Skift Global Forum 2015: The Science and Art of Online User Reviews

Professor Camilla Vasquez of University of South Florida, will speak about about loudsourcing, the inside world of online reviews at the Skift Global Forum on October 14 and 15 in Brooklyn, New York. See the complete list of amazing speakers and topics at the Skift Global Forum. Vasquez has culled through hundreds of thousands of reviews on TripAdvisor and Yelp in the last seven years to study how customers express themselves on these platforms. Skift geeked out with her about words like "definitely," "unfortunately," and "literally." And we also had a fascinating talk about how technology shapes language, context and emphasis. Below is an edited version of our conversation. Skift: Why do you think online commenting has become such a big part of contemporary culture? Vasquez: Some people argue that it's related to this more democratic way of being in the world that's afforded by being on the Internet. We're networked with billions of people around the world, we can share our opinions, we are no longer dependent on top-down modes of information. So we, as consumers, don't need to rely only on companies to give us information about themselves. We're not dependent only on the mass media to tell us what to think. We can also inform one another. Communications scholar Henry Jenkins talks about participatory culture. We all can use the internet to participate. Of course, other people critique and challenge that and say, "Well, you know, not everybody has equal access really and there are other things that we need to think about and not everyone's participating equally, too." If you're on Facebook or Instagram, you might have five thousand friends, but only two hundred of them are active posters every day. It's the same thing with online reviews. Not everybody who stays in a hotel is going to post a review. It's maybe ten percent of the total population. But it's certainly a vocal and powerful and influential ten percent. And it's also ten percent more than could do that, voice there opinions publicly, fifteen years ago, before we had this. If you were happy or unhappy with something, you could write a letter to the business and it wouldn't really go much further than that. Now you can make all of that public and let lots