Review Limbo

RateMyTeachers.com is a user review site dedicated to the teaching profession, covering grades K-12 in the U.S. and similar education levels in the U.K., Canda, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand. As with future site reviews on ReviewLimbo, we will be looking at several factors in order to generate an overall measure of this site’s value to its intended and incidental audiences: in this case, parents, students and faculty supervisors. Alrighty, let’s hop to it.

According to InternetArchive.org, RateMyTeachers first went live in 2001… easily one of the embryonic review websites on the web. It currently boasts over 10 million ratings of 1.5 million teachers - no other site (apart from sites that exclusively rate college professors) can hold a candle to those figures, making RateMyTeachers the authority on K-12 teacher reviews and ratings.

The developers of this site have obviously read SEO 101: the reviewee’s detail page places the subject in the beginning of the title tag, in the page url, in an H1 tag, in the body text, and in a link. As a review site, you can’t do much better than that.

But more important than the level of search engine optimization is the total lack of SERP protection that the subject has. These reviewees are individuals, not businesses or organizations… that means they typically have no search engine presence of their own, and thus, their detail page on RateMyTeachers shoots to the top of any query for that individual. It’s a great example of a CR site having absolute search engine power.

Behold, the Achilles’ heel of this site: the reviewers. The big problem here is that the reviewers and the reviewees have contradicting criteria for success. Teachers base their success on how much their students learn, and how well they maintain discipline and focus in the classroom. Most students, however, don’t exactly appreciate the value of homework and studying. They want an easy class where they can have fun and get good grades without trying. Understanding this, it’s obvious that the RateMyTeachers model is flawed - after all, a scathing review from a student could simply mean that the teacher did his/her job admirably, and that it was the student who performed poorly.

It doesn’t help that the reviewer base is comprised of children and young adults. Immature by nature, one would have to assume that their reviews should always be taken with a grain of salt.

The RateMyTeachers review system covers a sparse and awkward criteria set: Easiness (a vague measure of quality at best, but apparently not part of the rating formula), Helpfulness, and Clarity. There are several measures in place to maintain quality (flag a review, reply to a review, etc.), but again this is overshadowed by the immaturity of the reviewers. I noticed several instances where the reviewer’s comments were positive but their ranking inputs were negative… the kind of review data that should not make it to a live site.

RateMyTeachers.com gets a “very detrimental” overall rating for its value to the audience simply because the concept is all wrong. As previously stated, the goals of the reviewees (school teachers) are often in direct opposition to the goals of the reviewers (children), resulting in a near-useless data set.

Yet, the site still renders judgments on teachers that I doubt any parent would be able to turn a blind eye to, and access to such information could easily lead to favoritism, skewed class structures, and even lost jobs. It has been well-documented that America’s school system is slowly becoming more like a babysitting service and less like an educational institution, and RateMyTeachers.com only furthers this regression.

A funny thing happens when people start reviewing services and individuals… all the logic they typically use (when judging product reviews) goes down the crapper.

While reading product reviews, consumers instinctively build pro vs. con lists in their heads, and as long as the pros significantly outweigh the cons, consumers typically buy the product. But once the focus of the reviews shifts to services, local businesses or individuals, the witch hunt begins and negative bias rears its ugly head.

Why does this happen? Because there’s little emotion tied to product reviews, whereas emotion is one of the biggest contributing factors in service or individual reviews… and emotion is the enemy of logic. It’s highly unlikely you’d ever feel “wronged” or “disenfranchised” by the latest digital camera - but your landlord? Yeah, that could get touchy. Review readers appreciate this, and instead of taking the good with the bad as they tend to with product reviews, they sniff out the bad as a test of the reviewee’s credibility.

So which professions should fear consumer reviews and CR sites? The ones that rely heavily on credibility, of course. The repercussions are devastating because they typically result in losing business before you even have a chance to win the consumer over. Here’s the hit list… feel free to comment and add other professions or industries you can think of.

1. Condo/Apartment Owners: Reviews of apartments, condo developments, and public housing areas have a huge effect on consumer choices for two reasons: 1) as I can tell you from recent experience, it’s annoying as hell to drive around a city all day looking at apartments - consumers will look for any excuse not to check a place out; 2) everyone knows that no matter how great a domicile might be, what you see in the promotional photography is five times better than what the place looks like in real life. The easiest way by far to shorten your list of potential landlords without having to physically visit the building is to read what current and previous tenants have said, and cross the place off if there are any reviews from angry or frustrated tenants.

2. Medical Professionals: Four people gave Dr. Thomas positive reviews, but one person said she’s going to sue him for malpractice. Why take your chances if you’ve never gone to Dr. Thomas before? Nevermind the fact that most malpractice lawsuits are dismissed (and who knows if the reviewer even sued - maybe it was an empty threat)… the fact that the word malpractice is brought up in one of the reviews makes this doctor guilty until proven innocent in the eyes of consumers.

3. Car Dealerships: Ah, car dealers… the business everyone wishes they could avoid. If that’s the consumer mindset from the get-go, imagine how swift they’ll be to cross any dealer off their list at the mere sight of a negative review? Ironically, the only saving grace for car dealers is that most of them have nothing but negative reviews, leaving the consumer to choose the lesser of the evils.

4. School Teachers And Child Care Professionals: We all know that parents treat their children as sacred and perfect, and while I beg to differ when the 3-year-old next to me on the plane vomits on my laptop, I suppose there’s some validity to the thinking. So if everyone’s kid deserves the very best (logically impossible of course… but remember, logic has been thrown out the window here), what do you think will happen when parents come across a less-than-shining review of a school teacher or babysitter? Negative reviews of these individuals can ruin their careers, especially in affluent areas where a clamoring parent has power over any business or organization.

5. Restaurants: Restuarants need not be as concerned as the aforementioned industries, because the decision being made by the consumer is less risky. If you have a bad meal, it’s not the end of the world. However, there are plenty of keyword triggers to watch out for in restaurant reviews - terms that will get you crossed off any consumers’ list. The presence of cockroaches or other vermin, unkempt or otherwise unpleasant staff members, and any claims of the food being “horrible” or “disgusting” will paint a terrible picture in consumers’ minds, and they’ll always associate you with that picture.

There’s an understandable tendency on the part of small business owners to believe that Internet marketing is a big business thing. But what small business owners don’t understand is that which Google understands quite well: small business is big business.

Small Business Advocacy’s 2007 report [PDF] states that 99.7% of all businesses in the United States are small companies, employing less than 500 people. I’ll write that in bold to make sure it sinks in: 99.7% of all U.S. business is small business. And yet, there is so little small business presence on the web, and most of that presence can be attributed not to the business’ initiatives, but to companies like Google and Yelp who are dragging small biz into the virtual world, kicking and screaming. Local companies and niche service providers simply don’t have the marketing prowess to get involved; because of that, they shy away from anyone (such as an SEM Consultant) who would ask them to invest in such concepts.

If you’re an SEM/SEO service provider to small/local business, you’ve surely been shot down dozens of times by prospects who claim that their clientele doesn’t use the Internet, or that the web just doesn’t mesh with their product or service. Well, I’ll tell you where you lost your chance to pick up said client: when you decided to show them how utilizing the Internet could grow their business, rather than showing them how ignoring the Internet could bankrupt their business. It’s called framing, and it’s a psychological phenomenon that has proven time and time again that humans are much more likely to take initiative when there is a threat of loss than when there is an opportunity for gain.

I’m confident that small businesses will eventually take it upon themselves to get involved in SEO/SEM as they come across negative reviews and poor ratings, but if SEM is your trade, I suggest you approach such clients in this “framed” fashion. For example, instead of telling this restaurant in Pittsburgh that you could get them to the top of Google for “pittsburgh italian family restaurant” or generate 10-20 more dinner reservations a month, just show them their consumer reviews:

Three horrible reviews (albeit one dupe) and one that basically says it’s an okay place to bring kids. I wouldn’t eat there if another restaurant was just a click away. But maybe these business owners respond by saying that they have a 4 star rating in Zagat, and that’s the only thing people pay attention to. If I were you, perhaps I’d show them this Compete.com graph comparing Zagat.com to TripAdvisor.com and CitySearch.com. Mmm… looks like we have ourselves a new client.

Do not underestimate the psychological repercussions of CR on both reviewers and reviewees. A few angry customers can go a long way, and SEM providers should leverage that fact.

Smell that? Smells like… fresh content.

Fresh indeed; by all accounts this is the first blog dedicated to the consumer review aspect of Internet Marketing and Reputation Management. Having spent years in the automotive industry, monitoring consumer reviews online has become second nature to me. And although consumer reviews started popping up way back in the days of Amazon and eBay, the concept is just starting to gain recognition in the physical world of business - ironically, where it matters most.

I’ve come across far too many business owners (and even SEOs) who refuse to deal with consumer review issues when they pop up; Review Limbo seeks not only to shake the cobwebs out of these people’s heads, but also to educate the Internet Marketing community on optimization strategies and marketing opportunities utilizing consumer opinion.

Learn a bit more about the site, and by all means, contact me if you’d like to contribute a success story, a new idea, or a question about the world of consumer reviews.