Rather than one opinion – you get a chorus. And instead of just a small circle of friends – anyone with a curious mouse gets wind of the glorious numbers written about your restaurant.

Are you aware folks are talking? Do you hear what they’re saying?

Online sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor and UrbanSpoon put your quality grade a click away from anyone looking. These sites, for the uninitiated, are review websites. Yelp tackles everything from restaurants to mechanics and dry cleaners, depending on your location. TripAdvisor boasts more than 15,000,000 reviewers weighing in on vacations, hotels, resorts and restaurants. UrbanSpoon, as you may have guessed, provides a table for diner’s opinions.

At Yelp and UrbanSpoon visitor’s can easily see the ‘best’ in a particular city. And on all of these sites, the reviewers are real people like you and me. (You can even follow a reviewer and see the other businesses they’ve written about.)

This isn’t bought-and-paid-for advertising. Instead, you earn your stars (or stripes) based solely on your customer’s experience.

But unlike word of mouth in days gone by, now you’re able to see a review and adjust. You can learn what’s working and what’s failing miserably. Did you realize your actual location outshines your food? Or the nurse who’s greeting your sick patients seems to suffer from an unhealthy attitude herself? Certainly your heart will flutter when you read “This is what a hotel should be like.” It’s feedback like you’ve never gotten, providing insight you might never have heard.

Plus, now on Yelp you can talk back. When someone complains, for example, that you denied their coupon – you can respond directly to them, publically letting everyone know you don’t have coupons so there must have been a mix up.

All this begs the question – how much are you investing in your quality and service?

Because here’s the bottomline: review sites exist. With the ever-growing popularity of Facebook and Twitter, people are talking about you. (And mobile devices make it easy-peasy to let fingers do the talking.) Embrace it all. Use all these comments to better serve your customers. Make them happy…then listen to the sweet songs of praise.