Reviews via Email - A Case Study

I've heard this a few times from RIA regulars:

"reviews@rateitall.com is great and all, but why do I need it when I can just post my reviews from the site?"

For regular users, this is a valid point. You usually don't need need to use reviews@rateitall.com unless you want to, although it is far and away the easiest way to post photos with your review, or to add new things to the site.

But here's a case study from my own experience of when the reviews@rateitall.com feature was really, really helpful.

I recently came back from a trip to Tokyo. It was a 12 hour flight, with no wifi. So what did I do? I opened up my laptop and drafted some reviews of each of the amazing things I saw on my trip, and attached photos to each one.

When I was back online, those emails went out and posted instantly.

I use RIA almost as a diary of the things (and my reactions to those things) that I come across during my life. Reviews@rateitall.com is a way to document and capture those moments, even without access to the Internet.

This theme of how to log a moment on RIA even during those times when you are not sitting at your desk with an Internet connection is something I find pretty interesting.

For some of my Tokyo reviews, see here, here, here, and here.

Have a Blackberry, Pre, or an iPhone? You can now post reviews on the go.

One other aspect of our reviews@rateitall.com feature that we haven't really mentioned - this is a baby step towards making RateItAll a mobile service.

If you have email on your phone, you can now post reviews just by sending an email to reviews@rateitall.com.

Somebody has already figured this out:

Some Coverage for reviews@rateitall.com

Here are some links to some coverage and more information on our new reviews@rateitall.com feature:

TechCrunch

HyveUp

Press Release

Twitter Stream

reviews@rateitall.com FAQ page

Major Product Announcement

For the last few weeks, there have been whispers around RIA-land of an important new feature - the ability to post reviews, instantly, via email.

We have just released this feature publicly.

There are two ways to post your reviews via email.

1) The easy way. Look for the "email your review" link on any RateItAll item page. It looks like this:


2) The easier way. Email your review to reviews@rateitall.com

Here's how:



That's it. Of course, you can also attach images to your emailed reviews, and the resizing and formatting happens automagically.

Believe it or not, it was very, very hard to make this feature so easy to use.

Please help us out by hammering on this feature a bit. Send feedback to feedback@rateitall.com (it blasts out to the whole team this way).

Testing a Top Secret Feature

We are testing a top secret feature on RIA. If you are an RIA regular and would like to help us test, please message me, Automatt, or Lena.

On Off Topic Reviews

We've been seeing a rash of off topic reviews recently. These are typically very well written and pretty funny joke reviews (or photos) posted on a real product, service, or local business page.

Unfortunately, we need to delete these, per our site rules.

Behind every product, local business, brand, and service provider on the site, there is a real company with real marketing people, and sadly, real lawyers. These people tend to get really pissed off when RateItAll allows our regulars to post jokes on their pages. For these folks, their online brand reputation is no laughing matter.

So if you see your off topic joke reviews of real products, services, brands, and local businesses go up in smoke, this is the reason.

We tend to be much more lenient on the member created lists about whether something is off topic. The beauty of RIA is that you can usually find an acceptable place to post just about anything on your mind.