Updated: September 9, 2022
The Federal Trade Commission has updated their guidelines for US based businesses and how they should collect, moderate, and publish reviews. You can read their full statement here.
Review Collection
FTC Basic principles:
Don’t ask for reviews only from people you think will leave positive ones.
If you offer an incentive to consumers for leaving a review, don’t condition it, explicitly or implicitly, on the review being positive. Even without that condition, offering an incentive to write a review may introduce bias or change the weight and credibility that readers give that review. For these reasons, some platforms have prohibited incentivized reviews altogether or have established mechanisms for labeling them.
Don’t prevent or discourage people from submitting negative reviews.
We believe all feedback is important feedback and businesses should not pick and choose which customers to listen to. We encourage unbiased feedback collection that includes all customers. Our request modes are in compliance with Google's TOS and the FTC's guidelines to provide all customers an equal opportunity to leave a review, regardless of of their known or unknown feelings.
In short, this means if you want to link to your online review profiles, you must display your online review links to all customers regardless of initial sentiment.
Review Moderation
FTC Basic Principles:
Have reasonable processes in place to verify that reviews are genuine and not fake, deceptive, or otherwise manipulated. As technology and threats change, be proactive in modifying and upgrading your processes.
Don’t edit reviews to alter the message. For example, don’t change words to make a negative review sound more positive.
Treat positive and negative reviews equally. Don’t subject negative reviews to greater scrutiny.
Whitespark encourages all users to publish an online review policy and have this available for customers to view. In this policy you can outline what type of review content is acceptable and what may be grounds for a review to be removed from your website.
Currently you are not able to edit feedback within our platform, review responses are published exactly as they are received.
We also encourage users to have a process in place to verify all new reviews which could include matching reviews to customers. This should be done across all reviews, not only the negative ones.
Review Publication
Displaying your reviews on your site has many benefits. There is an SEO benefit from showing customer generated content, as well as social proof benefits. Customers strongly rely on the opinion of others before making purchasing decisions. This is reliant on accurate representation of reviews.
FTC Basic Principles:
Publish all genuine reviews and don’t exclude negative ones.
Don’t display reviews in a misleading way. For example, it could be deceptive to feature the positive ones more prominently.
If you display reviews when the reviewer has a material connection to the company offering the product or service — for example, when the reviewer has received compensation or a free product in exchange for their review — that relationship should be clearly and conspicuously disclosed.
Clearly and conspicuously disclose how you collect, process, and display reviews, and how you determine overall ratings, to the extent necessary to avoid misleading consumers.
Have reasonable procedures to identify fake or suspicious reviews after publication. If a consumer or business tells you a review may be fake, investigate and take appropriate action. That may include taking down suspicious or phony reviews, leaving them up with appropriate labels, issuing an alert about them, and addressing the issue with those responsible for it.
We have always believed that the best practice is to display all reviews, regardless of star rating, in order to maintain transparency and build trust with your customers.
We have made an update to the review widget to more accurately depict this belief.
We will now auto publish ALL reviews, regardless of star rating. Instead of selecting a specific star rating to be displayed in the review widget, we are now offering a time delay on auto publishing to give you time to validate review content prior to publishing on your site.
You can select: no delay, 1 day, 2 days, 3 days, or 1 week.
This time delay will give you the opportunity to review content to ensure it aligns with your online review policy. If reviews are not in compliance you may still select to not display them in the review widget by toggling this off within the customer activity page:
Displaying all reviews is not only the right thing to do, it will help you build trust with your client base.
Benefits from this Update:
Auto publishing of all reviews shows potential clients a full view of your online reviews, this generates trust and credibility as a mix of positive and negative reviews appears more authentic.
Use negative reviews as an opportunity to listen to your customers, respond and attempt to resolve any negative experiences.