Review: Guest Pulse online monitoring service

Guest Pulse’s service is simple: it helps you monitor your online reputation by emailing you the most recently posted reviews and mentions of your restaurant (at Citysearch, Google Maps, Tripadvisor, etc.).

I manage a couple restaurants in the San Diego area, so about a month ago I signed up for Guest Pulse’s 30-day-free-trial.  Since then I’ve used the service for my restaurants, but I’m sure it would work fine for other service-related business models.

The sign up procedure is quick, easy and user-friendly.  No CC required.  Just enter your business’s name and verify your contact info and a few details.  Once this is complete, Guest Pulse begins sending you the emails.  These report any sort of review site post, blog post, or news article that mentions your business.  You can have the emails sent on weekly or daily basis.  For most restaurants, the weekly option should suffice.

The coolest thing about Guest Pulse’s service is the format of the emails.  They make it easy to see which reviews/mentions are positive and which are negative… and where exactly each one came from.  You can also see Twitter mentions and Foursquare  check-ins– a bonus for me since it allowed me to catch things I missed in my Twitter/Foursquare feeds over the week.

So the emails are great!  But the service really hits its stride when you log into the website, where you can research your reviews and do a whole host of other things.  For example, you can organize your reviews by sentiment (positive vs. negative). This allowed me to go back and address things I might not have seen through my daily monitoring. The NY times travel and leisure website had published our phone number and address incorrectly.  We were able to correct it that day.  One less thing to lead people in the wrong direction.

Guest Pulse shows you pretty quickly (in the few couple emails) where the bulk of your online word-of-mouth, buzz and activity is taking place.  Even if you don’t sign up for the Guest Pulse paid service, this benefit alone is a good enough reason to check out the free trial.  Why?  Because once you discover the online locations most your customers are congregating and talking, then you can keep a closer eye on these locations.

The glaring omission from the Guest Pulse’s service is Yelp reviews.  Maybe this will change in the future, but it’s just another reason why you can’t rely on one source for all your ORM needs.

In the end, I chose not to participate the paid monitoring services that Guest Pulse offers.  The monthly price was two steep for the my corporate office.  But for the small business that wants to set up a monitoring service and forget about it, the price tag may be well worth it.

In summary:

Awesomeness:

• Easy to set up and use
• Free 14-day-trail
• Killer email format
• Effortless email updates

Lameness:

• No Yelp reviews!!!
• Expensive if you want to add more than one location

How should you use it?

Sign up for the free trial and check out where your buzz is coming from.  If you like what you’re seeing and learning, then spend the 30 bucks a month to continue the service.  If $30 is a little too much for you, drop the service and continue monitoring the review sites Guest Pulse showed were generating the most buzz.

Cheers,

Chuck