How effective Mouthshut.com is?. Review on Mouthshut

How effective Mouthshut.com is? Well, most of the times people write reviews when they are unhappy with a product or service. If you find too many reviews pointing to a single problem, then you know there is a real problem with the product/service in that particular aspect, right? So you can figure out shortcomings of a product before actually buying it.

Again, if lots of reviews praise about a single aspect of a product, then may be the product is strong in that aspect. Don't go by a single review, but review a lot of reviews of a product/service to get a reliable idea. It is always better to research instead of buying first and then repenting. And user reviews are a good tool of research.

Caution: some reviews can be rigged by employees/paid promotional guys of a company praising their product, but you have to sense it by reading it. One such example could be HLL Pureit & Pureit Marvella water filters. I mean they have 86% & 89% recommendations! And all reviews are similar, they are using it for two years, product is awesome, service is awesome, rating is 5 stars at random! Number of reviews are also very high. People seldom write reviews when a product is giving good service, as that is expected of it. Most of the time people write reviews when a product doesn't meet expectations. Its human nature. Further, water filter as a product has very low involvement with its user. And hundreds of people writing reviews about how excited they are about their water filter! Hmmm.sounds fishy:-)

What is the Mouthshut impact on companies. Well, MS is not that popular yet to make a huge impact on a company/product/service, but, certainly it has some impact. If a company is intelligent, they will use it to improve their offerings, if they are smart, they will rig the reviews to influence the readers:-), if the companies are dumb, they will ignore MS and lose business.simple! If I had a company, I would have rigged MS reviews through my employees, friends, well wishers, etc.:-) I don't know if MS has any preventive mechanism to prevent this.if they don't, they better implement one soon. Some review pages do look like manipulated. For example, two similar offerings from two rival companies, without much difference in quality & cost, one has 14% user recommendation, the other one has 68% user recommendation! WHY! I couldn't figure out.is it rigged? may be.

One feedback for Mouthshut, for heaven's sake please increase the character limits for reviews and comments for people like me who has this bad habit of writing long stuff. This review was supposed to be a comment on a poll, but the character limit is 140! Even an sms has better character limits! Character limit for a review is 7500.a billion dollar company spends millions of dollar to design & develop a product/service for us.and you guys want us to review it in 7500 characters? Too bad.:-)

Note: I am not done with this review, I will come back and add more.:-) Damn character limits.