With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/751527
60 BCBUSINESS DECEMBER/JANUARY 2017 And with that came a desire to game the system. "I had a company, a paid advertiser, we had even given them a 'Best Of' award," Peterson recalls. "A whistleblower in their company alerted us that they had been faking their reviews—they had hired students to create email accounts. We took away their awards and put up a 'suspicious activity' banner on their listing. I don't think they were rotten people—I don't think they would go into your home and do bad work. But there needed to be some rami-cations." Bullying is another issue. A 2015 BCBusiness article about Yelp detailed the experience of a local woman whose bad review of a legal -rm resulted in threats of a lawsuit. While this may merely demonstrate that one should never kick a kickboxer, o•ering pro- tection for reviewers is a key to the process, Peterson believes. "Somebody writes a negative review of a roo-ng company, and they -gure out who it is, call up the customer and make threats—'If you don't take that review down, I'm going to sue or come over there and... whatever'—that home- owner might call us up and say, 'Take that review down.' We'll automatically penalize that company. "The ISO (International Standards Organization) has set up a working group to come up with guidelines for the aggregation, adjudication and publi- cation of online reviews, and I'm on it," Peterson says. "The Consumer Council of Canada is part of it as well." Peterson points out that Canadian review sites face more potential legal peril than their American cousins. In the U.S., the Telecommunications Online Decency Act allows for websites to not be held liable for reviews aggre- gated on their site, she says. In Canada, it's more of a legal grey area. "Defamation law in Canada is old. If the reviewer is writing facts, it's -ne. An opinion that is not defamatory is -ne. As long as they don't say, 'The roofer was drunk or cheated me' or some other allegation that is di˜cult to prove, it's -ne." The dynamics of online feedback can be complex. Airbnb asks for reviews of both hosts and guests, and both sides can su•er from negative feedback. Thus both sides have a vested interest in keeping things positive regardless of the actual experience. But Peterson points out that the Airbnb system does circum- vent one problem plaguing consumer review sites—the bogus review from a malicious agent or competitor. At least with the Airbnb system, you know there's been a transaction, Peterson says. "I think the transparency that reviews provide is really vital," Peterson says. "I've had companies say to me, 'I wish HomeStars would go away, but I know that we are a better company today because of it.'" As for the question of what the Grand Canyon and Yosemite can do to improve themselves, that will no doubt be revealed by focus groups. But if they want to compete with Disney, they had better start listening.