No matter the industry, online reviews matter.
It’s one of the axioms of branding that the best kind of advertising is word-of-mouth advertising. One person telling another about their experience, positive or negative, is more powerful that fifty TV commercials. The problem has always been, “How do we generate word-of-mouth advertising?”
Before the Internet and “Web 2.0,” this was a very difficult thing to do, requiring grassroots events, surveys, testimonials and other expensive and difficult-to-execute programs. Now, in the age of connectedness, it’s not at all. Because of the proliferation of online review sites, and the way Google and other search engines have started aggregating; these reviews from all over the web, word of mouth is simply a part of your online presence, whether or not you sought it out.
