Is there nothing to fear but fear itself

(originaly posted on Happenings of The Re-Employed) 

The team at Circos has been busy benchmarking Hotel Reviews and those who review them. Our research will be published during the next few weeks as a report but our initial findings are interesting enough to start sharing ahead of the report.

Background - We have developed a few software engines (among other things) that take website visitor 'footprints' and determining visitors interests as well as their influence within a community for a given area of interest. Our semantic and analytic scoring engines are currently out for a drive and have by fueled up with user generated content found on large travel review sites. We scoped the initial scoring to Hotel Reviewers and have decided to ('while we're out there') score the Hotels too.

We scoped the scoring to hotels in 5 cities and knocked out hotels that didn't meet a minimum number of reviews.  Qualifying hotels (hundreds) and reviewers (thousands) were scored across a variety of dimension to determine things like favorability, frequency, velocity, key word association, preference drivers, etc etc.  An interesting finding (other than seeing the Net Promoter Scores for the hotels and knowing who the brand advocates and detractors are) is that for hotels in San Francisco (we are still crunching number on the other cities) the greater the number of online reviews about a hotel, be that positive or negative, the higher the Net Promoter Score. Furthermore, the more reviews about a hotel the tighter the standard deviation becomes. In other words, more reviews = higher scores with less deviation between scores.

This is rather validating as we have also developed software for brands that wish to arm their advocates so these promoters may carry the brand's message throughout their electronic communications. While it is too soon to draw conclusions it may very well prove out that the risks of user generated content on a brand are out weighed by the benefits.