Sean, we look at social media during underwriting but it's a very cloudy picture. I can see how it would be much more important for an online business to be active on twitter/fb but not a brick and mortar in "Hometown America". Hometown America still believes that social media is a face to face conversation and an actual handshake.

For brick and mortar, yelp/urban spoon/google/ ripoff report and many other review sites are much more important than FB/Twitter. At least in my opinion. It's just tough to compare Kabbage's findings to brick and mortar. With brick and mortar the actual store is the facebook page in some ways.

We take online reviews very seriously. Especially when they are showing a notable decline in service, product, and overall condition of the business. I've called neighboring businesses to potential clients when I felt something was "off" or saw unfavorable reviews. You'd be surprised how willing some neighboring business owners are to talk about their neighbors.

Facebook and twitter are fan clubs mostly. They don't really tell the whole story. But I don't doubt Kabbage either. Online only businesses rely on their online rep to make it work. FB and twitter are an important piece of that. Brick and mortar relies on their neighborhood rep to make it work. Getting a good bead on neighborhood rep is an art and fb/twitter can help but relying on them is a mistake imo.