Yelp Files for IPO to Raise $100M
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They day we’ve been telling you about just became reality. Doctor review site Yelp has officially filed to go public with their IPO. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to those of you reading the DoctorBlog this past year, as we’ve mentioned the likelihood of Yelp going public sometime in 2012. Now, with the class-action lawsuits behind them, they’ve stated they plan to use the IPO to raise over $100M…but, in all likelihood, may end up raising even more.
Harvard’s Stars-to-Dollars Study
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The really smart people over at the Harvard Business School recently released a study on the real effect of star ratings on actual revenue. We shared with you earlier this year that having stars showing up in your search results increases visitors by around 29%. Professor Michael Luca at HBS took it a step further by correlating the rise in rating by a single star on review site Yelp to a 9% increase in revenue. He did this by comparing the change in star ratings by thousands of restaurants in the Seattle area to the actual revenue reported to the Washington State Department of Revenue over a 6+ year period. (For more information, including a bunch of greek equations to explain things like “Regression Discontinuity,” you can download Luca’s working paper.)
How to Avoid Being Sorted By Yelp
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The online review wars are heating up again. With Google’s decision to build their own reviews (and subsequent purchase of Zagat) along with rumors of a Yelp IPO with in the next year, doctors are finally starting to recognize that online reviews are here to stay. Interestingly, some services promising legal protection from online reviews appear to have also recognized this inevitability as they’ve now started offering reposting services for doctors.
These third-party reposting services take positive reviews of your practice and post them for you on the major review sites like Yelp, Citysearch, Google Places, and others. At first, this may seem like a good way to take control of how you look to new patients when they research you online. Unfortunately, it isn’t. Here’s why you need to avoid the temptation of making this mistake…
It violates most review sites’ Terms of Service.
The terms of service for most online review sites state that the review must be left by the actual patient and not a third party acting on behalf of the patient. Posting a review as a third-party is almost always prohibited, and gives the site the right to take down the review. (Plus, when a third-party creates the profile necessary to post these reviews, they not only violate the sites’ terms – they also become liable for the review being left. Raising the question of why they’d want to do it in the first place?)
It can negatively affect your positive reviews from actual patients.
While there are many questions remaining about review site algorithms like the Yelp Sort Algorithm and whether they’re being used in an ethical manner, these algorithms are becoming smarter by the day. (And, with a potential Yelp IPO, they’ll continue to get better.) The algorithms can already tell when multiple reviews are being posted from the same address (regardless of how many new profiles are created). And, we’re seeing these filters removing reposted reviews en mass & flagging the account of the doctor being reviewed – making it even harder for a positive, first-person review from a genuine patient to be approved and displayed on your account.
It makes you look unethical.
If you think review sites act unethically with how they handle your reviews to give a distorted view of your practice, it makes you look even worse to a patient when the same review of a doctor is posted across multiple sites. While most patients are more than happy to leave a review of their doctor online, they also realize that they themselves would never cut-and-paste review on multiple sites for their doctors. Thus, seeing this very thing sets off warning bells in the mind of the prospective patient as to the validity of the reviews in question. Instead of making you look good across the Internet, it comes across as a questionable act taken by an unscrupulous online marketer or an overzealous office manager on your behalf.
On the old Internet, a less-honest doctor may have been able to get away with this sort of thing. On the new social web, transparency is key. Patients have become quite web-savvy, and expect more from the web than the same old marketing ploys. They expect the new marketing – one based on a truthful & transparent view of your practice that they can trust.
Want more trustworthy online reviews? Claim your free DoctorBase profile and learn how the Panda authenticates your reviews are from your actual patients at:
http://doctor.DoctorBase.com/claim
Groupon Best Practices for Your Practice
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Groupon’s preparation for their upcoming IPO has brought them quite a bit of attention…and a fair amount of criticism. While Groupon has been wildly successful for some businesses, there are others that proclaim Groupon is the worst business decision they’ve ever made. So, what makes for a good Groupon deal?
What Would Google’s Purchase of Review Site Yelp Mean to Your Practice?
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Last week, reports surfaced that Google is in the late stages of negotiating a deal to buy Yelp – one of the fastest growing review sites on the web – for more than $500M. Then, over the weekend, there were new reports that the deal with Google may be off due to another suitor (Microsoft, perhaps?) offering Yelp an even better deal. Regardless of who wins the bidding-war for Yelp, the outcome will have an effect on your practice. Let’s look a bit closer as to what, exactly, this means to you as a doctor.
If you weren’t already aware of it, Google has become the number one destination for your patients when they’re searching for anything from a new set of cookware to a new dentist. Over an average day, Google processes around 300 million searches. And, they currently control approximately 2/3 of the online search market – over 3x as much as their closest competitor, Yahoo!
As the web becomes more ‘social’ with review sites enabling people to share their thoughts and opinions online, the same word-of-mouth opinions that you’ve built your practice on are now accessible to millions. Putting a price tag upwards of half-a-billion dollars on one of these sites makes a very simple statement that review sites are not a passing fad that can be ignored, but rather the future of online search. And, if Google – far-and-away the most used search engine on the web – is willing to pay this much for a 5-year old online startup, it means they see user-generated reviews as the key to providing the best information about local businesses to consumers.
This potential acquisition also legitimizes online review sites. There have been plenty of stories (including a few of our own posts) about review sites like Yelp practicing in a less than ethical manner. This has lead some to believe that these review sites will eventually be exposed as being less than credible – leading to their demise. However, a mere offer by Google – a respected industry leader who has the famous corporate policy of “don’t be evil” – brings more weight and credibility to the reviews presented on sites like Yelp.
A deal would also present a great opportunity for you to attract new patients. Before rumors of this acquisition surfaced, Google was testing a local search advertising program in San Francisco & San Diego. This was likely to determine what results would be realized by allowing businesses to advertise their review-filled profiles on Google Maps. The commitment to include user reviews will likely present a chance to better use your own reviews to advertise your own practice locally on Google.
The opportunity is great, but it’s up to you to take control of your online presence. Make sure potential patients are seeing verified reviews from actual patients when they search for you online…
What to do with a Negative Review
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Face it – even the most skilled and amiable of doctors will have to deal with an unsatisfiable patient at some point in their career. Now, with numerous websites where these patients can voice their discontent to the world, it’s quite likely even the finest doctors will be faced with the dreaded negative review. So, what do you do about it? Let’s start with what not to do…
First and foremost, do not take legal action against the reviewer. Even if the reviewer’s remarks are entirely untrue, resist the temptation to file a lawsuit against them. By doing so, you risk tarnishing your image in ways far more than a negative review could ever accomplish. Because even in a best-case scenario, you’ll win and still be known as the “doctor who sues their own patients.”
You’ll also want to resist the temptation of replying publicly to the negative review in order to defend yourself. First, discussing patient matters in a public forum is a potential violation of HIPAA laws dealing with Protected Health Information. Second, as a professional, you don’t want to get pulled down into an online mud-slinging contest with ‘FlowerGirl73.’ Plus, by adding additional comments to the review, it actually gives the review more weight and can cause it to be displayed more prominently.
If you’re genuinely concerned for the patient’s well being, it’s okay to contact the patient privately and express this concern in order to resolve any issues. Although most reviewers don’t use proper names, specific details shared by the reviewer can often give you a good idea of authentic complaints that you can have your office staff follow up on.
The most important thing to do when faced with a negative review is outweigh it with positive reviews. You’ve likely built your practice on word-of-mouth referrals (aka “positive reviews”) from your existing patients. Get these same patients to post their positive reviews online in order to give a complete and honest view of your practice.
And here’s the best part about getting your positive reviews online – they actually turn a negative review into a benefit for your practice! This is because a negative review mixed in with a multitude of positive reviews gives the positive reviews more authenticity. (One doctor recently posted a mixed review of their practice on their DoctorBase blog, and found the number of new patients they received from DoctorBase actually tripled over the following 2 months.)
As you can see, a negative review isn’t the end of the world. It’s actually a great opportunity to be transparent with a whole new world of potential patients.
The Mystery of the Disappearing Reviews
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We’ve heard from a number of doctors this past month who’ve noticed their positive reviews vanish from popular review sites. In most of the cases, this occurred after the doctor politely declined to advertise with these reviews sites. Which leads one to ask whether the reviews on these sites are truly reliable.
As a rule, most review sites always claim their reviews are organic, user-generated content. Still, there have been plenty of cases where fictitious patients, laid-off hygienists, and even competing dentists have left false negative reviews for doctors. In order to combat these unscrupulous actions, some review sites began employing their own ‘algorithms‘ to weigh reviews from more established users.
Here’s where it gets a bit mysterious. Doctors are now noticing that when they decline to advertise with these sites, their positive reviews are disappearing from their profile page. It’s not that these reviews have entirely disappeared, as they’re still posted under the reviewer’s account. The new ‘algorithm’ is simply blocking these positive reviews from appearing on the doctor’s profile page.
An actual doctor’s reviews before declining to advertise with a review site:
The same doctor’s reviews after declining to advertise with a review site:
What makes this even more suspect is that positive reviews posted by established users are being supplanted by negative reviews from brand new users with few previously submitted reviews – entirely contradicting what these review sites claimed their ‘algorithms’ were setup up to accomplish in the first place.
Naturally, these practices are a bit unsettling; and they don’t stop there. For more info, check out the issues that some doctors & business owners have been dealing with in this post & this additional article.
If a similar thing has happened to you, please let us know by replying to this post…
Are Competitors Using Your Name To Advertise Online?
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The author is not an attorney and nothing here is to be construed as legal advice
If you type your name into Google these days, the odds are that you’ll find a number of search results that lead to profile pages on sites that you’ve never heard of before. (Go ahead – Google your name and see for yourself!) This is because the multitudes of review sites that exist on the web have created pages under your name with your publicly available information (think phone books, census data, etc.). This, in and of itself isn’t illegal, since all they’re doing is reposting public, non-copyrighted information.
It begins to get a bit more complicated when these sites begin using the profile they’ve established under your name to advertise for other dentists. Many review sites have begun “name-squatting” on dentists’ names in order to do just this. Here’s how it works…
A patient will search for “John Smith DDS” in order to find Dr. Smith’s phone number to make an appointment. The first search result may be a review site stating it has Dr. John Smith’s contact info. The patient then clicks through to the page, and finds a page with Dr. Smith’s info, and advertisements for Dr. Joe Johnson – Dr. John Smith’s competitor across the street.
Some sites are taking it one step further and actively advertising on Google with paid advertising for dentists’ names – right in the search results. It gets even worse when the advertisement that appears for a search of “John Smith DDS” contains “Avoid These Dentists” wording like the following example:
The first wave of lawsuits against Google for allowing this practice have all dealt with trademark infringement, and haven’t established any clear precedent as to the legality of this practice. Plus, you have to consider that just because it’s your name, doesn’t mean that it’s a licensed trademark. The real question seems to be whether this practice abides by the standards of fair business practice, and whether the website involved in this practice is acting as a publisher or a host.
The California Unfair Business Practices Act maintains that businesses that practice deceptive or misleading advertising may be subject to civil lawsuit, including penalties. By deliberately introducing confusion into the marketplace, there are some who argue this practice violates this section of California’s Business and Professions Code.
The next question is “who’s responsible?” If the website participating in this practice is doing so by injecting editorial commentary about you, then it’s acting as a publisher and may be held accountable for their actions. If the website is merely hosting these dubious advertisements for a third-party, then the onus for this practice could be passed along to the third-party.
Whichever way you look at it, the emergence of online advertising has opened up a whole new universe of legal questions. And, it will certainly be interesting to see what precedents the courts set in the following year.
What’s the Legality of Patient Reviews?
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The author is not an attorney and nothing here is to be construed as legal advice
I recently sat in a Bar Association of San Francisco session on recent court cases regarding online reviews and slander lawsuits, spoken and moderated by an attorney from the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) and the General Counsel from Yelp, as well as an experienced partner at a law firm who had extensive experience in such case precedence. All three people were very, very smart and obviously not only knew this space, but were actively a part of the process that was defining what is and is not legal, or what is and is not practical from a business point of view.
What struck me most about the case decisions that were developing in the industry were twofold:
1) A critical element seems to be about definition of who is the “Publisher.” If a website is merely allowing people to leave reviews, the publisher is seen as the the actual writer of the review – not the website. This means that in such cases where the website is not actively promoting the negative reviews – they are immune from liability by a section of the Federal Communications Decency Act #230, or CDA 230.
In some cases plaintiffs (read: dentists) have been able to subpoena the website to give the information of the reviewer. However, this does not mean that the website really knows who this reviewer is. I mean, seriously – how easy is it to create a fake FaceBook account with a free-mail email address to reply to?
This action, as many at DoctorBase have pointed out before, is that a public record of a dentist suing a patient for defamation and libel is about 25 to 100 times worse than a single bad review on the Web. If one thought a negative review in a social media website was damaging to their business, try having one of the local (or even national papers such as the Wall Street Journal) pick up your case as a mention in their ongoing fascination with online reviews.
2) There is something called an Anti-SLAPP statute that stands for Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation. What this means is that plaintiffs that sue reviewers in the hopes to intimidate them into removing those reviews – if found that the reviews are the honest opinions of the reviewer - could be responsible for the legal fees of the defendant. Talk about adding insult to injury. It’s a move designed dissuade those with more money from suing those with less money into silence.
Have questions or comments? Simply reply to this post..
Dentists Being Searched On The Web: Why Review Sites Are Booming
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Web marketing for private practices is becoming more and more competitive. Try paying for Google advertising on a term like “San Francisco Dentist” or any city plus the term “dentist” and you will see a very pricey cost per click. It is a good strategy as people now spend over 5 hours per day on average on the web.
The web has replaced such mainstays as the yellow pages and even a friends opinion as our go to information source.
But people are not looking to be “sold” when searching a dentist or other important decisions. They are looking for information. They are doing due diligence.
Below is the Google trend for the term “dentist Reviews”.
This is why review sites are enjoying growth and why it is a concern for the private practice as these are uncontrolled sites that can dramatically affect the perception of a dentist or his practice. A review site may work for a restaurant but the same model does not work for many other private businesses. This, of course, has lead to much upset over review sites holding small businesses and private practices hostage over brutal negative reviews.
Please contact the author if you have any questions or this concerns you since something can be done about it if review sites affect you negatively.
Fake Dentist Reviews Going Around
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As if managing one’s reputation online wasn’t tricky enough, our staff has recently found a rash of false reviews going around about some dentists in California. In essence, they are the same review (near verbatim in many parts) posted up about different dentists in different areas.
(Fake dentist review on Yelp)
(Same fake review made it to Google local under Dentist's name!)
(Same review again on different dentist in CitySearch)
Our staff has reported to Google, Yelp, and CitySearch about these false and “syndicated” negative reviews. We’ll keep you posted as we find more instances of such behavior. Our editorial staff and HIPAA attorney Maad Abu-Gazallah are trying to pin down “Daniela G.” and “Desgrassaplay” and the identity of others who are posting up this, and other similar fake, reviews.
#1 Patient Complaint in Online Reviews
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Reviewing our database of patient reviews as well as 3rd party review sites that cover dentists, the #1 complaint (in volume) was that patient-reviewers felt they were being “upsold” an unnecessary procedure or product. Here’s the statistical breakdown in a sample of 1,278 reviews across 5 states and 7 NFL cities:
Percentage of Overall Patient Complaints of Dentists Online:
1.) Upsold procedure or product (42.4%)
2.) Doctor rudeness (15.2%)
3.) Staff rudeness or administrative errors (12.6%)
4.) Costs “too high” (9.3%)
5.) Not enough communication (9.2%)
6.) Suspected fake or overly vindictive reviews (7.1%)
7.) Facilities were not modern (2.3%)
8.) Other (1.9%)
On DoctorBase, we get quite a lot of reviews each day from patients both happy and disgruntled. Less than 15% of all the reviews are negative, but when they are, boy are some of them nasty. Unlike other doctor directories, our engineers alert our doctors whenever a negative response is posted about them, and we try and resolve it with both the patient reviewer and the doctor’s office – this way the doctor doesn’t need to “wrestle in the mud” and the patient gets a response (with DoctorBase as the intermediary) so that the patient gets “response satisfaction.”
Meanwhile your office gets a chance to avoid someone leaving a very angry – and very permanent – review on another website. I know it sounds like a pitch for our search engine, but we do believe that for the medical industry, this “Mediation Model” is the future. After all, my practice is not a restaurant – I can’t move down the block, change my name and menu – and be back in business. But at the end of the day, we also feel strongly that patients need a forum where they can expect to get some response, recognition, or satisfaction to their gripes – a place online where they can provide feedback and know they’re going to be listened to.
