Talking trash about someone or something today is easy. Social media makes it that way. Do it anonymously, or not. Do it frequently, or not. Do it truthfully, or not.
All of that is up to you.
This would-be nefariousness all seems to have gained momentum back there in Web 1.0, when file sharing just encouraged many folks to care not about copyright restrictions and copy audio and program files willy-nilly. “I mean, if it’s so easy to do, it must be legal, right?” was the refrain I heard then from many a web surfer. Easy doesn’t make it legal, of course. And easy trash talking, although much of it probably isn’t illegal, isn’t right just because it’s easy.
This past weekend, my wife and I were reviewing some hotels for a vacation we’ll take later this year. We looked over a half dozen or so hotels, via their websites, checked rates and room availabilities, then hit the travel review sites to catch some opinions from those who have stayed at these places. We caught some good comments and some bad, of course. But the trash comments were actually trash themselves. Stuff like: room TVs only give you 25 channels instead of 28 (who goes on vacation to watch TV, anyway?), the floorboards squeak, they didn’t have any cinnamon rolls at the continental breakfast, the pool towels were too small, the hotel is too far from the airport making for an expensive cab ride, the bed was too hard, and on and on driveling all the way.
These trash comments drew one or two star ratings individually, and then served to pull the overall hotel rating down on that review site. Yet the positive comments, in quality, far outweighed the trash talk. Positive comments, individually, would sport four or five star ratings, but since the whole rating system isn’t weighted, a significant positive comment about staff service, or food quality, or room decor/cleanliness, gets trashed by a petty one-star comment about TV stations. The average just isn’t average.
Of course, you have to consider, well at least I have to because competitive analysis and threat assessments are my areas of expertise, that much of this trash talk might be by competitors in action just to pull down that average. They might not have had many specifics, so they just sign-in as whoever and post some generally petty negative comments in order to pull down that average. I suppose it works because my wife looked those cumulative ratings and picked the hotels with the highest averages to look into more deeply.
So because it’s so easy, the trash talking (authentic or contrived) likely turned two guests away from a hotel and toward another, which may or may not actually be any better than the hotel that was rejected.
The take-away is that just because you can talk trash in social media, doesn’t mean that you should. And just because you read trash, doesn’t mean that you should believe it.
