edmunds claims to post 4,000 reviews per month. For argument’s sake, if the 76 reviews in contention were gathered over just 12 months, that works out to a ratio of 632: 1 (.0016). Even accepting the unproven fact that the reviews were fake, that hardly seems damaging in big-dollar terms.
S.I.T.O. Part 3 gets down to the dealerships involved. Edmunds claims that they discovered this at 25 dealerships. There are 21,139 dealerships in the US. That ratio is 846: 1 (.0011). Even multiplying the number of dealerships by 100 would still be only one percent.
The Real Danger
The point is not to minimize the impact on a system that helps consumers distinguish good providers from the mediocre (if we assume the really bad ones eventually self-destruct anyway regardless of what people say about them). The real danger is concentrating power in the hands of, at best, disinterested third parties or, at worst, third parties who attempt to sell advertising to those most in pain.
Companies like Glowing Reviews may laugh in the face of Terms of Service in their methodology, but unless fraud can be proved, they provide a way for small businesses to defend themselves. Glowing Reviews interpretation of the TOS situation differs from their accusers.
Consumers who get good service rather expect it. They spend their money at businesses with the assumption that they will get good value for their money. When they get good value, they are not inclined to go out of their way to talk about it. When they don’t, all of a sudden they have all sorts of weapons to get even. And, they use them.
This results in an inherently unbalanced system. The bad gets reported at a statistically much greater rate than the good. And, often the good is filtered, because the review site operators think that positive comments are less credible – perhaps because of the human nature described above. Happy customers expected to be happy in the first place.
Balancing the Scales
Companies like Mpact Magic take this human nature into account. Pleased customers are generally happy to say so – if anyone asks. Legitimate systems to solicit real customer comments, good or bad, are far too rare. Without them, businesses are left to the random whims of customers for their very survival. A legitimate system will let happy customers have an easy route to expressing themselves..
No Room for the Dishonest
The reputation management industry has grown up around the specific need for businesses to defend themselves. There is no room for gaming the system. There is no room for the dishonest. Neither is there space for hard-working business owners to be overburdened by outside “reporters” to which they cannot adequately respond.
Roger McManus, Mpact Magic, Inc., http://mpactmagic.com, 702-605-8787 523, [email protected]
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