The voice of today’s customer
Sutori officially launched yesterday, and is now in public beta instead of private beta testing. While there are many wonderful user review sites out there (e.g., Epinions, BuzzShout, Yelp, RateItAll), Sutori is meant to be specifically for consumers to voice their grievances or good experiences. Users of Sutori can create their profile, write a review about the company or product, and tag each review. There is also a social networking aspect since you are able to add other reviewers as friends. The “1/0″ that you see in the screen shot below represents “agree/disagree”, although that isn’t readily obvious to someone who hasn’t signed up for the site. One issue I have is that once you agree or disagree you can’t change your mind at a later time.
The orange and red colors above represent the levels of goodwill for a company, product, or brand. I agree with Pete Cashmore who points out that the range of colors should be better differentiated. However, it was a good idea to incorporate colors into the reviews which helps beautify the overall look of the site.
Sutori was founded by a small team of Blast Radius employees who wanted to practice what they preached. The site was built using ruby-on-rails and has a wonderful UI that lends to a nice user experience. The tags help build Sutori’s Web 2.0 street credibility, and I was most impressed by the overall look of the site. The biggest challenge that Sutori faces comes in the form of a question that all user review sites have to answer: How do you get people to go to your site, log on, and write a review about something? It is interesting for me to see how other review sites answer this question.
My favorite Sutori story is Tara Hunt’s negative review of U-Haul. I seem to move at least once a year and I haven’t yet had a good experience with U-Haul. In fact, I feel like they’ve gotten progressively worse, and for some odd reason, I continue to use them.
