Trying to change the Nepali system of "We give you Free Dinner and Alcohol, Write Our Review"
In Nepal, it is still the trend that restaurants and business houses give free perks to the reviewers from various New Organizations. The conversation goes something like this :
"Why don't you come for a dinner at our restaurant, try some food and write a review of our food, Bill is on Us"
Problem with this system is, reviews are mostly (if not always) positive without pointing any of the flaws. It is for sure hard to write against a restaurant when you just got a free food for them.
In order to bring the change to this system we are doing the following:
We have hired an anonymous writer, Valley Foodie, who is going to restaurants in the city, experiencing it without telling the restaurant and writing an honest review. We realize that we may face some anger from restaurants, especially when reviews are not akin to their expectation. But we are going to stick to our method and keep on doing this.
Users, please provide us with feedback on what we are trying to do and how we can improve it!
Read the first review by Valley Foodie here
http://www.parakhi.com/blogs/2011/07/12/himalayan-java/
Restaurants watch out, you will never know when Valley Foodie is amidst your customers. If you are superb quality restaurant you need to nothing to worry about, but if you are giving a poor service, better start improving your service.
Its a superb websites.
BUT the last line on this thread shows your ATTITUDE.
You have a unique TALENT and try to stay in that BOUNDRIES to develop more STRENGTHS...
You've hired Valley Foodie to do the job, DHOLE BAJAYARE SAJHA MA NEPALI BUSINESS OWNERS HARULAI DHAMKI DINU UCHIT HOINA....
SexyInSaari: Yaslai dhamki nai bhanna milcha ra?
nari_in_sari (sexy_in_*** vanna milen ani sari ko aaghi sexy pani vanna milen, aaru kasaiko le lekhya malai ek dum chinta bujyo, anyway)
Nari_in_sarI ko valley bhitra khattam restautrant cha jasto cha....
I can see myself becoming a fan of this site. I just wish they had more content.
You should probably hire bunch of reviewers, at least for a short term, until you have sufficient critical mass of content in place and can safely depend on your crowd-sourcing momentum to move the model forward.
Furthermore, pictures are indeed worth thousand words, so have more of those. Not only that, make it easier to view those pictures. For example, your Himalayan Java article has some pictures which is great. But navigating from one photo to the other requires too many clicks and is not seamless.
As I said, I can see this site becoming quite successful in future, provided the right steps are taken, sooner than later.
Good luck!
While this is a good attempt at copying the business model of Yelp. Yelp has been accused of being unfair to businessed who do not advertise with them. This review business will be interesting in the Nepali context. There is just no way to guarantee that a review is accurate or not.
Please log in to reply to this post
You can also log in using your Facebook