Keynote Address on the Future of AI
Storm IMC’s Managing Director, Ronan Nichol, recently delivered a keynote address at the Apparelmaster Conference in New Plymouth.
READ MOREFind Out How To Avoid Breaching Google's Deceptive Content & Behaviour Policy
and Paying The Very High Price for Cheating
I think at this point its safe to say most business owners are sharply aware of the importance of online reputation and the pivotal role that Google Business Profiles Reviews play in presenting their business in a very positive light and winning new customers. Many local business operators simply live and die on the strength of their online reviews with recent research showing that 88% of shoppers read reviews before making a purchase.
A steady stream 5-star Google reviews, which result in a very positive overall Google review score is a massive boost to your business credibility, it demonstrates social proof to prospective customers at a pivotal point in the customer journey and will ultimately result in you winning significantly more sales and customers. Consequently even just a small sprinkling of poor reviews, or even a lot of ambivalent 3-star reviews can serve as a 'red flag' to prospective customers and they will just hit the back button and find another provider. The worst part is you'll never even know that you missed out on the sale.
It is against this backdrop that many business are introduced to an almost 'too good to be true' solution known in the industry as 'review gating'. The companies offering these solutions won't call it review gating and will likely refer to it as a 'great tool improving the quality of your reviews (much in the in the same way that Ponzi schemes are presented as 'amazing investment opportunities'). The problem is that review gating is prohibited by Google, the penalties for violating the policy can be very harsh and Google's tools for detecting these policy violations have taken a very big step foreward with the introduction of AI and will continue to improve into the future greatly increasing the risk for anyone using these deceptive tactics.
There are a few type of review gating but the one that we are seeing being increasing sold to local businesses (electricians, dentists, HVAC installers etc) is a fairly simplistic software tool where the business sends out a request for a Google or Meta review to their customers, normally following the delivery of a product or service and usually by email or text - This part of the process is totally fine in and of itself.
When the customer receives the review request, instead of being directed to Google or Meta to provide the review directly, the user is directed to a third-party webpage and prompted to indicate if their experience has been good or bad, normally by means of clicking on either a happy face or sad face or rating their experience on a numeric scale. Once the user has indicated their level of satisfaction, they will be presented with two or more options based on their previous response. Typically if the user have indicated that they are happy they will be promptly directed to submit their review to Google or Meta. If however they have indicated that they are not happy they are then directed to some other action e.g please enter your negative review on our webpage (where is will never see the light of day) or otherwise attempting to obstruct the user from leaving a negative review by introducing some other process e.g please fill in our feedback form to help us improve.
The business proposition here is really pretty clear and very attractive - request Google reviews from your customers and use a piece of software to send the happy one straight to Google to give you and review and 'catch and kill' all the negative ones of otherwise obstruct the user by putting obstacles in there way knowing full well that they are busy and will move on to other things without actually leaving their review. Its certainly a very easy and attractive solution (even though it is likely hiding the root problem that you should actually be addressing) but unfortunately it is a violation of Google (and many other platforms) policy and can result in all your reviews getting removed and even harsher actions.
You can see Googles Policy on this, listed under Deceptive content and behaviour on their website which says that they do not allow merchants to Discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers. I have included a screengrab below showing the precise wording to save you the click.
I have heard from businesses that have been offering these type of services that the solution providers offering these tools claim that for reason X or Y that this policy doesn't apply to their service and that they have a letter or other official communication from Google explaining that they are exempt, but when asked to share this documentation they go silent, never to be heard form again.
I have been working in digital marketing space long enough to recall many examples of when Google updated their algorithm and overnight 100,000s of business websites that had been sailing to close to the wind, but getting away with it, simply got wiped off the face of the search engine.
In many of these instances (The Google 'Penguin' update spring to mind) the website owners were using a third-party services and were unaware of the risk they were taking, but ended up paying a very high price for their ignorance (online visibility and reputations trashed) and the companies that had sold them the 'services' simply upped and vanished.
This is has all happened before and will inevitably happen again and when the tide does go out, we'll once again discover who's been swimming naked to borrow a phrase from Warren Buffett.
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Storm IMC’s Managing Director, Ronan Nichol, recently delivered a keynote address at the Apparelmaster Conference in New Plymouth.
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