Kyle
Washington DC startup Review Signal launched last week after 19 months in the making. Founder Kevin Ohashi has developed a product review platform that can be more trusted than traditional platforms like Yelp or Google reviews. Review Signal analyzes data points across social media to gauge the pulse of what people think about a particular product or service.
While there are hundreds of verticals that Review Signal could be applied to Ohashi has started with web hosting reviews as his first full on demonstration of how the system works.
Review Signal mines the data across social networks, and then separates the “mentions” for a specific product or service into good or bad. As Ohashi tells us in the interview below, if there are 100 tweets about a product with 50 being positive and 50 being negative, the raw review score would naturally be 50%. Now people aren’t forced to read long, sometimes biased long-form reviews.
One of the biggest problems we’ve seen with traditional reviews stems from the reason the average person would write a review anyway. Aside from career reviewers and those types that have to review absolutely everything, the bulk of the rest of reviews on review sites come when a customer is raving about a company, product or service after having a great experience or after they’ve had a bad experience.
You don’t get a lot of “average” everyday folks that take the time to write a review about a run of the mill or average experience.
For example say you went to a decent (not exceptional, just decent) restaurant and had the best chocolate cake ever. You’re much more likely to tweet “had this awesome chocolate cake” with a photo, rather than write a 5 paragraph review on the restaurant itself or, heck, even the chocolate cake.
One of the most fascinating parts about this story is how it came about in the first place. Ohashi actually based Review Signal off the idea he used for his masters thesis.
Check out our interview with Ohashi below. He does a really great job of explaining how the system actually works.