Smart Web Blog

Why Local Businesses Lag in Benefitting from Online Feedback?

Last week, I came across an interesting post on Greg Sterling's Screenwerk blog about how online feedback is influencing consumer purchasing decisions. The survey and analysis conducted by Opinion Research Corporation concluded that  84 percent of Americans used online customer evaluations in making decision to purchase a product or service. Here's the breakdown on the types of products and services that were surveyed and reported.

While it is clear that travel and consumer electronic goods have reached some level of saturation, the most interesting aspect is that all "local services"  continue to trend up and still lag behind. Contrast this with the fact that, in the pre-online reviews era, local services were the most influenced category through word-of-mouth. I have often believed that information about local services are significantly skewed since they are hard to track. I also believe that numbers would be significantly lower if all the local categories were tallied. However, the following 3 aspects could explain the growth and adoption pattern in local services:

Fragmented Recommendations - There are more than 20 million small businesses and only a small percentage of them have online reviews. It is likely that people would look for different level of trust and authority on recommendations depending on the type of service. One may want a recommendation from a close friend/confidant for a wedding planner while they could easily take a recommendation from an anonymous online reviewer for a dining occasion. Also, if you are traveling for business/leisure and need a good local business recommendation there, you may not get a recommendation from a trusted source. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are definitely helping in eliminating the geography-based limitations but coverage-gap still remains a huge issue. The following picture illustrates the coverage vs. trust conflict in fragmented local business domain.

Review sites such as Yelp, Citysearch have played a huge role in generating reviews that could expand coverage but still their content generation prowess has been limited to major metropolitan areas and is very time & resource consuming. The slow but increasing growth in Opinion Research Corporation's survey may be directly a result of the penetration of such review sources. Review & recommendation aggregators may also be contributing the growth.

Convergence of Opinion (or lack thereof) - Reviews about consumer electronics tend to converge very quickly. For many gadgets, it comes down to product specs and price/performance comparison with others in the category. The early reviewers influence other buyers and ratings quickly reach a settling state. On the other hand, local products & services are very "touchy/feely" and experience tends to differ from person to person. Even a business with 50 reviews may not offer sufficient insight and trust for a prospective buyer to make a decision. This adds to the inability to make a purchasing decision about a local product/service.

Buried Reviews (sort of) - Despite being highly fragmented, local products are services are still the most discussed category amongst consumers. Whether in newsgroups, informal conversations, tweets or blogs, they still dominate the discussion in our daily lives. Many small businesses are rarely online. They may have a website, but between their operational challenges and limited budget, they find it extremely hard to build their real online presence.  The online reputation of a small business is essential to influencing and attracting new customers.  Small businesses need to work on moving the informal discussions in newsgroups, tweets, blogs and other online forums to formal review mechanisms, so they can be tracked and used as influencers in a consumer decision process.

BooRah joins forces with Intuit

I'm excited to announce that BooRah is now part of Intuit. Intuit has exceptional products, loyal customers, and, is highly focused on customer experience/satisfaction.  I'm thrilled that we’ll be applying our technology to help local business owners stay on top of and improve their online reputations!

It has been a very rewarding experience over the past 3 years since I started BooRah and many thanks to all my trusted friends and well-wishers.

San Francisco Chronicle Comes to Us

  San Francisco Chronicle reviewed our reputation management product. With all the recent discussion about how local businesses are dealing with social media and user reviews, BooRah's reputation management product provides the necessary tools to monitor what is going on in the online world. It's a good hit for us and thanks to Chronicle for covering us.

" The 2-year-old firm, which started as a restaurant search site, is expanding to create summaries of everything that's being written about a particular dining establishment. It uses technology developed in-house to analyze the sentiments in online reviews and then generate scores, rankings and summaries. "

They also highlight the benefit of our newly announced restaurant reputation reports -

"One way for restaurant owners to differentiate themselves is by heeding and responding to online feedback, and our reputation reports and review tracking services make it much easier to do that."

We even had their  photographer come to our office and take a few pictures.

@Shrisha in blue, @NBandaru (me) holding mac with logo and @BooRahGuy in the front

Interesting Conversation on FalkensMaze

I had talked to Mark Johnson  and Josh Dilworth a while ago and completely forgotten about the podcast they recorded. I happened to accidently come across it today on FalkenzMaze  and it's a great conversation about what we do and our unique value proposition. It's a bit lengthy but hope you'll enjoy it.

You can hear the entire conversation on FalkensMaze at http://falkensmaze.net/post/62444821/episode-6-finds-us-chatting-with-nagaraju

OR

You can listen directly to it here

Thank Mark and Josh for taking the time to talk to me.

Evaluating Restaurant Search Sites

Last weekend, I had a chance to review the results of the analysis conducted by graduate business students of Santa Clara University. Many thanks to Prof. Kirthi Kalyanam for sharing some of the details on study related to search for "restaurants" on Google, Yelp and BooRah. The analysis included a few questions on business models etc., but I thought I'd share some interesting aspects on customer experience, relevance and how they rated the sites. The graduate business students all evaluated responses based on searching for restaurants in palo alto.

Making Sense of Search Results

"Google uses a combination of keywords, site popularity, and a proprietary cataloging routing to determine the order to present results. Yelp, on the other hand, first presents it sponsored restaurants and then the remainder of the restaurants. It is unclear how it determines the order of the non-sponsored restaurants - although it appears to be come combination of ratings and popularity. Boorah presents the list of restaurants simply by the quantity of "rahs" for each restaurant"

Most of the students inferred that Google did not provide a lot of supporting detail and seemed to perform well only when consumers were looking for maps, directions or a quick phone number. However, this is not surprising since Google is the just the starting point for a more comprehensive search in most cases.

"Boorah/Yelp: Better Dining Experience = Informed Reviews + Restaurant Information + Dining Expectations"

"Google: Quick Location of Restaurant = Map Location + Directions"

Search Results Relevance

The ranking for restaurants vary based on algorithms used by various sites but the trust and credibility in those rankings comes from supporting information. Overall, the analysis concluded that general purpose search engines like Google provided limited but valuable starting point for restaurant search.

Below are some of the typical criteria that were used to determine which site to use in making a dining decision:

    * Site Navigation
    * Number of Search Results
    * Accuracy / Credibility of Ratings
    * Response Time
    * Reviews
    * Relevant information such as reservations, discounts, menus

Google was highly rated them for easy navigation, response time and comprehensiveness of search results. Yelp scored highly for good reviews, good graphical view of user ratings, less clutter and usefulness of information. BooRah scored well when they found search results to be most relevant amongst the three, comprehensiveness of information such as online reservations, menus,discounts and ability to search for those.

Reliability of Reviews & Ratings

Google did not feature much in this discussion but some users clearly identified the two different approaches to building credibility amongst consumers. Yelp's approach is firmly planted in identity ownership and personal information that describes person's reviewing tactics and whether you agree or disagree with their distributions.  The same analysis describes BooRah's approach as a model of aggregation and semantic processing of vast quantity of information, achieving relevance through volume and processing.

Takeaways

Google results did not seem to offer any ability to make a credible dining decision. Except for phone and maps information, the students relied on sites such as BooRah & Yelp to help with recommendations.  A striking commonality across the analysis is how search has matured over the past year.  Almost all of the analysis viewed Google as simply a starting point for certain types of search and a source for basic information.  Not too long ago, people would be somewhat confused about what a ratings and reviews site is and how to use/judge one. Now it seems that there is very little confusion about the first aspect.  Perhaps 2009 will lead to consumers forming clear preferences on what they consider to be important features in a ratings and reviews site.

At BooRah, we firmly believe that a semantic approach to user reviews provides a unique and valuable consumer experience and at the same time caters to a consistent experience on the phone and web. I'm pleasantly surprised by the analysis that endorsed our approach and feel that we provide a highly relevant search for consumer needs. Our reach and breadth are a bit limited for now, but we are growing at a rapid rate and expanding to newer horizons.

Top 10 Semantic Web Companies for 2008

ReadWriteWeb today announced it's list of top semantic web companies for 2008. Semantic technology has manifested in mainstream apps in different forms during the past year and the folks at RWW have been at the forefront of discovering, analyzing and bringing it to the broader audience. So big kudos to them for such a great job.

Both Yahoo's introduction of SearchMonkey product and Microsoft's acquisition of Powerset demonstrate that the big search engines value semantic technology platforms and are continuing to pursue initiatives in that direction.

I'm excited that, BooRah has been recognized as one of the top companies in the semantic web area. Having spent nearly 3 years building a platform for sentiment extraction and meta data generation, we are now at a stage where we can accelerate deployment into other areas in a much more aggressive fashion.  I'm also very happy for other companies on that list ( many of them are good friends), congratulations!

2009 and future holds great promise for consumers and businesses who will see great improvement in their interactions with the products that will be powered by semantic technology.

SES San Jose - Semantic Search Session

The 10th Annual SES event will be at San Jose from Aug 18-22, 2008. The conference boasts attendance and participation from top Internet companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft etc.. and many early stage companies demonstrating start of the art search technologies. I'll be there for BooRah on a "Semantic Search" panel along with other industry big wigs such as Yahoo, Ask.com, Powerset, Hakia etc.. Join our session on 18th Aug 2008 at 11:15AM.

Here's some details on the session:
As search dominates our Internet use, this session will explore the new generation of semantic technologies that look to radically change the future. Different companies have taken different approaches to increasing relevance and improving quality of search results. From true natural language search being pursued by companies like Powerset/Hakia, to vertical-focused semantic companies such as BooRah and Uptake, this session will discuss how consumers will benefit directly from these new sets of Internet destinations or enhance experience on existing search engines.

You can see the detailed agenda at Search Engine Strategies Agenda

See you there.

Community Manager - Do you need one?

Marshall Kirkpatrick over at ReadWriteWeb has a great post about the role of community managers and how they influence startups.

A community manager is someone who communicates with a company's users/customers, development team and executives and other stake holders in order to clarify and amplify the work of all parties. They probably provide customer service, highlight best use-cases of a product, make first contact in some potential business partnerships and increase the public visibility of the company they work for.

See the rest of this great post and comments at Do Startups need community managers?

A Space Rendezvous that Matters

Last week NASA landed it's Phoenix Mars Lander on Mars. What a thrill to follow the successful landing event and exploration of water at the icecap on Mars! Nothing can be more exciting than to be a team member at command and control centers.

Congratulations NASA!

Powerset - Future of Search?

Powerset launched last week with much fanfare after a long wait.   Powerset is a Natural Language Search company which started with search of wikipedia/freebase articles. Similar to Google, you can enter keywords, phrases or ask specific questions.  Their technology aggregates information from multiple articles and provides most relevant references to articles, and in some cases directly answering the questions.

Most of the coverage focused around references to Michael Arrington post on TechCrunch and Danny Sullivan's post on SearchEngineLand. I had a chance to play with their stuff myself and thought I'd share my perspective.

After playing around with different queries that seemed to disappoint people, it was interesting to note the snap judgement aspects. E.g, Vanessa Fox's blog talks about about her bankruptcy reference. What most people fail to realize is that Google had the opportunity to test and iterate it's search at Yahoo's expense for a long time. Large search engines do not evolve overnight. The flip side of that is that consumers will not make the shift unless they find something that delivers better value and search experience. How Powerset conquers the mind share and market share in search remains to be seen, but there are clearly proof points to that pipe dream.

I started off with a simple query "what movies did bruce willis star in" in both Powerset and Google. Believe it or not, Powerset just nailed the responses that I was looking for. Google on the other hand brought up enough references but none that was really right on the mark. Infact, interestingly enough the third link's title was "Bruce Willis to star in". Powerset's results from Freebase also included pictures.

Similarly, I tried a bunch more queries, which had natural language search intent than just keywords until I finally ended up at "what charges were brought against bill clinton"? Google had a reference to Wikipedia article on the 4th link but if you clicked on that link, you'd quickly be lost in a ton of irrelevant stuff. Powerset, I thought, had a lot better results, though the 2nd link wasn't necessary relevant.

I then started trying a couple variations on google and finally found that "charges against bill clinton" seemed to yield better results and seemed comparable. It's not clear what percentage of general searches are in proper construct form (vs. keywords) but it seems to me Powerset does deliver for such queries.

The biggest downside for my searches was where Powerset lacked content from multiple sources. Freebase or Wikipedia have very little information for searches such as "Safeway" (I'd have expected a link to the website) but Google over the past years has THE index for all webpages. I'd be eager to see more content from different sources, which I think will truly bring out the differentiation.

Ultimately, the challenge with such technologies is one of user adoption, consumers cannot comprehend that technology has evolved so much that it's capable of reading,understanding and responding as we humans do. How we engage users to harness that power ultimately decides success or failure!

Disclosure: I'm founder of BooRah, an NLP Restaurant Search Company that extracts sentiments from user reviews and blogs and generates summaries and ratings for restaurants across the country. The ideas expressed hereby are as a blogger and may not reflect BooRah's perspective.