Precision
Paint & Tile
Copyright 2012 Precision Paint & Tile
Online Reviews in the Internet Age
I have worked in construction off and on a good part of my life, having two brothers who were contractors, and
worked for them many summers during high school and for several years after. I eventually left construction to go
back to school, and came to NYC in 1974 and was an antique dealer and appraiser for many years.
I went into business in January of 2000 as Precision Paint & Tile. When I began this business the public Internet
was still in it's infancy. I had never owned a computer and knew only vaguely about the Internet. I advertised my
business by putting up flyers on the Upper West Side of Manhattan passing out business cards, and once the
business began to gain a foothold, referrals. I did no advertising to speak of other than these tried and true methods
of generating business. The majority of my work was generated by these flyers, word of mouth, and referrals.
Late in 2000 I bought my first computer. A Gateway. Still a very nice and elegantly designed computer. Although it
was a completely new technology to me (I didn't even know how to type at the time) I took to it quickly, and soon
had built my first simple website, the one you are viewing now.
From the beginning, I brought to my business the values and work ethic I had been raised with. It was pretty simple
really. Keep your word, be respectful, put in an honest days work, take pride in your work and always endeavor to
give a customer good value for their money. These are the principles on which I still run my business today, and
they have served me and my clients well I believe. In the last 12 years, I have a long line of happy and satisfied
clients.
While the Internet has brought to my business a much broader and more diverse customer base, many valuable
clients, and has been a tremendous boon in the growth of my business, it has also brought some “competitors” who
are vicious when it comes to spreading lies, posting fake “reviews” on the Internet, and attempting to put honest
businesses out of businesses by spreading false information all over the Internet. It has given everyone a voice, some
which, like children when I was raised should be “seen and not heard”
Internet “reviews” have become a meme that is now so culturally entrenched that people have a tendency to give
far more weight to these reviews than they deserve., particularly when you come to understand the concept on
which “review” web sites are built, and the “business model” that is followed to build a review website.
Review web sites such as Angie's List, Yelp, and Service Magic, to name a few (there are scores of others) that I
personally feel are some of the worst offenders on the Internet in leading people to believe that their reviews are
unbiased, and that they exist to help the public to sort out who is a good business and who is not, and that they are
in the business of serving the public good. That is NOT their business. Their business is to sell advertising and
charge fees for leads. They charge substantial fees to the contractors that they provide leads to, and subscription fees
to users of their sites to both businesses and subscribers. (in the case of Service Magic and Angie's List) Their
reviews are simply the vehicle and platform which they use to build content and attract users to sell to, and to
collect subscription fees from, and for the most part they could care less if businesses get “good” reviews or “bad”
reviews. It is all the same to them. “Reviews” are content for their sites, and on the Internet, content is King. To
these companies there truly is no such thing as bad publicity when it comes to the reviews that their business clients
get on their site, it is all content to them, and they could care less if your business is praised to the heavens, or has
been attacked by a competitor with a scorched earth approach, it all brings users to their web site.
Why do I feel so strongly about the companies I mentioned above and others like them. One big problem. They are
aggregators and scrapers, for profit. If your business is on their site it is because they took it, literally stole it from
you without your consent. All of the Internet is aggregation of course, but it is one thing to aggregate and scrape the
Internet to gather material for informational purposes, another to do it for profit.
What does this mean, exactly?
The Internet is crawling with bugs. Literally. Electronic bugs, little packets of code, spyders, web crawlers, bots, all
are designed to scour the Internet to look for information and bring it back to the entity that sent it out. The
Internet would not be the Internet without these little buggers ^-^ They gather information and that information
is used for every purpose imaginable, both good and ill. To track your browsing habits, to gather content, to steal
information and content, to sell you things, and on and on. These review sites crawl and scrape the Internet for
business information, they then take that information, content that they did not create, and “create” a web page
using your, often proprietary, information.
Let's say your business for example.
Content that you have spent hours, days, weeks, years to create. You have spent substantial sums of money to
create a website and a recognizable identity for your business. Your business logo, your reviews on your site, the
design and layout of your ads, post, and web site, your business address, any and all content that you have created or
payed to be created about you business, articles you have written, anything that you have published on the Internet
and intended to be content for your business and your website. These businesses take your content without your
permission, they dilute the effectiveness of your content by reproducing it without your consent, re-formatting
your information, corrupting your design and identity, and use it to sell and market their products. And, even
worse, if you search the Internet for your business name and find all of your content on a website such as Yelp, you
are asked to create an account and “claim” your business.
What?
You have stolen and corrupted all of my business information and reproduced it without my consent, and now I
have “join” your website to access my information that I have created and you have stolen?
And even then, often on these sites, you cannot even edit your own information. I have to email you and get your
permission. What I am thinking here and would like to say here, would make everyone cringe . . so I will bite my
tongue.
Many of these sites will not remove your content even if the business owner ask them to. They incorrectly cite the
“Fair Use Doctrine” as justification for their stealing your content and using it without your consent. http://www.
copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html"
Section 107 contains a list of the various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be
considered fair, such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Section 107 also
sets out four factors to be considered in determining whether or not a particular use is fair:
The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit
educational purposes
The nature of the copyrighted work
The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work.
“Fair Use” is not applicable to for profit businesses to steal other businesses content for their own profit.
Because of sites such as Yelp, Service Magic, Angie's List and others like them that steal content wholesale from
small businesses, and many small businesses who will not play ball with them have been literately destroyed by
fabricated “reviews” which these sites refuse to remove.
I was attacked by a competitor with fake “reviews” on Yelp, and even though I proved to them that these reviews
were fake and were not written by any client of mine by sending Yelp the url to four other web sites where the exact
same “review” had been used to libel other contractors,
Yelp still to this day refuses to remove these fake “reviews”; (they have, after much complaining by me moved them
to their “filtered” page), but still refuse to remove them. I had asked Yelp several months ago to completely remove
my business from their website due their unreliability and manipulation of reviews. Yelp sent me an email asking if
I was “sure” that I wanted to remove the page and that “it couldn't be undone” I answered with an resounding and
unequivocal “remove it” The page remains to this day. I have 6 legitimate 5 star reviews on Yelp, but they still
refuse to remove the fake reviews on the “filtered” page. These same “reviews” were posted on Citysearch and
Yahoo Local. I contacted them and they looked at my business, my real reviews, and my reputation, and
immediately removed the fake reviews. This is what any responsible business would do. Kudos to Citysearch and
Yahoo! Local, and a big Bronx cheer to Yelp.
I have worked years to establish myself and myself as an honest, ethical and responsible contractor. I created my
own website, and I chose which sites I wanted my information to appear on and posted pages on them based on the
reputation of their website, the reliability of the information, and the reputation of the company. To my dismay,
within weeks of my posting my content on reputable sites that I had pro actively chosen, I “googled”; my company
name one day and found that my articles, company description, name, address, phone numbers and the exact
content that I had posted on web sites where I wanted it to be, now appeared wholesale on numerous sites that I
had never heard of, and was linked to everything from car washes to adult sites.
If your company has a good website, good content and a good reputation, all the more likely that it will be usurped
and ripped off and copied and used to drive traffic to bogus and crooked websites.
Please read here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/your-money/22haggler.html?_r=2 -
An article in The New York Times, posted May 21st, 2011 about fake reviews on Yelp, and it's effect on
businesses. Trashing of fluffing a businesses for profit has become a huge business on the Internet. It has gotten so
bad that you now have to hire a “reputation management company” to monitor your presence on the Internet and
try to mitigate the damage done by fake reviews and other garbage that can be posted by anyone, for any reason,
usually for profit. I filed a complaint with the better Business Bureau in San Fransisco regarding Yelps's refusal to
remove my listing on their site and bogus “reviews” Yelp still refused to remove the page citing “Fair Use Doctrine”.
Then I looked at the Better Business Bureaus' Yelp page and rating for Yelp. I found it curious that the BBB gives
Yelp an A+ rating, their highest rating, despite the fact that Yelp has had 232 complaints against them in the last 3
years.
Two Hundred and Thirty Two Complaints.
If 232 were filed, how many thousands more fake reviews are there on Yelp that they refuse to remove, and simply
have not been discovered by the business owner yet?
“Complaint resolved with BBB assistance (147)”
“BBB found business made good faith effort to resolve complaint but customer not satisfied with business response
(85)”
So, in 85 individual complaints, the customer WAS NOT happy with the outcome, nonetheless, the BBB found
Yelp “made good faith effort to resolve complaint” so despite in 85 reported instances of customers who found an
issue serious enough to report them to the BBB, and who where not happy with the “resolution”; the BBB still
comes down on the side of Yelp, and gives them an A+ rating.
Hmm . . . does anyone else smell the horse poo here?
So . . . when you come across a business that has been trashed on some site such as Yelp, Angie's List, Service
Magic, or any of the other of the countless “review” sites lurking on the Internet, do your due diligence, look
around and try to put together a true picture of the business you are considering, even call the business owner and
get your own sense of his or her true nature and credibility. Your own good judgment is far more reliable than a
fake review on a website that profits by posting “reviews, ANY reviews, fake or otherwise, just to make a buck.
Hot Tip!
Here is GREAT free service from Google.
http://www.google.com/alerts
Enter your name, your business name, or virtually anything else, enter your email address, and voilà!
Anything that has been published related to the your search term is emailed to you, and it is updated daily. A very
valuable tool. Like having your very own reputation manager working for you 24/7.
Cool!
Jim Lamm
Precision Paint &Tile