Knowing where to go on the Web for valuable meetings intelligence may mean visiting more than one site, says Adam Metz (www.metzmash.com), a San Francisco-area Web social strategist who advises clients about how to be savvy online marketers.
“Bear in mind that TripAdvisor and Yelp are only good for snapshot opinions. You can’t book meetings on what you learn there,” he says. “If I were a planner, I would mix and match—spend 10 minutes looking around Yelp, for example, and then go to a site like LinkedIn to check people’s backgrounds, so you know more about the reviewer. I don’t trust content without identity—that’s not a good thing. Anonymous reviews are places for trolls to hide, and building trust means there must be multiple accountability.”
None of the new sites has the perfect combination of user interface and features, he maintains.
“Bear in mind that in any social community the number of people who generate content from scratch are only about 10 percent,” Metz says. “The rest might do some content, but at a low level.”
