"Actually ALL reviews should be based on first-hand experience.
Simply having past 'knowledge' of a place is a dubious proposition for a review. Community policy says: "Contributions must be based on real experiences".
A local guide still has the first hand experience as long has he or she has visited the business whether in the past or future. He is still allowed to write his review on that business he or she visited. Come to think of it, when you visit a place 6months ago and the services was poor you wrote a review about their poor services. Along the line the business owner saw your review and improve on his services. Now this is 6months after yet you didnt visit the place again and yet your review about their poor services was still there. What of after 6months he started getting a lot of good reviews. Maybe he improved on his business. Would you say the reviews were fake. No is the answer. That is what am saying. We should not forget that review change's. That is why Google allows us to edit review's. It means anytime we visit we can always review businesses. It is not for you to decide if review's are fake. If you see a fake review, report it privately. You don't need a public scrutiny on local guide's reviews.
@PhiliI I think you and @HelloSamsonR both have some very valid points, I gave kudos to both actually.
My thought is that we should find a way to make things better and receiving phone threats from a business owner, something I've seen happen to many LG in this community, should be made very hard if not impossible.
I don't know how, alias review posting could work but would also probably make possible some very bad SPAM related reviews.
There has to be a way, again, thanks for your support.
I just hope this creepy business owner is satisfied now and goes on with his pathetic life.
"Actually ALL reviews should be based on first-hand experience.
Simply having past 'knowledge' of a place is a dubious proposition for a review. Community policy says: "Contributions must be based on real experiences".
...That is why Google allows us to edit review's. It means anytime we visit we can always review businesses. It is not for you to decide if review's are fake. If you see a fake review, report it privately. You don't need a public scrutiny on local guide's reviews.
@SimoneM Thanks for taking the review down and promoting peace in your community as well. Why I replied your post is because I have been faced with such a situation before. You see the local guides program is a voluntary program, if you feel you have security issues being a local guide, you can consult with the Google moderators, they would provide you useful information's on what to do. We face many difficulties being a local guide. In my region to take pictures of business places sometimes are always difficult and challenging, some feel you want to take a picture of their business and plan to come back and rob them, others feel otherwise. Look at what I do at at times for such places. On my early hours to work, i take the photos of such places. Its not really easy, but don't let the threat of one business owner deter you from contributing and helping millions of people in the world. You could even arrange for a peaceful visit back to this business owner and make him understand and see reasons why he needs to improve on his business. Talk to him and settle the differences, he would be happy so also u too.
I wish I hadn't tried, during the first call, when his tone was still "reasonable" I tried to explain him my motives for a 2 stars review, he replied to such reasoning with verbal violence and by extremely raising his voice (and the tone of out conversation).
That's why I revised my review to 3 stars.
Was that enough? No sir, he wanted that review completely removed, and became very aggressive with the threats.
Can you imagine he invited me to the business to "just talk in person" casually adding that he wanted to give a "very bad review to my person", can you see where this was going?
That's just to say the kind of threats he made, in the end he stopped verbal jokes and gave me the F word several times, called me a wimp for refusing to go there and stated "You better remove the review or you will pay hard for that"
I stated that I was willing to remove my review and that I hoped that would help him learn something new about customers, his answer?
"Absolutely not, I have nothing to learn from F* like You"
Did this make me consider doing the craziest thing to him? You can bet, but I'm not going to, since I don't want any more trouble or losing more time.
But this looks like a big fail for me as a LG community member.
I appreciate your suggestions though, unfortunately this simply cannot be applied 100% of the time.
Many thanks for sharing this information in Connect. The team will contact you very soon privately via email to secure the information to share with the Google My Business (GMB) team.
@Pea: It sounds like you may referring to Google's previous name policy which required you to use your full name. You may change the way your name appears across Googleincluding using a nickname) by following these instructions. Your name, however, may not be that of a business, brand or organization per the Local Guides program rules.
* Due to the volume of private messages please note that I do not reply to them
@SimoneM Okay, This is what you would do, when he is angry just be mild with him. You know an answer when mild turns away rage, but a word causing pain makes anger to bubble forth. I really want you to be at peace with the business owner, it's very important, please try to do your all you can, it's good you make peace because of other future Local guides. When such a thing happens again the business owner would know how to handle the situation. Best Regards doing that. You might still need to visit that business in the future again who knows. Lol. 😄
A local guide still has the first hand experience as long has he or she has visited the business
Hi @HelloSamsonR I think we are both saying the same thing? I agree completely with that statement, a review should be a first-hand experience based on a visit to that location.
If however you've visited a different branch of the same organisation, that's not valid. And if you simply walk past without experiencing the business, that's not valid either. Otherwise I could walk down the street 'reviewing' every business just by looking in the window. Or sit here and write a review of Sydney Opera House and say "Great music place, beautiful, very popular". As the guidelines say: Write a genuine report of your experience with the place.
@SimoneM wrote a genuine review of his personal first-hand experience, entering the business, interacting. It happened to be negative, but it was honest. That's the perfect example of what a Local Guide should do. Hopefully SimoneM you won't be put off by what happened after, the program needs LGs like yourself.
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