Neither a success nor a failure.

If you are wondering how successful a YouTuber can become, try to check out Casey Neistat. He has 6,542,053 subscribers on YouTube and 1,060,000 followers on Twitter. His studio in New York has become a tourist spot because of his popularity. His videos always on YouTube trending and the video he uploaded titled “Who I’m Endorsing for President” gained upwards of 3.3 million views and 178,000 comments within 48 hours.

With gaining so such attention and reputation, Casey tried to expand his career and created something new. In July 2015, he released the first version of Beme. Just like other social medias, this app offered a platform to encourage users to share their real moments with friends in real times. Beme inspired un-edited and not retouched videos to show the "real me" and "real life". Another interesting function was users can simply put the phone in front of their chest as a start button to take video and then the video will be sent. Also, viewers can take selfies to show how they react to others' videos while watching and sent back to original creator.

After Casey posted the video titled “meet Beme”, the video reached 1,500,000 views. Beme has been downloaded more than 1 million times, with 1.1 million videos shared in the first week. However, not all the responses were positive.

Even though Casey emphasized that this app is "nothing cute or twee about it", some people thought it is too simple and had nothing special compared to other social medias. Some compared Beme with Snapchat and pointed that it essentially takes the core values of Snapchatand presented a bare-bones version of it.

With so much controversy and discussion, Beme initially soared in popularity. It had trouble gaining traction and downloads slowed. Finally, it shut down in January 2017. But it was not a sad ending for Casey and this app: Beme was acquired by CNN for a reported $25 million.

Social media is all about people. If people lose their interest on an app, some certain flaws must be existed. However, this may be a success for Casey, at least it is a worthy attempt for people like him.

As a famous YouTuber and a founder of Beme, Casey used the reputation he gets from a social media platform to create another social media platform. He tried to turn these existing followers into the audience of the new app. It seems like moving the apples in Box A into Box B. But social media is not a box, people are not apples which can be moved so easily. Even though the popularity can boost attention of a new app, it is only the first step.

Online reviews: reveals honesty or dishonesty?

What connects social media? The idea of sharing. We share our reviews about our favorite restaurants on YELP. Also, we rely on other people's sharing on YELP to decide the place for a drink on weekends. It seems to be a habit for us. But have you ever doubt the honesty of YELP reviews? Are they really shared sincerely by customers? Are their reviews really dependable? 

A few years ago, some YELP users expressed their doubts if businesses paid YELP to hide negative reviews. On the website of YELP, you can see the reviews by filters, which includes YELP sort, newest first, oldest first, etc. But on the mobile app, you cannot choose but only see the reviews in order which YELP offered. Another suspicious point is, you can see some people are selling 5-star YELP reviews on eBay.

However, YELP solved this crisis positively. YELP claimed that “You Cannot Pay Us to Remove or Reorder YourReviews.” They also asserted this slogan in some online question-and-answer sites like Quora and stated their positions seriously. Moreover, YELP made some changes to its website, they changed “filtered reviews” to “other reviews that are not currently recommended". For customers, this would be seen as a sign for respecting their opinions.

In fact, dealing with fake reviews is a common problem on social media, especially on these customer reviews based websites. In China, the most popular online shopping website, Taobao, is also facing the same obstacle. Some sellers will hire professional reviewers to leave good words of their products. They even offer photos which were taken at different times and under various circumstances, just make the reviews looks more convincible. It has become a common phenomenon that customers need to pay much attention to distinguish reviews. 

No doubt that these customers reviews based websites are successful at first. We can call these websites a word of mouth and the most influencing factors are, as groundswell mentioned, believable, self-reinforcing and self-spreading. Whereas, this online review system is losing its advantage now. Because what customers want is cutting down the time for searching and avoiding making wrong decisions based on other's experiences. These expectations will not achieve when online reviews are no longer trustful. Likewise, these businesses have already lost their reputation.

Actually, businesses do not need to worry about these negative reviews that much. Based on the research, negative reviews are essential to the credibility of the site. Positive reviews just do not seem believable without negative reviews. In retrospect, will we get a product which only has positive reviews? Definitely not. People's opinions are personal and sometimes, 100% satisfaction will only drive customers away.