Judy's Book Blog

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How to write a great review

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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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!

Filed under: Judysbook

Follow your favorite reviewers

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.

Filed under: Announcements

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