Category Archives: Business Communication

Current Research on COVID and Discourse

It has now been just over one month of sheltering at home here in the US.  Like most universities around the world, my institution moved all instruction online last month.  One of the courses that I teach is a doctoral seminar in Applied Linguistics, which I describe to friends in the following manner: “we sit around a conference table and discuss different research articles each week.”  Of course, we still read and discuss different research articles each week.  But rather than sitting at the same table in a shared physical space, we now sit in our individual homes and gaze at each other in the small Zoom boxes that appear on our screens. One of the students in my class shared a dream she recently had: “I dreamt that we were sitting around discussing research articles… but they all had something to do with COVID.”  With that statement, she predicted what the next iteration of the course will probably look like.

A number of colleagues I have been in touch with (mostly language people and other social-sciencey types) have found that the topics of their research have somehow been disrupted or impacted by the health crisis (and related circumstances) that we are currently experiencing.  As a response, they are shifting focus and undertaking new research projects – or adapting their current research – in ways that are somehow COVID-related. 

For instance, colleagues at UK and Hong Kong universities have launched a new blog, Viral Discourse, where you can read posts on topics ranging from war metaphors used in journalistic reporting on COVID, to the mixed messages we’re getting about the use and non-use of wearing masks to protect ourselves and others.  Another colleague here in the U.S. is researching COVID-related humor on internet dating sites.

Certainly the variable responses of different political leaders to the public health crisis as well as their messaging tactics is a topic that has elicited a wide range of reactions.  The Association for Business Communication (ABC) invited me to contribute a digital lecture to their collection of online resources, and I decided to focus on leadership discourse, as exemplified by NY governor, Andrew Cuomo’s press briefings.  Like many other viewers, his no-nonsense, stick-to the facts approach really resonates with me.  I also appreciate how he humanizes this very odd reality we are living through by sharing personal narratives about his family’s responses.  You can view my brief lecture on this topic here.

Camilla Vásquez’s lecture on Leadership Discourse

I’ve also been observing how the travel and tourism industries have been severely impacted by this crisis.  With non-essential travel and tourism currently on hold, one creative business adaptation I have been following with great interest is Airbnb’s Online Experiences. Offering remote experiences such as “Wine Class with a Cool Wine Expert,” “Easy Balinese Vegetarian Home Cooking” and “Guided Meditation with Sleepy Sheep,”  Airbnb is harnessing the immersive, educational and interactive aspects of tourism and offering a digitally mediated alternative to traditional travel.  Airbnb launched Online Experiences on April 9, and since then, the number of experiences on offer have more than doubled.  With this trend, we are likely witnessing the birth of “virtual tourism.” 

Are Yelp reviews racist?

Well, according to a recent study carried out by food studies scholar, Sara Kay, many Yelp reviews are reinforcing harmful ethnic stereotypes.    Kay examined 20,000 Yelp restaurant reviews and found that 7% of them made reference to authenticity in some way.

In her study, summarized here, Kay explains how reviewers’ discussions of “authenticity” vary according to what type of restaurant they are describing.  For instance, the décor of one Korean restaurant deemed “authentic” was described as a “kitschy hut”; whereas that of one “authentically” French restaurant was most often described as “elegant.” In other words, comments about authenticity on Yelp tend to associate European-cuisine-serving restaurants with positive attributes.  In contrast, where Chinese or Mexican restaurants are concerned, the typical Yelp reviewer associates authenticity with negative attributes, such as dirt floors or plastic stools.

Kay’s study found that these harmful stereotypes can also extend to describing interactions with service staff at these restaurants.  My research collaborator, Alice Chik, and I discovered similar kinds of comments in our dataset of Yelp reviews of Michelin-starred Chinese, Japanese and Korean restaurants in New York.  For instance, in a review of one of our Chinese restaurants, the following comment appeared.  (Check out the explicit bias and stereotyping in the part I’ve underlined!)

The person at the front desk is pretty rude. I mean, there is a level of rudeness you’d expect from a chinese restaurant, but that woman was just down right rude.

As Kay explains: “Not only do Yelp reviewers talk about non-Western workers differently, but the difference is racist, rude, and frightfully mimicking of other supremacist trends on the internet and in American life.” 

This is a valuable study, and one that contributes to our understanding of online review language.

Podcast about Airbnb Reviews

A good interview often feels like having a conversation with an old friend that you haven’t seen in a long time. A few months ago, I was interviewed by Evan Jordan, a tourism researcher and faculty member at Arizona State University. Evan is the host of the exciting new Trip Doctor Podcast series, which is all about tourism research, and is really intended to help people be more intelligent travelers. Although Evan and I have never met in person, we had a wonderful chat about the passion that we both share for travel, and the specific things that we love about it: like great food, new adventures, and interesting stories! Evan was especially interested in the AirBnB reviews study that my student, Judith Bridges, and I published last year in the journal, Current Issues in Tourism. Our work is featured on Episode 01: Searching for the truth in AirBnB reviews. Check it out on The Trip Doctor website (www.gotripdoctor.com), iTunes (https://apple.co/2t9T3BQ), or Android (https://bit.ly/2lnC0rz)! And I invite you to share your best and worst AirBnB experiences with other RDM readers.

Gaming TripAdvisor

Although my main project these days is focused on linguistic creativity and humor in social media, I’m still very interested in all things review-related.  My friend Michael just sent me this great link about how a VICE reporter “gamed” TripAdvisor by creating a fake restaurant profile on their website.  Although this was not exactly his intention going into it, in just over 6 months, his fake restaurant (“The Shed at Dulwich” = literally, the garden shed that he lives in) became the highest-ranked restaurant in London!

The article is a highly entertaining read.  Or, if you prefer, you can watch the 18 minute video version available from the same link.  To me, the most clever parts were the restaurant’s “mood”-themed menu, as well his unexpected food-styling reveals (“whipped cream quenelles” made from shaving cream & “scallops” that were actually round white bleach tablets).  As a consumer, I know that I am totally a sucker for exactly these kinds of conceits: sexy food pics and a conceptual menu.  I was especially interested to learn about how TripAdvisor responded (at the end of the article).

And on a different topic, I just remembered a recent conversation I had with business writer, Tara Ramroop.  We talked about how language shapes workplace culture: a very relevant topic, but something that not all businesses think about, or approach very systematically.  You can read more here.

Growth in research on the language of online reviews!

Two years ago  I wrote a post about how excited I was to see 2 presentations about online reviews – other than my own – at IPRA (the International Pragmatics Association), the largest international conference about Pragmatics, which is held biennially.  Interest in this topic continues grow as was seen at this year’s IPRA in Belfast, where there were 7 presentations on the topic.  (Incidentally, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland = total playground for sociolinguists!)

My colleague, Tuija Virtanen, and I organized a panel for this year’s IPRA called “Analyzing Prosumer Discourses: Consumer Reviews, Customer Feedback, and other modes of eWOM.”  The panel was international in scope, with speakers from Finland, New Zealand, Italy, Belgium, and the US.  Tuija’s presentation dealt with various ways of conceptualizing the rather abstract notions of responsibility and accountability as they are made relevant in consumer reviews: in her case, in book reviews on Amazon.  Michael Barlow’s corpus study examined differences between hotel reviews written by male and female TripAdvisor reviewers; interestingly, he found virtually no gender-based differences in variables such as word frequencies, review length, lexical variation, as well as the other variables he looked at.  Irene Cenni’s presentation built on her prior work, comparing TripAdvisor reviews written in Dutch, Italian, and English; this time with a particular focus on service encounters.  She had a number of very interesting findings, which she plans to publish soon – stay tuned!  The two remaining presentations (my own, and Maria Rosaria Compagnone’s) looked at businesses’ responses to restaurant reviews.  I focused on features of “linguistic impoliteness” found in restaurants’ responses to 1- and 2-star reviews, posted on both TripAdvisor and Yelp.  I showed examples of restaurant owners firing back defensive-sounding messages, which included features like sarcasm (“So much for knowing your Florida seafood.”), dismissing the reviewer’s comments (“As for the rest of it…whatever”) and excluding the reviewer from future contact (“Hopefully this reviewer will stay true to their word and make this their last visit.”).  I thought these responses were unprofessional…until I saw Maria Rosaria’s data! Maria Rosaria’s Italian restaurant owners posted much more aggressive and hostile responses on TripAdvisor – including one death threat!

Besides our panel, there were 2 additional presentations dealing with online reviews.  One of these was about extreme positivity in Airbnb reviews: the presenter focused on UK data, but the trends were nearly identical to what Judith Bridges and I wrote about in our Airbnb paper, published earlier this year.  The other was a more exploratory study examining differences in Chinese and Anglophone reviews and responses.

The next IPRA will be held in Hong Kong in summer 2019.  Will the number of online review-related studies continue to grow?  I’m looking forward to finding out! 🙂

NYT Story about UBER

I have a long list of topics that I have been wanting to blog about, but between dissertation defenses, conferences, and course-final assignments, it’s a busy time right now.  Hope to be posting at least once per month starting in May though!

In the meantime, this weekend, the NYT ran a great story about Uber.  Especially fascinating is how Uber is leveraging insights from both behavioral science and big data analytics to entice their drivers to stay on the road.  To do this, Uber relies on principles of “gamification,” which combine individualized income targets for drivers with the “ludic loop” = that state of mind that happens when you’re playing an addictive video game and the target goal is always just a tiny bit out of reach.

Whenever I take an Uber, I usually ask the driver a series of questions about their experiences working for the company.  It looks like I’ll be adding some new questions to my “informal interviews” about how drivers view the effectiveness of these targeted messages they receive.

Are there any bad Airbnb experiences?

My first experience with Airbnb was 5 years ago.  A group of us were planning to meet for a 4-day conference in Boston, and one friend suggested we rent a 2-story brownstone on Airbnb.  Her idea was that rather than staying in 3 separate hotel rooms, we could all save some money this way – and we could also see each other a bit more, since at that time, we were scattered across different parts of the world. The plan sounded good to all of us.

Our Airbnb host was pleasant young woman who lived on the ground level of the same building, and as she gave us the key and showed us around the 2 floors of our unit, she assured us that we could use anything and everything we found in the house:  the kitchen was fully stocked, the living spaces were filled with fascinating vintage objects… but the real highlight was our host’s eclectic collection of over 2,000 records.  She said we could play those too. (We took up her offer: the 5 of us stayed up really late one night, drinking wine, and listening to genres of music we didn’t even know existed.)  After our initial orientation, we never saw our host again, but every now and again, we could hear her footsteps below us (which, at least to us, felt more reassuring than obtrusive).

In the end, the house was a bit out of the way, and Boston was cold, so what we ended up saving on hotel rooms we probably spent in taxi fares.  But we definitely got to spend more time as a group – making breakfast together in the morning, and at the end of each day, lounging around comfortably in “our” living room, chatting, and catching up with each other.  It’s one of my favorite conference memories.

Since then, I’ve used Airbnb over a dozen times.  Sometimes because Airbnb was a more economical option than a hotel (Barcelona, Helsinki); other times because I wanted to stay in a particular neighborhood that didn’t even have any hotels in it (Chicago, Philadelphia); and a few other times, out of nothing more than a sheer sense of adventure (Bali).  All of these stays have been memorable – either due to some unique features of the property itself, or due to the host’s fun or quirky perspective which expressed itself in the property’s furnishings (like in our Boston house), or perhaps due to an unexpected interpersonal interaction associated with our stay (either with the host, or with other guests).

Of all of my Airbnb experiences, only 1 has been unacceptable.  And this seems to be the general trend.  For most people I’ve talked to, the overwhelming majority of their Airbnb experiences have been great…and sometimes even amazing. I’ve collected stories of Airbnb hosts picking guests up at the airport late at night, of making them breakfast or cooking them dinner, of showing them around the city, of introducing them to their group of local friends: in other words, experiences which involve some kind of actual “sharing” – as is implied by the broader label of “the sharing economy.”

However, most people who use Airbnb regularly have also shared at least one story of a not-so-great — or even downright-unpleasant — experience (a dirty property, a unit that looked nothing like what was advertised, an unresponsive host, etc.).  These experiences are certainly the exception rather than the norm.  But I always ask: “Did you leave a negative review on Airbnb’s site?”  And the answer, invariably, is “no.”

There are many reasons for this, as Judith Bridges and I discuss in our recent Current Issues in Tourism article: “If nearly all Airbnb reviews are positive, does that make them meaningless?”  As we explain, sometimes reviews that appear to be positive on the surface, actually reflect less-than-positive experiences.  We also provide a few tips Airbnb consumers can use for “reading between the lines” as they consult reviews on the site.

Viewing social media data from a qualitative perspective

When it comes to mining social media for information, I’ve observed that it’s quite unusual for folks from the business world to consider alternatives to “big data” approaches.   So I was delighted to see that, in this recent article from the Harvard Business Review, the authors argue that qualitative approaches to social media listening can generate new insights for companies.

This resonates with what I’ve been saying for the last couple of years.  When I’ve had opportunities to speak to, or work with, companies in the travel industry for example, I have been advocating a “small data” approach to the analysis of user-generated online reviews.  There is no question that  big data approaches can be useful in revealing large, general patterns of consumer behavior.  However, like the authors of this HBR article, I have found that close, careful, qualitative text analysis can yield very different types of contextually-relevant insights into consumer experience and sentiment.

To respond or not…What should businesses do about online reviews?

Last week I spoke with Sparksheet, a content/media/marketing blog, about my research on online reviews.  Among other things, I discussed some factors businesses should keep in mind as they develop a strategy for how to respond to reviews.  Coincidentally, the NY Times just ran a story about this very topic as well.  The main take-aways?

  • Businesses really can turn popular sentiment around by engaging with online reviews/ers in a variety of constructive ways.
  • Completely ignoring online reviews can eventually hurt a business.
  • Canned responses are usually not very effective.  To the extent that it’s possible, responses should be personalized.
  • Getting into a public argument online with a reviewer is usually not the best approach. (But see my earlier posts on “Facebook Reviews” and “People Hate them on Yelp” for some interesting counterexamples.)
  • Reviews and ratings can be powerful marketing tools. Buzzword of the day: it’s all about “relational capital.”

Facebook reviews

A few people have recently asked me if I’ve extended my research to reviews of businesses on Facebook.    And my short answer to that question is “no” (for all sorts of reasons) — but since this topic has been coming up a lot in the last few weeks, I’ll admit to being at least a little bit intrigued.

A friend who lives in another state told me about super negative experience she had this year with one of her local financial services businesses. She really wanted to warn others to stay away, but the only review forum she found for this business was on Facebook.  After taking a closer look, she discovered a couple of things – 1) all of the reviews were positive, and 2) it was not possible to post an anonymous review.  (Obviously, these two phenomena are related.)  Now this particular friend is a generally happy, positive person, and one who is not shy about speaking her mind…yet, she didn’t necessarily want to have her offline identity linked via her FB profile to her negative comments about this business.  Since it wasn’t possible to post a review anonymously there, she ended up not posting a review on FB.

A group of angry vegans in Ireland have shown much less caution than my friend.  When a frustrated restauranteur in Dublin posted a rant on Facebook about how vegan customers were being unreasonable in their expectations, a number of indignant vegans fired back in the reviews section of the restaurant’s FB page.  As reported here, the verbal volley between restaurant owner and online vegans continued to escalate on FB, with insults and (pseudo-) death threats growing increasingly more outrageous.  And as more and more vegans posted 1-star reviews, more and more supporters of the restaurant posted 5-star reviews.   In the end, this story went viral, people all over the world have now heard of this restaurant, and business is booming like never before.  Normally, insulting one’s customers online is probably not the best social media strategy for a business to have… but, as this case shows, there are rare instances where this kind of completely-over-the-top behavior leads to an unparalleled level of publicity.