My name is Benedikt Profanowsky and I started my activities as a local guide on Google Maps about a year ago. At first I thought that sharing my opinion about places would be a good thing and might help to change our world into an even more exceptional place.
Since I am more on the participating side and prefer to discover unknown places on my own, I did not spend too much time reading other reviews.
However, this changed when I decided to focus on something specific for my time consuming new passion of being a local guide.
I specialized on reviews of bus stops and parking lots and lately I discovered that you can even post reviews of mailboxes.
When talking to friends, we are often discussing the benefits of online reviews in general. How does it affect your decisions? How important are reviews for small businesses and how dangerous is an unsatisfied customer to your online presence. Even a mediocre review can lead to a massive business downswing.
I have heard stories about customers who tried to get benefits by threatening restaurants or doctors with a negative review. I have talked to entrepreneurs who are regularly begging customers and friends to add enthusiastic reviews to their companies websites.
Even though leaving aside that there are so many fake reviews out there, I doubt that reading tons of - mostly boring - local guide complaints makes our world a better place. How much time does a customer spend online finding the „perfect stay“ for his holiday? How important is this really and how high has our level of expectation risen with all those fantastic reviews out there???
I truly believe, that if you are in search for satisfaction, it’s wise to lower your level of expectations.
This absurd rating race became even more ridiculous when google maps sent me the invitation mail for Connect Live 2020, which is the only reason I am writing this post. The invitation ended with the request to give this email a rating. Are you crazy? Can´t you even fart these days without giving it a rating???
Ok sorry, I did not want to sound rude. Don´t misunderstand me, I would love to join this conference and discuss those topics, on which I seem to have a different perspective than most other local guides.
Now let´s see what I decided to do with my reviews concerning all those controversial facts. My idea was to add as many absurd and superfluous reviews to the world so that consequently readers would question themselves and hopefully change their perspectives on consulting reviews. By adding book suggestions and beer brand recommendations to bus stop reviews I was hoping to lead my readers in a direction where they would start to think on their own.
I was still not content and when talking to my friends about this and explaining my concept they nodded in disbelieve and laughed out loud, telling me that this was tilting at windmills. So some days ago I changed my strategy once again.
Since focusing mostly on parking area reviews lately I have realized that most of the other comments were just dumb complaints about the unsatisfactory state of the sanitary areas. So instead of shouting out swearwords I wanted to give my readers a positive feeling, making them smile or even laugh.
Therefore I decided to draft my reviews in funny poetry forms which seems to bring up the results I was aiming for - at least when I show them to friends.
I call the list Profanowskys Parkplatz Poesie, you will guess what it means ?
Unfortunately my knowledge of the english language is not profound enough, so I feel that I am limited to german, which will make it tough for most of the community to understand my intention. Sorry for this but here is an example anyways.
I guess this should be enough for my first post here. I am pretty curious on the reaction of the local guide community and hope for a wide response and discussion.
Hope to see you around - maybe soon enough even in real life
cheers Benedikt Profanowsky
P.S. Benedikt Profanowsky is the alter ego of the german magician and comedian Ben Profane who is not completly virtual and tries to bring up issues concerning a joyful future.
