Last week, I read an interesting piece on Consumerist that ends with the question “how do you determine the worth of online reviews?”. As the person charged with growing, managing and improving the user reviews on our sites, I read the blog entry, but especially the comments, with great interest.

I am an avid reviewer on Yelp, mostly of restaurants — I write reviews, and I use reviews to help me choose new places to go. When reading reviews of anything, I look for general trends and don’t put much stock into individual reviews. If one person says they had a horrible experience but everyone else says it’s pretty good, I won’t let the one person deter me. But figuring out what is a trend and what is a quirk is somewhat of an art.

This is mostly what the commenters had to say as well. I thought that DANB had a very concise list of things to look at. To paraphrase:

1) Common themes over a period of time

2) Number and tone of reviews

3) Date Clumping (how spread out the reviews are, shills are usually clumped together)

4) Reputation of Reviewer

5) Consult more than one site

I will be thinking of all of these points as I set about to improve our user reviews experience this year — both to encourage people to leave more reviews, and to encourage people to come to our sites to read the reviews.

What do you look for when writing and reading user reviews?