ViewGuide

Creating a bare bones review in ViewGuide is as a simple as dragging five opinion sliders and clicking Save. If you want to get noticed and be influential, however, you’ve got to do more.

Promote Yourself
Your ‘Trust Score’ measures how influential you are in ViewGuide. For instance, movies are included in the Top 5 based on their Trust Weighted Scores, community consolidated scores that assign greater weight to the opinions of trusted reviewers. So the score awarded a movie by a reviewer who is trusted by five members counts five times as much as the score of a reviewer who is trusted by only one other member. Most reassuringly, scores given by reviewers who aren’t trusted by anyone don’t count at all in Trust Weighted Scoring.

So you need to grow your Trust Score to grow your influence. One easy way to do this is to invite friends who share your taste to join ViewGuide and have them add you to their Trusted Reviewer list. Another way is to trust other reviewers, who will likely end up trusting you in return.

Explain Yourself
Every new review gets highlighted in FreshPiks on the front page. This is a great opportunity to show off your work to members who are unfamiliar with it.

FreshPiks shows most of your opinion settings along with the first 20 words of your Summary commentary. So, of course, you should write at least 20 words of Summary commentary. Otherwise it will show as blank. However, the review must contain at least 50 words of total commentary to count as a ‘Quality Review,’ and thus count toward a ViewGuide T-Shirt. This commentary can be lumped into one area (e.g., Summary) or spread across various judgments, e.g., Summary, Acting and Film. Some ViewGuide reviewers find that explaining themselves in this segmented way helps organize their thoughts.

You should also pay particular attention to the opinion settings that are highlighted in FreshPiks. These include several about the movie’s quality: Summary, overall Acting, overall Film quality, along with Direction, Dialogue, Music and Visuals. They also include several judgments about the movie’s content: overall Edginess, along with Sex, Violence and Rudeness, and finally overall Reality. People glancing at your review in FreshPiks will judge your trustworthiness based on how reasonable these judgments appear to them. If they seem sound, then you’ll find that members will click ‘Trust This Reviewer’ right from FreshPiks, and your influence will grow.