| The problem is real. I'm not sold on the solution. Having built a successful consulting company, we've found that most of our business comes from word of mouth referrals. After that, it comes from people who've found our side projects and wanted something like that. Even after we get an introduction, people generally want to see a portfolio of work and get an estimate of time/cost before they go to check references. Honestly, we don't even put testimonials on our web site, and that'd be an easy place to add them if they were valuable at all. That being said, having reviews of things like accountants could be useful for us. Yelp never really caught on for that, and the reality (with accountants, and other service providers) is that you don't often get to experience many different types, so it's hard to leave a comparative review. Also, because they have fewer clients (than restaurants have patrons, for example) reviews are scarcer... and correspondingly I'm disinclined to leave a negative review. Sites like best vendor are ostensibly already trying to solve this issue. I don't think they've found success yet. |