The Trouble With Online Customer Reviews

Growing skepticism about the validity of online reviews is a challenge for companies like Yelp and Angie's List, which have both lost favor on Wall Street. Waiting in the wings are heavyweights Facebook Inc. and International Business Machines Corp., as well as startups like MunchAdo and Mona, all vowing to deploy new technology that makes reviews more useful and prevents unscrupulous businesses from gaming the system with fake ones.
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When Yelp arrived in 2004, it was one of the first companies to build a successful business entirely around online reviews and apply the concept to the service industry. Today, the San Francisco-based company attracts 168 million monthly visitors looking for feedback about hair salons, taco shops and a host of other businesses.
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Yelp says it helps small businesses get discovered by more people, helping them compete against chain restaurants with bigger marketing budgets.
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MunchAdo, which bills itself as a food-discovery platform, helps restaurants connect bad reviews with the dates, times and circumstances so they can make changes when appropriate. Many review sites fail to give business owners key details to help them improve, but ding their reputations with poor reviews.
 “They’re not able to connect the review with a transaction,” MunchAdo CEO Puneet Talwar said. “That’s often the first thing we hear from restaurants.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-23/the-trouble-with-online-customer-reviews