General Guidelines
People come to Voice for Locals to connect with great local businesses. We’ve put together these general guidelines to help set the tone for discourse on the site—just in case. Please also read the additional guidelines below for specific types of content that you might contribute to the site.
- Relevance: Please make sure your contributions are appropriate to the forum. For example, ratings & reviews aren’t the place for rants about political ideologies, a business’s employment practices, extraordinary circumstances, or other matters that don’t address the core of the consumer experience.
- Inappropriate content: Colorful language and imagery are fine, but there’s no place for threats, harassment, lewdness, hate speech, or other displays of bigotry.
- Conflicts of interest: Your contributions to Voice for Locals should be unbiased and objective. For example, you shouldn’t write ratings & reviews of your own business or employer, your friends’ or relatives’ business, your peers or competitors in your industry, or businesses in your networking group. Businesses should always ask for a feedback at the end of every transaction and never ask to write ratings & reviews for an incentive or best endeavours.
- Privacy: Don’t publicize people’s private information. For instance, please don’t post close-up photos or videos of other patrons without their permission, and don’t post other people’s full names unless you’re referring to someone who is commonly referred to by their full name.
- Promotional content: Don’t post promotional material unless it’s in connection with a Voice for Locals advertising product and through a Business Account. Let’s keep the site useful for consumers and not overrun with commercial noise from every user.
- Intellectual property: Don’t swipe content from other sites, users, or businesses. You’re a smart cookie, so write your own copy and share your own photos and videos.
Additional Guidelines
Review Guidelines
The best ratings & reviews are personal, passionate, and reflect your consumer experience. They offer a rich narrative, a wealth of detail, and a helpful tip or two for other consumers. Here are some additional thoughts for conscientious reviewers:
- Personal experience: We want to hear about your first-hand experience, not what you heard from your partner or co-worker, or what you saw in the news. Tell your own story without resorting to broad generalizations and conclusory allegations.
- Accuracy: Make sure your review is factually correct. Feel free to air your opinions, but don’t exaggerate or misrepresent your experience. We don’t take sides when it comes to factual disputes, so we expect you to stand behind your rating & review.
- Demanding payment: Giving a rating & review should be informative and meant to help the broader Voice for Locals community. You should not threaten to post or offer to remove a negative rating & review as a way to extract payment from a business.
- Rating & Review updates: Rating & Review updates should reflect a new experience or interaction with the business. Don’t keep posting about the same old story you’ve already told. If you’d like to add new insight to an old experience, you can submit a new review anytime after your new experience.
Photo and Video Guidelines
Photos and videos should be broadly relevant to the business and reflect the typical consumer experience (e.g., what the business looks like, what the business offers, etc.). If you’re a business, show us what you offer and what makes your business unique. Here are some additional things to keep in mind:
- Keep it relevant to everyone: We will not upload a photo or video that showcases a unique personal experience that isn’t relevant to other people (e.g., a receipt or email exchange with a business) from the photo gallery for the business.
- Keep it clean: We don’t want imagery of violence, drug use, nudity, near nudity, or suggestive acts—even if those images are an accurate representation of the business’s services or products.
- Keep it friendly: Don’t use your photos or videos to attack or disparage others. A picture is worth 1,000 words, so it’s best to pick those words carefully and make your point in a review, direct message, or review response.
Community Guidelines
Don’t be shy. Use your account profile to let people know who you are and what makes you tick. Your peers want to read ratings & reviews from people they know and trust (not those with profiles that are empty or laced with inappropriate content).
- User Profiles: Since user trust and transparency are important to us, anonymous users who are disruptive to the community will be dealt with more sternly than those who stand behind their words. We encourage users to tell people a little something about themselves, but ask that you keep it relevant and don’t attack competitors, reviewers, or Voice for Locals. Avoid seeding your profile with keywords, special offers, or promotions—we’ll remove those if we see them.
- Business Messaging: Businesses can engage with reviewers using their free Business App configured for your business by the Voice for Locals success team. Use the app to resolve a dispute with an unhappy customer. Let’s not have an argument in the public forum. Hopefully it goes without saying, but don’t use direct messages or public comments to launch personal attacks or offer an incentive to change a rating or a review.
- Ask the Community: Being able to ask and answer community questions about a business is extremely valuable, but as they say, with great power comes great responsibility. Stick to questions that are also relevant to others, don’t ask loaded questions or make presumptions, and keep the tone civil and non-argumentative. If you really don’t have anything meaningful to add, best not to say anything at all.
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