Daily Deals on Twitter from Judy’s Book
June 18, 2009
If you use Twitter, start following @judysbook. We are beginning to tweet the most up to date, latest deals on Twitter. This is the fastest way to get those limited deals and discounts before they expire.
We want to hear your voice
May 15, 2009
We want to know what you think about Judy’s Book and how we can make the site better in order to serve you best. Please take few minutes to complete the following survey:
Thanks for taking the time to help make Judy’s Book better.
Love or Hate relationship
April 21, 2009
It’s a constant challenge to provide a platform to foster authentic sharing and recommending of local businesses without it being abused. Ideally, users would feel safe about voicing out their experience, whether positive or negative. If it was positive, it’d be an encouragement to the business as well as future customers. If it was negative, it’d be a valuable feedback for the business to improve on. This would also prove valuable to the businesses as they can hear and understand what their customers are talking, what they can improve on, what people are looking for etc.
The unfortunate thing is that the world we live in isn’t at this level yet. Some users abuse the platform to vent their anger, instead of providing constructive feedback for improvements. Some businesses use this to deliberately destroy its competitions by fake writing negative reviews. At some point, no one can trust anything said online because, the assumptions are:
1) A positive reviews are written by the business themselves
2) Negative reviews are written by the competition, angry customers or just pure lies
No one likes to have negative things said about them. Looking at the abuse reports, almost always only the negative reviews are being flagged and to be investigated for taken down. Read about how to write a great review.
How do we deliver trustworthy reviews and help each other to make confident decisions, in a mutually honoring way to the users and to the businesses?
At Judy’s Book, we don’t take down reviews simply because a business complains. They cannot pay us either to take reviews down. That’s the hard line we drew. We just won’t and never will. The only time we take down reviews, is when the review violates our terms of use policy. There are lots of exciting things to be done. Our recent introduction of trending chart and business activity feeds is a way we are innovating to bring a new way to look into how the business is doing and not purely by flat average like most sites do. We are also working on something for the businesses as well, so that they don’t feel all so powerless when a negative review was left behind.
We are committed to build the platform with rich set of tools to foster a healthy community which people can feel safe to share, browse and make confident decisions. Also a community which the businesses enjoy honest conversations with the users to serve them better.
Rolling Average Windows
April 17, 2009
Ever thought about why everyone seems to show rating of a business with simply an average rating across all of the reviews? Perhaps that’s just how things are done. But how useful is it really? One, it doesn’t portray the clear picture for how good the business really is and will be for when you decide to go there. Second, it’s not fair for a business to constantly have to pay for its mistakes that happened a long time ago and now have improved since then.
We thought about trying something new, why not display ratings like how the stock market does. We’ll show you a rolling 60 day rolling average of the current business rating(when we have enough information). We also left the traditional average ratings there to show you if the business has gotten better the last 60 days or gotten worse.
In the above example for Malay Satay Hut in Redmond, Wa the last 60 day rolling average is 4.3 where the overall average is 3.9. So the customers are definitely more pleased with this restaurant over time.
Another benefit of this is to allow people to keep on coming back to write the most current review without feeling like they are spamming the business. So, now every time someone goes to a place, regardless of whether they’ve rated this place before, they can rate it again.
We plot all of the activities the business has received on Judy’s Book in a stock market like trending chart. You can see where things have changed and what people had to say about it.
We hope that you’ll enjoy this feature and find the data represented in a friendly way. Click on the Feedback tab on the right side of your screen on any business page to let us know your ideas for how we can make Judy’s Book the best site for you.
How to write a great review
March 18, 2009
We love to get recommendations from people we trust, when we need to decide where to go. Here are some tips on how to write a good recommendation that is informative and helpful to the person who is reading it.
- Talk about the business, not about you – people wants to know what’s good about the business, what they didn’t do so well to meet your expectation and what constructive feedback for improvement. If your experience during the visit wasn’t great, share about what didn’t go so well. Perhaps the reader might not mind about that aspect of the business.
- Use clean language, spell check and proper cases – offensive language has no place on Judy’s Book community and people get turned off reading about it. I’ve seen some reviews were purely written in all UPPER CASES LIKE THIS. It’s very hard to read.
- Update often – people like to know most up to date information about the business practice. If you go often, update people on how things are going. Anything new to share? Our system actually tracks the business ratings in rolling window so that a bad business doesn’t get punished by old ratings. Similarly, good business that started to slide, can’t get by for long. In order for this to work well, we need reviewers to update us on the most up to date information
Bottom line, we all know what recommendations in the past have helped us the most. Let’s give recommendations in the same way that we want to read. Let’s build a great community together!
Follow your favorite reviewers
March 18, 2009
We’ve just released RSS feed to the business page and member’s book page. Now you can get the latest updates to each simply by subscribing to their RSS feed.
What is RSS feed? This might help: http://www.whatisrss.com
If you have the latest browsers like Firefox or Internet Explorer, upon getting to a business listing page or member’s book, your browser’s RSS button will light up.
Try it here: http://www.judysbook.com/cities/seattle/Japanese-Restaurants/101/p1/t1/Kiku_Tempura_House.htm
or
http://www.judysbook.com/members/9480
If you browser’s RSS button doesn’t light up, or your browser doesn’t have one. You can simply click on either the RSS icon (the one in orange with 3 curves in it) or the link that says “Subscribe to updates”.
Use this to follow your favorite local reviewers, family and friends to see what they have to say and recommend. We’ll continue to roll out more useful tools to help you to share and acquire recommendations of places to go.
Hotel Reviews
January 20, 2009
If you ever stayed at a hotel locally or in different parts of the country on vacation/business trips or whatever, now you can rate your experience on Judy’s Book. Share with your family and friends where you’d recommend them staying when they go on their trips.
We’ve partnered with Expedia to deliver rich photos as well as Google Streets View to show you what’s in the area before you decide on which hotel you like to stay at. We will pass on all of the great deals and vacation packages to our users.
Email notifications to stay in touch
November 24, 2008
We’ve recently rolled out a feature to help you stay in touch with the local businesses that you use in your day to day life. A lot of us have visited a store few months or even years ago. But since then, the business may have gotten better and you can hear what other members are saying about it through our email notification. In some cases, the business has gotten worse, and you may want to consider taking your business elsewhere.
Sign in onto Judy’s Book today and update your profile settings to make sure you are set up to receive these emails. If you want to opt-out, you can choose to not receive them through the profile setting as well.
Little treat for the holidays
November 24, 2008
Came across this deal this morning and thought I’d share it with our blog readers. This coupon expires at the end of today, so jump on it.
80% off Savings on Dinner of the Month Club Purchase. Code SURPRISE. Now thru 11/24/08.
