Google Places: Reputation Management

Most small businesses live in dread of the day when a competitor drops a nasty review on their Places page. Imagine waking up one day and finding 58 of them. That’s what happened to the Place Page for Moishe’s Moving Systems in NYC. For several days in early July they were finding one 1 star review after another showing up on their Places page. Imagine their sense of futility as they hit the “flag as inappropriate” link over and over again.

A quick call to their competitors across town indicated the same was happening to them. Not just the same pattern but the very same reviews, same bad English, same mispellings, often not even getting the company name correct.

A search in Maps on the phrase “It really hurt me and I highly recommend that NOBODY DO BUSSINESS WITH THIS COMPANY>>>>>> and by the way all the locations they advertise with are 100% fake” surfaced the very same reviews on over 100 moving companies country wide from Miami to LA.

It seems that in this scam, hundreds of moving companies across the U.S. not only ALL received the exact same bad reviews but many then soon received unsolicited proposals to “remove malicious, old, slanderous, unfounded, and internet defamation ratings”.

 

The internet has spawned a whole new generation of reputation management firms that help make sure that the front page of Google does not have bad things prominently displayed about your company. With the growing importance of reviews and the impact that they have had on businesses a number of companies jumped into the “positive review” only game to be sure that your Places page showed only glowingly satisifed reviews.

But apparently, the review reputation management business has taken on a new, more sinister twist of late. It appears that unscrupulous “reputation management” firms are now not only offering to place postive reviews on your Places page and help take down negative reviews, they are actually creating the negative reviews in the first place. Now that’s a business model! Have you seen this practice in other industries?

Google has indicated that they are in the process of removing the reviews. That being said it does highlight the structural problems caused by a still immature review spam algo AND the frustrating process for an SMB to request that a review be removed via the “flag as inappropriate” link. This problem is much like the issues that they confront with bugs in the Places Dashboard process.

It is likely that this obnoxious review spam will be taken down, it is also likely that the spam review filter algo will improve over time.

The current automated flagging system however is inadequate to handle the situation until such time as the algo improves. The flag, like many Google complaint processes, is likely just feedback to their machine learning system. It rarely if ever leads to an immediate takedown. Google consistently prioritizes their needs and the assumed needs of reviewers in this process. It certainly provides NO feedback to the affected merchant as to what if anything Google will do about the problem review.

As demonstrated once again by the review snafu last week, when numerous revews were lost, reviews are an very much a flash point for most business users of Places. The lack of quick public response on Google’s part demonstrated either an incredible lack of staff, an incredible lack of sensitivity or perhaps just an on-going tin ear to the needs of their small business clients vis a vis reviews.

Until such time as the algo is significantly improved and problems like extortion spam can be greatly minimized in an automated fashion Google needs to create a process that comes down in favor of the SMB reporting the problem. Perhaps one that hides the egregious reviews pending a human review process that actually includes timely communication. Once the algo has been refined they could then think about a cut back to the human intervention.

But with Google’s growing portfolio of Local Commerce products they will find a very chilly reception indeed on Main Street until they do a better job of handling reviews.

Geo Data Quality & Time to Fix

The Baltimore Sun reported on Saturday that Google Maps is erroneously showing the complete Intercounty Connector between I-95 and Gaithershburg Md as being open. Apparently Gogle driving directions are directing drivers along a 12 mile stretch between I-95 and Georgia Ave that still “is largely a muddy track where bulldozers are still doing what bulldozers do”.

This particular case is interesting to me for several reasons.

It is a high profile error in a very densely populated area of the US that has lots of road traffic. The Maps error has been picked up by the Washington Post and the regional NBC affiliate as well as the Baltimore Sun. Coverage of the issue has been persistent with the Baltimore Sun following up on their original reporting on 3/27 noting that 48 hours after reporting the problem to Google the problem is still in Maps.

Clearly, the reporter, Michael Dress of the Sun, thinks that Google should be able to fix the problem in a 2 day timeframe and is dismayed that it remains unrepaired. It is a reasonable expectation to think that a critical mapping error be fixed in 2 day timeframe. Whether Google can or will is another question. Typically they take 30-60 days to act on these corrections.  One of the realities of privatization of essential public services like this is that without strong and enforced regulations, the decisions like these are dictated by profit and not the needs of people. Should a private company that is providing a product for free be held to a higher standard when their product affects public safety in the public realm?

Secondly this story has already achieved a fairly high level of visibility by virtue of being covered in media sources that are very high profile and effectively national in scope. Google, in the past, has held that these types of public exposure have little impact on their willingness and speed to affect changes. Most in the SEO industry have seen obvious examples of “hand jobs” that seems to bely that. This will be an interesting case to test whether Google actually does intervene in these types of cases.

Thirdly and a bigger question is whether the overall quality of the underlying Maps data has improved over the past 12 months. Google stopped using TeleAtlas and started using their own geo data in October of 2009. They implemented a system of end user geo error reporting at the same. In May of last year, Google hired 300 temp workers in the Maps arena to improve the quality. As recently as last September, this reporting system was behind Google’s stated commitment of fixing geo errors in 30 days and there still was some reporting of whole towns going missing.

However since that time, complaints seemed to have dropped. While there have been some problematic and visible examples of large scale geographic map errors, for the most part the quality of the underlying map data seems to have generally improved. This seems to be true in both urban areas and rural areas as well.

Certainly the number of high level complaints on my radar has decreased. It was a common issue that affected visibility of business listings but reports in the Places forum of the problem have declined. Not a perfect proxy of reality but one that should reflect the general direction of the quality of the underlying data as businesses have a very high vested interest in being found and are thus motivated to report the problem. In my anectdotal test of Google’s mapping errors in my home town, most have been fixed.

It has been reported that Google receives over 10,000 corrections an hour to their maps. That’s a million corrections received every 4 days and over 87 million some odd changes every year. Do you think that they actually improved the underlying quality to a level appropriate for business listing accuracy?

Would love to hear your opinions on whether you think that Google has improved the quality of the underlying geo-data over the past year.