Reviews - I need more!

What we did, which I guess now is against most of their rules, was to offer a gift (a jacket with our logo on it, so free advertising as well) for those who would leave reviews (we never said good, we just asked for honest). But we do an in house survey so we contacted those who gave us the best ratings so the likelihood of a good review was high.

You may want to take a look at this thread(especially post #22):

http://www.warriorforum.com/offline-...autopilot.html

I also recently saw a sign in a business I patronize that says,"recommend us to your family and friends on Yelp and Google"

I have heard businesses are not supposed to solicit reviews from their customers, but I don't see the harm, especially since Yelp has a habit of filtering legitimate good reviews and leaving only the bad reviews to count in the star rating system. Also, when Yelp started they used to pay people to post reviews and they have been know to "extort" ad fees from businesses, in order to have the negative reviews filtered or pushed to the bottom. They don't play fair. They don't care that their poorly designed algorithm, negatively affects innocent business owners and their employees, costing much needed jobs and lifetimes of savings invested in these small businesses, when these businesses have to close their doors.

As long as the business doesn't ask for good reviews, but only asks for reviews( good or bad), I really don't see the harm.

I think the only way to do it with integrity is to ask your clients
to ask for reviews. The post referred to by digichick outlines
a very good system. I'm not keen on any incentive though.

At my hotel, I deal with TripAdvisor.com a lot and follow their guidelines
for responses and requesting reviews. In a nutshell, we can request reviews,
but cannot offer incentives. TripAdvisor.com provides a form we can
download and hand out. It provides the url for the guest to use to post their
review.

It's really simple if the business basically does a good to excellent job.
We get enough positive reviews to make up for and bury the bad
ones - naturally. Our bad ones usually involve a guest who had was
having a bad day, or expected us to be a five star hotel when we
are only a two star and we don't try to appear otherwise.

These might help you structure things for your replies, or what you try to get your clients to do:
Help Center

Dan

Well, if you're building an email list for the business, you can talk about how important the feedback that true customers have is, and ask for an honest review, with a link to the site you need - Google +, Yelp, YP, whatever. That way you can sort of steer where you need the reviews to go.

There are a couple of WSOs that have a landing page system for catching reviews, which send bad reviews straight to the business owner, so you could send them there from the email you send too.

Technically, this isn't so much "soliciting" reviews as it is making customers aware that reviews are needed/valued.

From my experience reviews that are posted by asking customers usually get filtered. The reason being is they set up a new account, post one review then abandon it. These are not regular users. This is the same type of activity Yelp looks for in fake reviews, so they get filtered. I have heard countless stories of this happening. There are also some businesses that end up getting all of their good reviews filtered for no reason whatsoever, usually they have been solicited by Yelp beforehand for paid advertising and they refused.