Please, Please Review Me

Online Reputation Management is a buzzword you're going to be hearing a lot these days. Especially now that Google has just announced that it has added reviews to businesses on Google Maps.

(For more on online reputation management, read The Rise of the User Review or The Need for a Cohesive Identity Strategy)

Over the past few years, Citysearch, Yahoo! Local, YellowPages and many other local search sites have also all added user reviews to their listings. Amazon.com is generally considered the responsible party behind this trend, when they started added user reviews on each of their products.

Pat Kitano, in a post last week, spoke of the need to monitor agent review sites - and I agree wholeheartedly. (There's a business model in there somewhere too. Someone who can aggregate and track reviews on third party sites or conduct an ego search on my behalf and let me know when a new review has been posted. MerchantCircle is the only company currently doing this, as far as I know.)

But monitoring the Net for negative comments is only half the battle really; generating positive reviews is equally as important.

When I was last in San Francisco, I went for lunch at a little Moroccan restaurant and I noticed, in the small print on the back of the menu, a request for patrons to post about their visit on the restaurant review site Yelp. Presumably, the goal was to generate more positive reviews and hopefully attract more customers.

It struck me that this is a perfect application in real estate as well. Going forward, you're going to want as many positive reviews out there as possible. So who's going be the first to put "Review me on Google" on their business cards?

Technorati Tags: marketing, real estate marketing, real estate business, user reviews, online reputation management

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