Patient Gag-Order Fallout
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We reported last week on the developments surrounding patient gag-order contracts and how a provider of these contracts, Medical Justice, is now advising their doctors not to have patients sign them. But, what about the doctor that found herself as the spark that ignited these developments? Stepping away from the legal standing of these contracts, the class action lawsuit, and the FTC complaint, let’s take a look at what happened to the doctor and her practice from a business point-of-view in light of her use & subsequent attempt to enforce a patient gag-order contract.
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.
Yelpsuit Dismissed For Good…or Bad?
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It’s officially over. The class action lawsuits against Yelp claiming extortionist practices were dismissed with prejudice this week by US District Court Judge Edward Chen. These lawsuits had been dismissed before, but still allowed for the plaintiffs to refile the lawsuit. The refiling of these lawsuits is what brought the case back in front of the court in a hearing earlier this week. And, that’s what makes the ‘with prejudice’ part of the court’s ruling important – it means the lawsuit cannot be refiled and that the case against Yelp is officially over.
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
The New Google is the Old Yelp?
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By now we all know that fake negative reviews have become a major issue for doctors on many online review sites. While Google’s recent decision to remove Yelp, RateMDs, & Demandforce reviews from the star-ratings on their places pages is understandable, it is raising problems since their initial approach to filtering out fictitious reviews left directly on Google still needs some work.
While we don’t know a single doctor who appreciates being extorted by an online review site, there have been strides taken over the past year by some of these sites to address the phenomena of fictitious reviews being left by non-patients & competing doctors. But, with Google starting to build their own database of online reviews, we appear to have reverted back to the days of Yelp – circa 2008.
Since Google’s review algorithm is relatively young, we’re seeing it being taken advantage of by some practices. For example, a practice in the San Diego area created 2 separate places pages with 5-star, “Best Ever” reviews displayed prominently on each profile:
Dental Practice on Google Places #1
Dental Practice on Google Places #2
Dig a little deeper though, and you’ll find that the faceless profiles belonging to “eRIN” & “Sammi” have each given 30+ 1-star reviews to competing local practices in the San Diego area:
At this point, it no longer matters if it truly is a top-notch practice with a highly skilled doctor – actions like this make them look dishonest and leads potential patients to start wondering about what else the practice isn’t being straightforward about. (And, we can’t imagine it’s going to make for a pleasant local society meeting next month?!?!)
We’re confident the brilliant people at Google will find a way to deal with this problem, but for now it appears anybody can get their fake reviews displayed on places pages with relative ease. In the meantime, please don’t fall victim to the temptation of doing this for your own practice. With the growing transparency of the social web, getting caught is becoming inevitable – and the backlash simply isn’t worth it.
Want more verified reviews from your actual patients displayed online? Claim you free DoctorBase profile and learn how the Panda automates & verifies your online reviews at:
http://doctor.DoctorBase.com/claim
Rise of the Fake Reviews
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This past month, the New York Times published an article on the rapidly increasing problem with fake reviews. We’re glad that somebody with a slightly larger reach than our own blog is creating some awareness on a topic at the core of what we set out to accomplish when we founded DoctorBase.
Since the early days of online reviews, we’ve noticed an inherent credibility issue. Initially, we saw the reviews sites themselves using fake negative reviews to drum up business. It worked for a while, but was then exposed as just a new form of online extortion. When review sites began using these fake negative reviews to entice doctors into paying to have them deprecated (and even removed), the fallout was realized in multiple class-action lawsuits.
Once these lawsuits began to lose steam, some businesses began to to take the fight back online by attempting to balance out fake negative reviews with fake positive reviews. Unfortunately, two wrongs don’t make a right. Now, this practice is also being exposed as more attention is being given to online solicitations on sites like Craiglist & Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, where the price of a positive online review ranges from $5 – $20. (And no, we’re not linking out to examples because we don’t want to give anybody any bad ideas.)
What’s the answer to this problem? Software. (Granted, we are quite biased!) When there’s software in the doctors office that can compare a list of your actual patients with the people leaving online reviews, reviews from verified patients can be separated out from the mess of online reviews submitted by people who’ve never even visited your city, much less your practice.
Want more online reviews from your actual patients? Claim your free DoctorBase profile and learn how the Panda can automate & verify online reviews for you at:
http://doctor.DoctorBase.com/claim
Yelp v. Google
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As we reported a few weeks ago, Google removed reviews from 3rd party websites like Yelp, Citysearch, Demandforce and others from their Places pages. While we suspected there was more to it than Google just playing nice and caving to allegations of ‘stealing’ content from these 3rd party sites, it appears these allegations may have been the driving force behind the decision.
Google+Places=?
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Last week we reported that Google had removed reviews from third party sites like Yelp, Demandforce, & Vitals from their places pages. The question we were asked by hundreds of doctors was “why?”
Google Removes 3rd Party Reviews…
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Google made a change in policy last week with regard to how it aggregated reviews on Google Places pages. The change is a big one: Google no longer aggregates reviews from 3rd party sites into their Places pages.
Yelp Hits 20M Reviews…
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Yelp, the online review site that’s been a topic of contention for doctors over the past couple years, announced that it reached 20 million reviews this past Friday. Their number of reviews have doubled in just the past 16 months and shows no signs of slowing down. We’ve also been hearing rumors of an IPO coming up for the online reviews site sometime in the calendar year.
The Benefits of a Negative Review…
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A recent study by students at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business discovered that small doses of mildly negative information can strengthen a patient’s positive impression of your practice. The study showed this “blemishing effect” can make positive reviews more persuasive to a patient. While this flies in the face of conventional thinking that negative comments need to be removed at all costs, it validates exactly what we’ve seen here at DoctorBase.
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