The Evolution of Online Reviews: Adapting to Changing Platforms and Consumer Behavior (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Online reviews have been around for some time, right? Platforms have changed, evolved. There are new platforms. There's stuff I'm sure that I've never even heard of that you can leave a review on, right? Not to mention just all the listings, but kind of put the listings aside and think about just the reviews. You know, how have we seen that evolve? I know here recently, maybe not all that recent, within the last year or so, Facebook kind of evolved their ratings and reviews, right, with the would you recommend or not and some of that kind of stuff. And so are we continuing to see the platforms themselves evolve the way they treat these

Speaker 2: reviews? Yeah, definitely. So we saw with Google, for instance, you could just leave a review and it was in a date sort of format. So you can, you know, it was the newest one was at the top and then you can go and if there were a number of reviews you can page over to see the oldest one, you know, on however many pages back it was within just the Google My Places. But then starting to add features like this was helpful, the thumbs up on it, the length of the review starting to get a little bit more juice in terms of where Google placed that as default from a listing standpoint of those reviews. You can have the newest one, may not even be on the first page where you see the Google reviews. So some of those evolutions are happening. They want, the platforms want to give you the most relevant information that will help the consumer make a choice in the shortest amount of time. So definitely have seen that evolved, but I think too, there's some platforms, a new one being CareDash, for example, they're looking to get verified patient reviews on the platform. So it's, you know, in the patients like me, quote unquote, that, you know, they're offering another sort of value prop to folks who are looking and doing research on a provider. You have U.S. News and World Report adding a patient experience factor to their profiles. So we're seeing a lot of different movement and growth in this space. The traditional ones, you know, a lot of them are what platforms get used are impacted on Google's algorithms changes, you know, one's rise and fall and the volume to those based on what Google decides to do since Google is the, the behemoth.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, and that's where everybody's going. Right. That's kind of the point of entry in a lot of cases. Right. And so, you know, with all these platforms and they're available to us, you know, the, how you prioritize and spend time as the owner, the brand, if you will. That's an interesting discussion. Right. I mean, we've had discussions about this before. You take something like Yelp in Austin, Texas is very prevalent in West Texas. It's not in the state of Florida. It is in the state of Mississippi. It's not right. So I think a lot of this is as marketers or as owners or protector of the brand is going out and figuring out our consumers, where are they spending time?

Speaker 2: Right. Absolutely. And at some point in certain markets, there are going to be platforms that have, whether they launched there, I'm thinking of, of ZocDoc for instance. Oh, sure. You know, they launched in Denver really heavy. So they may have more reviews of their positions on ZocDoc just from a listing standpoint than some other cities. So it is very relevant to the market. Like you said, Yelp, 5% of Yelps and data that you can read in their annual report is related to healthcare businesses. Well, in some cities, it's going to be really high. So you have to manage that platform and be concerned. In some other cities, you probably don't need to be as concerned about them. So definitely contextualizing it to where you're at, what platforms may have launched in your city or had a foothold, that's going to make a difference. And so depending on how much time and effort you put in, you definitely need to do an audit in the landscape of where are things raking out and then giving your attention to those platforms.