Grapevine Consulting

User generated product and service reviews, particularly regarding going out and travel, seem to be a growth area right now in social media. But with a range of communities springing up across niche and general areas like Trip Advisor, TrustedPlaces, and Epinions how do brands get users commit to commit to their community and remain engaged? And what are the opportunities & challenges for these types of sites?

I posed some questions to Rob Hinchcliffe, Community Manager for Qype who position themselves as a ‘local reviews site’. I’ve been spending a bit of time recently attending their sponsored events, drinking their free bar and wondering how it’s all going for them.

Ok, so user-generated review sites - what’s the benefit of them if you don’t want to sign-up or contribute your opinions?

Well if you’re not signed up to Qype you can still get a lot of information from it. We’re not a walled garden like Facebook for example, so you can hunt for places, read the full reviews people have left, use the interactive map to see the best places in any area and get URLs and telephone numbers for those places. It’s only when you want to start contributing your own information and interacting with other members of the community that you have to sign up.

Are these sites making an impact on search engine results?

Short answer: yes.

Google et al love user-generated content so the more reviews a place gets the better it’s ranking tends to be. We also provide a lot of meta-content to the places we have, so for example we have tags, pictures, videos and comments as well as all the user-generates guides and groups a place can feature in. So unlike a straight business directory we take a place and have fun with it, connect it to other places and people all of which makes it way more searchable.

What are the advantages/disadvantages to being a site which specialises in one sector such as entertainment or travel vs. a one-stop “rank anything” user-generated site?

Cornering a niche is always good but niches also have their limits and I think what the whole Web 2.0 revolution has allowed us to create a huge space in which the users can create their own niche. You can create a site just for gay/lesbian/bisexual real ale drinkers or you can just let that group form organically on a much broader platform where they have the opportunity to create link and relationship with other groups. (And yes, the LGB real ale drinkers group does really exist).

Effectively you’re monetising collation of user-generated reviews - what’s the barriers to getting people to contribute to your content base?

I think the main barrier to contributing to a review site is that writing a review takes a conscious effort. With sites like Flickr or Last.fm you’re more than likely taking those pictures or listening to that music anyway, but there’s relatively few people who are already writing reviews of the places they’ve visited and looking for a repository for those reviews!

We find that our users usually take around two weeks to get into the reviewing habit and then get addicted! It’s our job to bring that time down so they can get an immediate hit and luckily technology is allowing us to do that.

Currently you’re incentivising your community to build content. Long term how will user generated reviews sites become intrinsically motivating to contribute to?

We award points to our members for all sorts of things: writing reviews, adding photos, inviting friends etc, but the real rewards come when a user becomes involved in the community. Finding people who share your opinions and interests, receiving good feedback and offering tips and advice is definitely what gets people coming back for more (even though the cuddly Ninja toy you get when you hit 1000 points is pretty cool!).

To someone that hasn’t heard about you why should they come to Qype?

For the cuddly Ninja toy obviously! Ok, maybe not just that…

I guess what Qypeoffers is a socialnetwork with a practical edge because it’s a community which revolves around the real world. Our content is full of real world experiences and opinions which you can put to use in your life and we’re expanding the ways in which you can use Qype all the time. So our mobile widgets are getting smarter, we’re goignto be adding better video review functionality soon, and we’re expanding the site to cover all different elements of your social life.

At that point the site becomes more than a network and becomes a tool to help you live your life more easily!

Thanks to Rob for his time.