google reviews for work

I work for a storage company. My bosses are now ordering me to get 10 google reviews from people a month. I view this has busy work. They told me I should be asking people for reviews when they rent. I pointed out that this was stupid cause how is someone who hasn't even moved their stuff in yet going to have an opinion? I get my 10 reviews a month from asking people has they leave or when they come complain to me. I have even told a person when they were complaining about the price, go write a google review maybe my bosses in charge of pricing will see it and do something. They wont. I know no one looks at these. I have also made fake accounts twice to insure I meet monthly goal. In one of these fake account I gave property 1 star and said rats where everywhere, no comment from anyone.

I was wondering how many other people work in place where they're suppose to get google reviews for some reason? Do people actually look at reviews? I do for some products, but a storage facility isn't something I would check on. I have gone away from checking restaurants too, cause I often disagree afterwards.

I have a good buddy who works at different facility and we have started just making reviews for each other. So my fake accounts reviewed both our stores and when he makes fake account it also reviews my store. I jokingly said the company should just start a email chain or something where each store writes reviews for 3 other stores each month. Than we would meet our foolish goal and they could get near endless 5 star reviews. Well just venting after dull day of sitting in meeting listening to my bosses BS.

My workplace is currently on a google review kick, although the boss is making that more difficult than it needs to be. Google reviews matter if Google matters as a way for to drive up business for your work. The prevailing thinking in marketing at the moment is that you ideally need to be in the first three results on a search and most definitely want to be on the first page. You can get that by paying for a top spot in Google Adwords or by meeting the criteria set by Google to rate highly in the organic results. Google Reviews is one of those criteria.

Whether or not people actually read any reviews, or pay attention to the star rating, is a weirder discussion which I could probably boil down to yes and no. I use them for some businesses and not others, I tend to look at a medley of positive, mixed and negative reviews with a critical eye for fake reveiws or people carrying on about nothing.

I'd also add that someone should probably be monitoring your review and social media pages and replying to reviews because that is an indicator of a business that is worth a damn or not, at least it is to me.