You have added your company to Bizwiki (or someone else has) and people using the site can find your address, telephone number and read a little bit about your company.

Does it end there?

Absolutely not!

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Sometimes all people need is the facts.

I was struck by the truth of a paragraph in a recent post by Brian Wool discussing the local search offerings presented by the major players at the Santa Clara Search Marketing Expo last week.

In regards to ‘cool’ photo options for local-listings Brian says, “If you’re a dentist in Omaha, Nebraska, what impact will a photo have on a potential new patient? ……. Providing information on the services, procedures, and insurance plans you accept would probably work better.”

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In the last post we discussed ways in which companies can encourage satisfied customers to post positive reviews (along with some tips on how to make sure they are satisfied customers).

Now we come to the difficult task of dealing with negative reviews. In a recent post Chris Linnett says that companies have three alternatives for dealing with negative reviews: flame the publishers, simply let it play out or get directly involved, to which I have added a fourth option below.

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In our initial post in this series I stated that “Online reviews are one of the best things that could have ever happened to marketing-led companies.” But how do you get reviews? And how do you go about ensuring that the reviews are positive, or at least not negative?

8 ways to Increase Your Positive Reviews

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Bizwiki is a user generated business directory. This means that YOU can write on this site. As a business owner or manager the ability to submit your company, free of charge, and add to and update your Bizwiki business record gives you the opportunity to go far beyond the standard directory style listing or phone book entry.

We want Bizwiki users to be able to find out all about your company and so we are offering companies the opportunity to add a wide range of information about their company’s products, brands, specialities, areas of expertise, geographic locations they serve, awards they’ve won, associations they belong to, special mentions and so on.

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Started in 2006 and open as a public-beta since June of last year, Bizwiki is finally officially live today. We’re cutting the ribbon (or more literally, removing the Beta ribbon that’s been on the top left of all pages since last June) and announcing the site more widely to the general public.

We are very happy to be able to say that Bizwiki has already had over two thousand people sign up to help add content and edit the site, with many more expected now that the site is officially live. Now is a good time to thank everyone who has contributed to making this site what it is, thank you.

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It’s all passed in a blur of new features being added, people signing up, improvements being made and a large amount of contributions to the information on the site, but believe it or not Bizwiki has now been live to the public for six months.

And what an eventful six months they have been, too.

We have continuously been impressed with the quality of information that has been added by the general public. Yes, there has been the occasional piece of ‘self-promotion’ or advertising-copy masquerading as a review, but that’s par for the course on the modern internet and most of these have been removed within hours. What is far more impressive is the amount of businesses that have been added, contributions submitted and genuine reviews we have received from people who are trying to help improve the quality of information available for others.

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Since beta launch Bizwiki has been swamped with submissions. It’s great! A big thank you to everyone who submitted new listings, changes and updates. We’re working through them as quickly as we can.

Please note that Bizwiki is a directory for UK companies, organisations, associations and clubs, and not a website directory.

That means that we’re more than happy to include the main website of any UK company, but not websites on their own. In fact you can add up to 5 brand or product website addresses in the External Links section of a business record.

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The online news has been buzzing with the story of a US college student’s “Wikipedia Scanner” as reported in Wired, BBC and numerous other places.

No wonder it’s getting attention. The tool lets you see who is really editing Wikipedia pages, and shows clearly what many in the web community have known or suspected for some time – in addition to the outright and very obvious problems of spam and articles being defaced, Wikipedia’s open editing policies have also allowed company owners and corporate as well as government spin-doctors to quietly remove any references they don’t want published and ever so softly insert their own versions.

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Why include reviews?

Bizwiki is dedicated to collecting and publishing business information rather than opinion, and the question of whether to include review functionality at all was debated early on in the project.

Our conclusion was that in some cases our visitors will want to know other peoples’ experiences with a business more than anything else, so we decided to add reviews as an alternative place for users to share opinions that would otherwise inevitably filter through into the business information.

After all, you can’t give users the right to edit the pages of a site and not expect them to want to express their views and opinions!

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