Daniel Lemin, Author of ManipuRATED on Online Ratings and Reviews

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Welcome to the Marketing Technology Podcast. News, tools, and tips from marketing technology companies and the marketers using them. Here's Douglas Karr.

Douglas Karr 0:13

Well, welcome to another in our interview series on the Marketing Tech Blog. I have on Skype with me today, Daniel Lemin. Daniel, welcome, sir.

Daniel Lemin 0:23

Thank you for having me. Pleasure to be here.

Douglas Karr 0:25

Yeah, and for those that aren't familiar with Daniel, Daniel is a respected authority in the reputation industry. He was an early Google hire, which that's pretty excited. Lemin was one of the first pioneers to realize the importance, impact, and power of online ratings and reviews on small businesses and the ongoing struggle business owners have with their online reputations. Daniel is an acknowledged expert on digital marketing, public relations, and reputation management and is a consultant for prominent Fortune 500 companies, including Nestle, Procter & Gamble, Hilton, Sony, Suzuki, Munchkin, and Best Buy. And closer to home, Daniel is a senior strategist with the consulting firm Convince & Convert, who we know a little bit about, of course, and your contributor to the Convince & Convert marketing blog, which is, of course, the number one rated content marketing blog in the world. How's that? That's a pretty good intro right there, right?

Daniel Lemin 1:28

That never fails to impress that last metric.

Douglas Karr 1:32

Well, welcome to the show, sir. And what we're going to be talking about today is Daniel has a new book coming out December 1st in all major stores, but it's called Manipurated, and it's how business owners can fight fraudulent online ratings and reviews. And so some of the businesses listening may not even realize that that is happening in this industry, but Daniel and I were talking before the show, Yelp has 26,000 new reviews per minute. Per minute. That's absolutely incredible. And Daniel, your response to me when I said that that was so extraordinary was?

Daniel Lemin 2:13

Well, a quarter of that 26,000 is fake.

26,000 a minute is a shocking number, but you realize that a very large number of those are fake. It's even more off-putting, I think, for a lot of consumers and businesses alike.

Douglas Karr 2:36

Yeah, absolutely. And talk about that. So what composes a fake review? Are these bots? Are they agencies? Who's doing these bad reviews?

Daniel Lemin 2:49

Yeah, well, Yelp definitely has probably a different flavor for what bad reviews look like than some other sites. They take a pretty wide, very technical approach. So if it appears that it's coming from someone who works for the company, friends and family, it's IP address-related, associated, all of that kind of gets flagged as fake reviews. And, of course, there's the obvious stuff, the fake, the fakest of the fakers, you know, the bots and the things that don't even make sense when you read them. That's pretty clear. But they take a pretty advanced look at fake reviews from an algorithmic perspective. But even with that kind of fail-safe in place, I actually don't know that I would call it a fail-safe. It fails pretty regularly. There was a separate study. So the 25% figure actually comes from Yelp. There was a separate study from a group of researchers at a university that found of the reviews that are published on Yelp, an additional approximately 20% are fake in some way. So to say it's pervasive is understating, I think, the extent of the problem.

Douglas Karr 4:03

And with that extensive issue, how much are these, even these fake reviews, how much are they impacting businesses?

Daniel Lemin 4:13

They have, I mean, it hurts businesses in a few different ways. The most obvious is if a competitor comes after you, right? If your next door competitor or your competitor across the street starts publishing fake reviews about you, that's obviously going to harm you. And that's a pretty clear-cut case. But the other way is that it kind of hurts businesses. I think a lot of business owners feel that maybe the lowest-hanging fruit for getting new reviews is to pay some of the easily findable services to go out and write fake reviews for them. So they kind of get trapped in that game as well. And in truth, fake reviews are a huge problem for the industry, but it doesn't serve anyone. It's kind of a zero-sum game, really. Yelp and Angie's List, TripAdvisor, they certainly hate it, right? They don't like the presence of that. It doesn't help consumers make a better decision, and it doesn't really serve in the business owners either. So it's a pervasive problem, but it's kind of just wrought by the nature of the Internet itself. The anonymity gives everybody kind of license to make money off of that and sort of make a business model out of it. I actually interviewed a woman, and she's not unique. I just happened to kind of hone in and develop a relationship with her. A young woman lives in San Diego. She went to UC San Diego. She's a smart woman. She studied communications, public relations. She definitely is of a marketing mindset, so much so that she started writing fake reviews for a living because that just seemed like a market for her. So that's her whole business model is companies paying her to write reviews mostly on Amazon about products that they have. So it is a massively pervasive problem.

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Douglas Karr 6:36

Wow. You would almost think that it would require – you know, Amazon is probably a good example where why not require someone to, you know, have that purchase in place? You know, Angie's List is a – you know, they were a client of ours, so full disclosure there. But what intrigued me about Angie's List was, you know, that you had to be a paid subscriber in order to actually write a review. Yeah. So it was – a lot of people said, well, I'm not going to pay to use a review service. Well, it wasn't that. It was, you know, it was trying to keep the quality of the reviews up in the system. But it's interesting. I wonder, do you think that the industry is going to, you know, modify its behavior? Or are they going to continue this autonomous approach that – where people can just, you know, keep trying to game the system like this?

Daniel Lemin 7:22

I think they have to modify the system. Amazon itself actually implemented maybe a few years ago. I don't know the actual timeline for it. But they have a lot of reviews marked verified on their site. So if it's a purchase that actually happened through their platform, it gets marked as verified. This young lady in San Diego has figured out how to game that system. Has the client reimburse her on the back end for buying the product.

Douglas Karr 7:49

Oh,

Daniel Lemin 7:49

no. So, you know, she does actually receive the product. She told me she never really uses it or opens it. She might eventually, you know, give it away. So that type of thing is happening. I think one of my favorite examples, though, of a company trying to do better – Angie's List is actually a really good example. Because of the way their model is built. The other one is TripAdvisor. They've done a good job kind of working with American Express to develop a system that basically when American Express – if you connect your TripAdvisor account and your American Express account via their kind of back-end system, when American Express sees that you stayed at the Hilton Hotel in Chicago, they'll say, do you want to write a review about that hotel on TripAdvisor? And then it gets marked on TripAdvisor as an American Express stay. So they know that you at least had a financial transaction with that particular hotel before you wrote the review. It still doesn't have the opportunity for fraud. But that becomes a much higher threshold to cross, right?

Douglas Karr 9:05

Yeah.

Daniel Lemin 9:06

To

Douglas Karr 9:06

have

Daniel Lemin 9:08

an American Express card and fake a night at the hotel and get a charge. It starts to become a little bit more cumbersome.

Douglas Karr 9:17

Now, it seems to me – and this is fascinating. It's fascinating that someone can make their living writing a fake review at a product level where margins are so tiny. Is the impact of a positive review that much that you could – let's say – I don't know what it would cost. Let's say it's $100 or $150 for someone to write a fake review. Maybe I'm totally off. Maybe it's $5.

Daniel Lemin 9:44

You would think someone's time is that valuable. She only charges five. Wow. Believe it or not. So she's churning these things out probably dozens a day at a bare minimum. And in some cases, multiple reviews for the same product with different personas. She's kind of figured out how to mask her IP address. So she kind of tricks the system into thinking she's in San Diego and Chicago and New Orleans all on the same day.

Douglas Karr 10:15

I'm so disappointed.

Daniel Lemin 10:18

I was disappointed. It's like this woman is smart. She could just put this to use to solve like real world problems. We could all benefit. But it's a real problem. You could go on Fiverr, F-I-V-E-R-R. That's one. You can find any number of people willing to write reviews.

Douglas Karr 10:42

That's incredible. It seems and, you know, the similar, I guess the parallel would be the SEO industry, you know, for the longest time, you know, it skyrocketed to a $5 billion industry. And that was because people saw that if they, you know, if they spent, you know, $100,000 on black hat, you know, SEO tactics, it could lead to millions of dollars of new business for them. And thankfully, you know, Google algorithms have, I believe, largely caught up with that. So now it's, you know, there's this daisy chain of relevance and websites and age and everything else that they're applying, you know, to validate, you know, the authority of the sources on there. It'll be great to see if, you know, Amazon and the rest of the people are able to do the same from an algorithmic standpoint.

Daniel Lemin 11:37

Well, it's really interesting you bring that up because one of the sort of principles in my book that I put forth is that business, large businesses understand the game, right? They've got agency resources, you know, they know how to game the system and they have a lot of experience because of that SEO background for, you know, 15 years they've been doing this. Small businesses don't have that understanding because they just don't have those resources. They're not in the business of marketing. They're in the business of whatever, donuts or accounting. And that the latter kind of evolution in the SEO world, which shifted everything away from inbound links and link farms, all that crap, to freshness, fresh content on a page, is the primary reason Yelp and TripAdvisor and those sites became so prominent in the first place. It's because Google started to love them because they had tons of fresh content all the time, you know, some thousand reviews a minute on Yelp. So they're packed full of fresh content every minute.

Douglas Karr 12:55

And is that in your book you talk about the fresh factor? Is that what you're speaking to?

Daniel Lemin 13:00

That's exactly it. And I think businesses can use that mindset to kind of fight back and not by hiring fake reviews, but by using the system in the way it not necessarily was intended to work, but the way it's become the way it has sort of evolved, which is this toxic mix of freshness and links and all of these things. Freshness is really one of the key things that Google cares about. Because it's the signal that seems to be the most prominent to them right now.

Douglas Karr 13:36

Well, I suppose you would eventually run out of money if you just kept trying to prop up your false business. You

Daniel Lemin 13:44

will. And you run out of money and you might even get caught doing it. It's pretty likely you'll get caught doing it. Yelp has a really active program. It basically puts scarlet letters on a company's profile that says, this company is faking its reviews. You should steer clear. It's pretty scary when as a business owner you think, how can I get caught up in that mess? I'll never get out of it.

Douglas Karr 14:14

That's incredible. We have a friend of ours that owns a pizza shop here in Indianapolis. And one of the reviews that he got, he believes it was from a competitor, but it was basically that this guy came in and ordered the special and it was terrible. But the week that the review ran, there was no special.

And my advice to him was attack it head on. Go ahead and defend your business and put in there that, hey, you don't have to be rude or anything. But you can go in there and absolutely respond and say, I'm just curious. We didn't actually run a special that week, so I'm not sure how this is a valid review. And go out there and do it. And so, which leads to a question with you is we've talked about, obviously, the impact and what's wrong with the industry. But what is a small business customer whose time and energy, of course, are limited? How do they deal with even the reviews that aren't fake but are bad or ugly?

Daniel Lemin 15:29

Yeah. Jay talks about this, Jay Baer, in his new book, Hug Your Haters. I think that's out next year in the spring, 2016 in the spring. He did some research and found that the most important thing that any business can do is to really look at responding to every review, good or bad, because that sets the precedent for you being kind of an active participant in the story about your company or your products. And I think that's a very high bar to cross for a lot of businesses. If they, in the litany of things they have to do every single day, also add this task of doing maybe an hour's worth of rating and review responses. And so, I think my perspective on that is that is definitely the stretch goal for every business to say, yeah, we're going to respond to reviews no matter where they are, whether they're good or bad. You know, the thing for a small business owner, they first kind of need to figure out which sites are really driving business to them in the first place. If it's not Yelp, then I wouldn't suggest they don't care about Yelp. But if they have to make some choices, you know, they can take Yelp off of the list. There's different ways they can do that. You know, obviously ask customers, where did you find me? That's one easy way. But they can also look in their website analytics to see if they're getting any inbound traffic whatsoever from Yelp or Angie's list. And they kind of, if you do some correlation and say, customers are telling me that they're finding me on Angie's list. I'm getting traffic from Angie's list. And I rank pretty highly in Google search. That's one of the highest, it's one of the, you know, top search results for my business is my Angie's list profile. So maybe I can not worry so much about Yelp and really focus on Angie's list. And that already gives them a sense of priority. That's at least giving some structure to their day, at least that component of their day. And then kind of shift to this mentality of responding to every review, good or bad.

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Douglas Karr 18:15

We're on the line with Daniel Lemon. Daniel is the author of Manipurated, which is coming out December 1st. Make sure you go to manipurated.com. You can download a free chapter of the book. And of course, you can find the links to pre-order it on Amazon and Goodreads and everything else. You were just talking, Daniel, about how people can focus their time and attention and have that ultimate goal of answering reviews. I'm curious because I did download the chapter and read the amazing story about Bobby the Hairdresser. And maybe you can just talk about that story a little bit. And I'm intrigued now. I don't want to obviously stop you from getting people ordering your book. But I'm curious how that story ended. But maybe you can give everybody kind of an overview of the story and then where it went from there.

Daniel Lemin 19:11

Yeah, you bet. So Bobby's story, Bobby's a good friend of mine. He lives in Los Angeles. And he had started a hair salon sort of after a litany of kind of career shifts. He worked in the creative industry for a long time. He just was passionate about, you know, hair. And so he opened a really nice hair salon on Abbott Kinney in Los Angeles, which is kind of a hot little. It's a hotbed of, you know, hipsterness in Los Angeles, which is already.

Douglas Karr 19:46

It's where I won't be.

Daniel Lemin 19:48

Right. You don't really find me there either,

Douglas Karr 19:50

to be fair.

Daniel Lemin 19:51

But his salon did very, very well. It was kind of a little garden setting. And it became very popular. Bobby had, I think, a very typical experience from probably 99 percent of American businesses. He was besieged by calls from all manner of salespeople almost the day he opened. You know, we want to sell you accounting software and advertising and all of these things. And some of those calls came from Yelp and CitySearch. CitySearch probably doesn't even matter for a lot of people anymore. But at the time, it was still somewhat relevant. And he was just besieged by calls from those folks. And he sort of ignored it at the point. At that point, you know, he was just starting and didn't really have tons of resources. Until the one fateful day when a friend actually told him about a review on Yelp that was just scathing and awful. And Bobby hadn't really been paying attention to his Yelp profile a whole lot. And he hadn't seen it until a friend told him about it. And it kind of made him panic. You know, it's very off. It's very off-putting or sort of upsetting to a business owner. It's an entire livelihood. And in the case, in his case, it was an actual customer. It was just such a crazy customer that it looked almost fake. It was an unbelievable rant against him and his business. And she was a crazy woman. A crazy woman. But she left him a nasty review. And it was all her. But unfortunately, it left him feeling very vulnerable. And so the next time Yelp and CitySearch called, he started to listen a little bit more. And there were a lot of the promises of, we can help you manage your reputation. And we'll promise you this and we'll promise you that. And so he actually signed up with CitySearch and later with Yelp and didn't have a particularly good experience with either one of them. They are not particularly easy companies to work with. Yelp in particular. As a small business owner, they're really not a particularly easy company to work with. But there was always this sort of inherent threat that if you don't work with us, who knows what could happen. And there have been a lot of reports of Yelp deranking companies that don't advertise with them. And I don't think he ever quite got that sense from them. But there was definitely a sense of potential harm. And that's very upsetting to business owners, particularly in the midst of maybe confronting a new review you just found out about that's very negative to then kind of be shifted to this. If you don't subscribe to our services, you know, we can't promise that that's not going to happen again. It was a very negative experience for him. And eventually it just sort of worked itself out. I mean, he continued to get other reviews. Unfortunately, that crazy woman's review stuck at the top of his Yelp profile for a very long time, despite a bunch of other great legitimate reviews from customers. It eventually went away. But it's, I think, a very typical experience for a lot of businesses. And what actually happens there is it causes them a knee-jerk reaction to just disregard the entire platform altogether, which is, that is perhaps the most harmful thing. Because not being present there, not addressing reviews is not going to help you grow your business in any way. And so that reaction that, you know, screw it all, I'm not going to do anything, you know, screw them. I got that sense from a lot of businesses when I was interviewing them for the book. And some businesses get it. And a lot of, and just about all of them understand the power of Yelp and TripAdvisor. But there was that sort of, I don't want to do business with those people because they're evil sort of sensibility. And you sort of have to put that aside and say, this is where my customers find me. Right. So unfortunately, I have to go make the most of that platform.

Douglas Karr 24:17

And now, here's an example. You know, I was speaking about my friend that owns the pizza shop. Of course, I have a friend that owns a pizza shop. But that's another story. Is it a good pizza shop? Oh, my God. It's incredible. Yeah. New York style pizza. I'll give him a shout out. It's Brissini's. But now, TripAdvisor, it was interesting that you had talked about the quality of their reviews, especially their verified reviews. But he gets a lot of business from TripAdvisor. And he asks his customers, of course, where they heard about him. But I think he might be doing the same thing. I think he's had some similar issues with Yelp. So he's largely, you know, kind of ignored, you know, that medium. You know, is it best that he, you know, if you have a situation like that where you have great reviews and you're getting a ton of visits off of certain, you know, companies and another company where you might have poor ratings, so you're obviously not getting business off it. Is it worth it to even, you know, keep going after that negative one and trying to, you know, turn it around? Or do you just put your time and effort, you know, into where you're getting the best leads from?

Daniel Lemin 25:34

I would argue as someone whose time is limited, it's probably the latter there. You know, you put your effort where you think the best return is. And the truth is, I think Yelp and TripAdvisor have completely different audience segments. That's my hunch for the vast majority of businesses. You know, I think TripAdvisor tends to be an older, probably more frequent traveler, whereas I think Yelp tends to be a younger crowd. And so that alone may be, that's maybe a very broad generalization. Everybody uses Yelp, but I don't know that everybody leans on Yelp as their first choice of thing. The one interesting thing about reviews in general is that consumers are pretty smart. They know the drill. They can see through those crazy people's comments and a review to the point that most consumers read anywhere between two and ten reviews when they make a purchase decision. Local business. So that alone should reassure a lot of businesses that, you know, one bad review isn't going to take you down. And I think that's also true. I believe that consumers shop around different sites. So if they see a three-star overall rating on Yelp and they think that's interesting because TripAdvisor, it's a four-and-a-half-star pizza place. And I don't understand the difference there. And then if they click into Yelp and see there's just a couple of reviews, whereas TripAdvisor, there may be 40, 50 reviews. Then I tend to think that wins on their decision quite a lot.

Douglas Karr 27:16

Interesting. Yeah, I know I had attended a consumer electronics show years ago, and it was a fascinating conversation. I can't remember the gentleman's name that was speaking, but he was working. I think he was working for Sony or something like that. And they had this amazing study where they found that people basically ignored five-star reviews. Yeah.

Daniel Lemin 27:43

And

Douglas Karr 27:43

so they found that when they had an average of like 4.2 to 4.8, the sales were highest. But if they had five, sales plunged. Yeah. And it was because the consumer did recognize that, oh, my God, this can't possibly be real. You know, nobody can have a perfect review. And then the other thing that he talked about was that consumers a lot of times, and I do this on Amazon, I instantly go to the one-star reviews. Yeah. And I read the one-star reviews and just see whether it's relevant or not.

Daniel Lemin 28:22

Yeah. And

Douglas Karr 28:22

most of the time I go, well, you know, they're a troll or it's not relevant, and I buy the product anyways.

Daniel Lemin 28:30

Yeah. And I also look at the date personally. That was another interesting thing that I found in my research that reviews past three months old are somewhat seen as irrelevant by consumers. You know, for a variety of reasons. It's just old.

Douglas Karr 28:48

Interesting.

Daniel Lemin 28:49

In the Internet world, three months is everything. So I think that weighs on people, too. If there's a bunch of old reviews that aren't that great, I think it's probably not that relevant.

Douglas Karr 29:00

Yeah. Wow. This is really fascinating data. What an incredible – and by the way, you have already – I think Jay actually wrote your preface in the book. Is that the right? Yes. Yeah.

Daniel Lemin 29:15

Yeah.

Douglas Karr 29:15

And gave it some awesome reviews already and said that there's an incredible amount of science and use cases within the book. So I want to encourage people. Again, go to manipurated.com and you'll find Daniel's book. You can get a free chapter right there on his site. And then, of course, you can go – make sure you go preorder it so that you have great sales on your opening day, right?

Daniel Lemin 29:41

That's right. That's right. And write good reviews. Oops. I didn't just say that.

Douglas Karr 29:47

Yeah. You're not allowed to say that, are you?

Daniel Lemin 29:51

No. No. Really, you're not.

Douglas Karr 29:53

Yeah. And that's an interesting concept right there, right? Because a lot of businesses – and maybe you can explain what the – you're not supposed to solicit reviews from people or you're not supposed to reward people for reviews. Or is it both?

Daniel Lemin 30:11

So your latter point there, rewarding people, that's pretty much a universal no. Every platform that I researched, they all strongly, strongly oppose kind of rewarding people for reviews. Only a few really discouraged soliciting reviews. Yelp being the primary example there. They are very aggressive about not soliciting reviews, which I don't necessarily agree with. I think it's a strong stance. Well,

Douglas Karr 30:43

it seems like if I do a great job, if I'm a business and someone comes in and says, you know, I just wanted to take five minutes and tell you how much I appreciate the work that you did. And I don't understand the bad part of me going, you know what, I really appreciate you saying that. If you could, take the time and go on Yelp and write it on there because it would be – it would mean a lot to us.

Daniel Lemin 31:04

Yeah. Yeah, they take a hard – a very hard stance on that. But other sites like Angie's List, they'll actually give you widgets you can put in your email or on your website to capture and collect reviews. TripAdvisor will as well. So it's – there isn't the clear industry precedent there. I've gotten to the point of just suggesting to businesses soliciting reviews is just fine. Just don't solicit – don't ask for good reviews. Just solicit feedback.

Douglas Karr 31:34

Oh, interesting. And I've seen some of the apps that I've seen out there is there's some review apps that they add like a layer between the review sites. And so they'll say, you know, when you leave the shop, you might get a text message that says, how did we do? And if you say one star terrible, they instantly call you and say, oh, my God, what did we do wrong? How could we fix it? But if they give you a five, they say, oh, my gosh, go to Yelp and share that.

Daniel Lemin 32:05

Yeah. Yeah. I mean it's – the other really interesting kind of thing I discovered in this process is there's a distinct difference between a star rating and the written context, the actual review. That star rating is everything. That is everything in search. And, of course, Google has its own algorithm for star ratings. And I don't think a lot of businesses think about their presence on Google, on the Google platform, like reviews that happen on Google.

Douglas Karr 32:44

Right.

Daniel Lemin 32:44

Well, right now it's Google Plus, but on the local platform. And that is really everything in search. If you search for any business, that star rating, Google has recently made changes and stripped out other platforms from that algorithm. It's just their own now. So if someone says, I had an amazing experience here, Google needs to be one of the things you would toss into rotation. Like, can you give us a star rating on Google? That's the easiest thing to do. It takes like a minute.

Douglas Karr 33:17

Yeah, interesting.

Daniel Lemin 33:18

I just talked to a vet clinic this week, and they're doing something really interesting. They have a huge email list. Like, for a vet clinic, it's several thousand people for a local vet clinic, which is fairly large. And they're actually going through one by one and looking for people with Gmail addresses. And they're individually emailing those and just saying, you know, we noticed you were in a couple weeks ago, and we'd love if you'd give us a rating on Google. So they're being very focused on trying to grow their presence on Google for that reason.

Douglas Karr 33:56

Nice. Yeah. And it's incredible. I just couldn't imagine being a business and being in a position where I have to manage, you know, my content, and I have to manage my social media, and I have to manage my reviews across, you know, whatever 800 sites there are. It's really getting tough for businesses, isn't it?

Daniel Lemin 34:20

It really is. I mean, it's the playing field is so, it's stacked in, not in favor of any business on the face of the planet almost ever. I mean, there's so many deterrents to opening a business. I am, like, so impressed by the people I interviewed that they're doing so much at such a high output level, whether it's accounting and HR and reviews and marketing and reputation and website and email, all these things. You can do this every day and still make donuts.

Douglas Karr 34:54

Yeah, exactly.

Daniel Lemin 34:56

Which is what you're in business to do. It's amazing.

Douglas Karr 34:59

Yeah, well, I mean, being a late entrepreneur myself, I was just telling someone the other day, you know, I said, I've basically, you know, the business is coming up on seven years. I've been sprinting for seven years.

Daniel Lemin 35:11

Yeah.

Douglas Karr 35:12

You know, it's incredible. Well, Daniel, this is a fascinating conversation. Again, I really want to encourage everybody, just go download the free chapter and you're already going to be glued and want to get the rest of the book. So go to manipulated.com. Daniel, people can follow you on Twitter, right, at Daniel Lemon. Yep. And that's D-A-N-I-E-L-L-E-M-I-N. And I'll put those links in our blog post when we share this as well. And then, of course, LinkedIn and let's see, YouTube, you have a channel on there for manipulated?

Daniel Lemin 35:55

We do. I don't have much content on there just yet, but there will be more stuff coming for on the video side.

Douglas Karr 36:04

And then you're on the speaking circuit as well as writing on Convince and Convert, too, right?

Daniel Lemin 36:10

That's right. Yeah, I've got a lot of things coming up. I'll be at Social Media Week in Chicago in November. So if anyone happens to be there, there will be an event at Cision's offices in Chicago. So that will be a great place to hear more direct about the book.

Douglas Karr 36:28

Fantastic. And this is really a book, you know, both, it sounds like, you know, focused on both small businesses, medium-sized businesses and agencies, right?

Daniel Lemin 36:38

Yep, for sure.

Douglas Karr 36:39

Yeah. And so, by the way, I always tell people this, I pre-ordered the book already. Thank you. So you have one more sale there?

Daniel Lemin 36:48

I think you and my mother, I have now two pre-orders.

Douglas Karr 36:52

I don't think my mom bought my book, so you're ahead of me.

Daniel, I can't thank you enough for taking the time today. This is a fascinating topic and such an important one for businesses. And, again, everybody, to get ahead of this and to really understand the science behind it and then the strategies that you can utilize to get ahead of, you know, bad and even ugly reviews as Daniel puts it. Be sure to order manipulated and develop a strategy for this so that you can optimize your time wisely as a small business and get ahead of this trend. Daniel, thanks again for joining us today.

Daniel Lemin 37:35

Thank you very much for having me on, letting me share. And I hope businesses kind of take heart that it's not as complex as it might seem at first. That's really the big message.

Douglas Karr 37:49

Awesome. That's great to hear. Thank you.

Thank you.