Today’s SF Chronicle has an article on boorah.com, one of the growing number of services that allows business owners to get a perspective on how they are being talked about on social networks. (Others include circos.com for hotels, and radian6.com for businesses in general.)
Curious about boorah, I looked up Jack’s Burger House in Dallas. The front page of the review has the comment that “The waiters were terrible , it took us 30 minutes to be seated even though I made reservations 2 weeks in advance , and the food tasted like it came out of a can and was way over priced … It was absolutely TERRIBLE!”
Problem #1: Burger House is a hole-in-the-wall burger restaurant. If you tried to make a reservation they’d laugh. Problem #2: this review doesn’t actually exist; if you click through to the “more” it doesn’t appear among the expanded commentary. My guess is that there is some kind of database sweeper that goofed and pulled the data from the wrong place… but meanwhile there is what looks like a real restaurant review on a real reviewing website, bad news for Burger House if anybody reads it and certainly for boorah which will need to fix this problem, stat.
A cautionary tale with the moral being, don’t throw that “go live” switch before you’re sure you’re ready for the world to see your website.
Otis – You found a good one (or rather, a bad one) with Burger House. Unfortunately, in our database of hundreds of thousands of restaurants there are cases like this that crop up occasionally due to on old issue we had with our review search system many months ago. It’s now fixed, as is the now previously inaccurate information on Burger House.
You’re right about the credibility of a system – BUT, the new BooRah reputation report service is an entirely different service than the content displayed on BooRah.com. When a restaurant (or other customer) orders a reputation report, we kick off a “deep dive” intensive search across the Internet for the latest set of reviews from professionals, blogs, and consumer reviews sites, specifically on that one restaurant. By the time we’ve generated the report (it usually completes in about 2-3 days), we seek to have captured a truly representative set of information that provides a “snapshot” of the restaurant’s Internet reputation based on what’s being said across the Internet. (The report is based on more content than is displayed on the public reviews site.) A restaurant owner, marketer, or consultant can use this report to identify key issues they may want to address with their establishment, whether it be operational service issues that need work, or simply that the owner needs to spend more time engaging their customers in an online forum.
Hi there!
Wow, that’s an interesting issue…and perhaps endemic to how hyper-plugged in we all are now? One super important part about online reputation management and social media monitoring is the ability to not just catch these issues, but correct them before lasting damage is done to your brand.
Thanks for the Radian6 mention, too!
Best,
Amber Naslund
Director of Community, Radian6
@AmberCadabra