Some really smart people are developing software programs that aim to spot fake reviews algorithmically, and you can play with one of them yourself.

It’s called Review Skeptic, and it’s as simple as pasting the review text into the site and letting the computer guess if it’s authentic. The public website is out there “for entertainment purposes only,” the site says … and it is kinda fun to see how accurate it is.

The site says it’s best to use English-language hotel reviews, but I did some limited testing of my own using a variety of business types: I cut-and-pasted the full text of my 10 most recent Yelp reviews, and Review Skeptic identified all of them as truthful. Whew.

Review Skeptic is the work of a group of Cornell University researchers, and the result of testing on 400 fake and 400 authentic hotel reviews. There’s a link at the bottom of the site to their research paper, which explains that the software had 90 percent accuracy during testing.

How to Detect Fake Reviews

I’m no scientist, but the way I read the material in that PDF is that Review Skeptic classifies words and text patterns and looks for signs of authenticity or deception. And one of the researchers, Myle Ott, just explained it like this to TIME.com:

…the software takes note of subtle signs that most people overlook. “Truthful reviews tend to have more punctuation, such as dollar signs, which indicate a specific that’d only be known to someone who has been there,” he said. “There are also more specific details, like the hotel location or that the room was small or large.”

Fake reviews, by contrast, tended to have more superlatives and adverbs in the writing (makes sense) and more details that were “external to the hotel,” such as whom the reviewer was traveling with. The fakes were also filled with pronouns, rather than proper names — because someone who had never been to a hotel wouldn’t know the name of the bellman or the woman at the front desk.

Interesting stuff, but I kinda wish the “secret sauce” was kept secret.

That TIME article mentions that no “major websites” are using the software behind Review Skeptic, but I’d be shocked if Google and other major review sites aren’t also using algorithms to identify review spam. Yelp, in fact, is well known for having a review filter in place — although my understanding is that Yelp’s filter focuses as much, if not more, on the user than on the words used in reviews.

Anyway, if algorithms and software can do a better job than we humans of identifying review spam, here’s hoping Review Skeptic and similar products catch on more widely. On that note, one last thing: According to this New York Times article from last summer, the Cornell researchers have been contacted by Amazon, TripAdvisor, Hilton Hotels and other sites … and Google contacted Ott to ask for his resumé.

(Stock image via Shutterstock.com. Used under license.)

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This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Review Skeptic: An Algorithmic Approach to Fight Fake Reviews

The Pew Research Project has put the value of small business reputation management into numbers:

44% of online adults say they have searched online for information about someone whose services or advice they seek in a professional capacity, like a doctor, lawyer or plumber

That stat comes from a Pew study on reputation management and social media. Pew says the number would be higher, too, if not for age differences: Only 23% of Internet users 65 and older research small businesses online. Take them out and the overall number goes up to some degree.

What type of people are most likely to research businesses online? Here’s what the study says:

• College grads – 58%
• Higher income groups – 58% of people who make $75,000 or more
• White internet users – 46%
• Parents – 49%
• Broadband users – 49%
• Wireless users – 50%
• Social networking users – 56%

If you haven’t recently done a search for your business name, personal name, or the names of important people in your small business … might be a good time to do it. A lot of potential customers are.

The Pew study is quite interesting and I wrote more about it on Search Engine Land tonight. You can also download the PDF yourself.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

44% of US Adults Research SMBs Online

But there’s also a lot of detail about the costs of Yelp’s business/advertising services, not to mention the bizarre story that leads the article about a small business owner who got in a physical confrontation with one reviewer and ended up falling down the steps outside his apartment. That’s an extreme example of the power struggle that exists on Yelp between reviewers and small business owners. The article sums up the debate well in this bit:

American society has, for more than a century, been defined by corporate power, and the Internet has upset that balance, mostly for the good. When someone sends a Twitter message about his baggage being lost by a large, publicly traded airline — “Delta sucks!” — it’s hard to argue that this is a bad thing. Delta does suck in that instance. And Delta can take it.

But Yelp encourages people to be unsparing in their critiques of companies that can’t take it — companies that are small, independent, and not particularly profitable. The site capitalizes on our impulses to take down the Man, but, in doing so, turns us against mom-and-pop businesses — already hit by globalization, consolidation, and a recession. At its best, Yelp is meritocratic, helping good businesses like Lauren Hart’s to thrive. At its worst, Yelp empowers people who do not need to be empowered at the expense of those who are already struggling.

There’s also a complementary article with some advice for SMBs about how to deal with criticism online.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Inc. Magazine Goes Deep on Yelp

For ages, I’ve had Technorati RSS feeds setup for searches on my name and on “small business sem,” which is how many people refer to this blog. While checking RSS last night, I saw this alert from Technorati:

The message says that existing feeds have been “retired” and hints that new feeds are on the way. I went to Technorati last night and did those vanity searches, and sure enough … no RSS feeds available (yet).

It’d be nice to get this tool back.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

One Less Reputation Management Tool

Wikipedia is a rankings powerhouse and almost always shows up on page one, especially on Google. So, while having a Wikipedia page for your small business may sounds like a good idea, in most cases I don’t think it is. Here’s why.

Qualifying for a Wikipedia Page

Let’s get this out of the way: Most small businesses don’t qualify for a Wikipedia page, making the pros/cons debate of this article a moot point. Sure, anyone can create a Wikipedia page, but if you (or anyone, for that matter) make a page for a business that doesn’t belong, moderators/administrators will remove it. As the site’s Help pages indicate, Wikipedia is not a directory.

To qualify for a Wikipedia article, your small business must have received some measure of notoriety; it must be noteworthy for some kind of accomplishment. Wikipedia has a page detailing the notability guidelines that determine what fits and what doesn’t. Notability will often come in the form of high-level media or news exposure. A feature article in your local paper won’t cut it. A feature article in TIME magazine? That might be good enough.

Or maybe not. Consider this: Charm City Cakes, the Baltimore bakery that’s featured in the Food Network’s Ace of Cakes program, has a Wikipedia page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charm_City_Cakes … but the page is actually about the show, not the small business. Junior’s Cheesecake, on the other hand, is a famous New York restaurant and it has a Wikipedia page. In fact, there are a number of small businesses with Wikipedia pages — a fact that reveals how difficult it is to determine what’s notable enough and what’s not.

• Zip’s Drive-In, a small fast food chain up here in my area, has a Wikipedia article. (I was shocked to learn this.)
• Burger Ranch, another small fast food chain in my area, also has a Wikipedia article, but note that it’s been flagged with an alert at the top: “This article may not meet the general notability guideline.”
• Tekserve has a Wikipedia article. It’s a New York-based Apple sales and service provider.
• Sparks Steak House in New York is also on Wikipedia, but not for business-related reasons. It’s notable for being “the establishment where Gambino crime family boss Paul Castellano and mobster Thomas Bilotti were gunned down” in 1985.
• Hollywood-based Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles has a Wikipedia article, although my untrained eye wonders how it passes the notability test.

As you can see, there are small businesses that have a Wikipedia article. It’s not impossible. So, let’s say your small business is notable enough. The question remains, should you have a Wikipedia page?

The Pros of Having a Wikipedia Article

In no particular order:

1. Great exposure. Wikipedia is a heavily used web site, and having an article about your company means more exposure, more eyeballs, and so forth.

2. Reputation management. As I mentioned above, your Wikipedia article will probably rank on page one for your company name, and that helps with your online reputation management.

3. Increased trust. There’s no underestimating the need to earn trust, both from customers and search engines. A Wikipedia article can help with both, I believe.

The Cons of Having a Wikipedia Article

Again, in no particular order:

1. You don’t have a say in what’s said about you. Even if you qualify for a Wikipedia article about your business, Wikipedia will frown on you or an employee creating the page, and they’ll frown on you even updating or correcting the page. You don’t meet the neutral point of view policy. Your best bet for influencing the article is to have a Wikipedia account in good standing and, after identifying yourself as a company employee, be active on the “Talk” page for your article, suggesting additions or corrections you think someone should make. But you can’t make the changes yourself, and this may prove very frustrating.

2. It requires constant monitoring. If your small business is operating on such a level that you deserve a Wikipedia article, there’s a chance that you’ll have some competition and/or some angry customers or disgruntled employees that would love to make you look bad. While you can’t go in and edit your own Wikipedia article, they probably can. So you have to be extra vigilant in watching for updates and then hope that you can find someone to correct or edit any untruthful information that someone adds. In some situations, this monitoring can become very time-consuming.

3. No room for error. The exposure and notoriety that comes with having a Wikipedia article means you have almost no room for error when it comes to future business mistakes. Your CEO makes the news after his picture is taken outside a strip club? That’ll show up on your Wikipedia page. An ex-employee files a discrimination suit against you? That’ll show up, too.

Final Thoughts

As a published author, I probably qualify for a Wikipedia article. But I don’t want one: too many potential headaches, too much need for monitoring, not enough benefit in return. That’s my general attitude at the moment toward Wikipedia. And that’s what I said last week when a magazine writer asked me about putting a small business on Wikipedia at the end of our interview.

But ultimately, I think it depends on the small business. For some, the exposure and status of being the subject of a Wikipedia article might be a good idea. That’s especially true for small businesses with the time and resources to monitor their Wikipedia article and help make any needed corrections. But I’ve never recommended that one of my clients try to get one. The cons have outweighed the pros. I’d rather my clients spend what little time they have for online marketing in other pursuits, not in watching over a Wikipedia article and worrying about who’ll be next to edit it.

Your turn: Am I wrong? As a small business owner, would you want a Wikipedia article about your company? Marketers and SEOs, have you ever recommended for or against a client having a Wikipedia article? Comments are open, please make this post better with your thoughts.

(Thanks to Ryan Rose, Michael Crites, Eric Wu, and Michael Gray for help with this article.)

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Should a Small Business have a Wikipedia article?

Plan on doing this at least once a month, if not more often. Reputation management matters for small businesses. People are writing, reviewing, and blogging about you … and they’re showing up in your search results. It’s your job to watch and manage that.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Quick Reputation Management Tip for Small Biz Owners