The Benefits of a Negative Review...

A recent study by students at Stanford's Graduate School of Business discovered that small doses of mildly negative information can strengthen a patient's positive impression of your practice.  The study showed this "blemishing effect" can make positive reviews more persuasive to a patient.  While this flies in the face of conventional thinking that negative comments need to be removed at all costs, it validates exactly what we've seen here at DoctorBase.

Back in 2009, we told you about how negative reviews increase appointment requests for our doctors.  We found that the occasional negative review serves to validate all of a doctor's positive reviews.  The Stanford study takes it even further by pointing out that the negative information also highlights & boosts the impact of the positive information.

Admittedly, we wish we could've learned this through experimentation with chocolate bars & champagne glasses like those really smart Stanford grad students did.  Still, our inner-geeks are glad that our old-fashioned metric-based web research came to the same conclusion.  And, we can at least take delight in knowing we told you about this phenomena a year-and-a-half before their study was published.  (Take that, Dom Perignon!)