Definition
A reputation management discipline focused on collecting, responding to, and learning from customer reviews on Google, Yelp, and platform-specific sites.
Why it matters
Reviews are one of the strongest influences on whether a nearby customer chooses you over a competitor, and they also feed how prominently you show up in local search, so managing them does double duty. Actively asking happy customers to post and responding to the ones who complain is how a business builds a steady flow of recent, credible feedback. Left to chance, review volume skews negative, because unhappy customers are the most motivated to write, while satisfied ones rarely think to.