I don’t know how I can assure you more of our authenticity. People that send us or leave us their written notes and letters, cards (candy, bottles of wine) and so forth — those would be difficult to fake — I never really thought anyone would question the realness of these materials. And for a small company like ours I’m not sure it would be practical, if we were that desperate I don’t think creating testimonials would be a good way to spend our time and resources — would it really make more bookings and would we really be able to do them as well as what the real people have provided? — I don’t think I could be that creative to speak and write how the real people do. If we were going to fake out the recommendations we would just put text on the screen in blurbs that sound nice, we would not likely collect and scan these sorts of materials and provide them we would just do it the easy way and hope people believed the made up text.
When we designed our website we thought about how we think when we go to a site and there are all these testimonials just one after the other in the same text with people’s names and sometimes where they are from (usually a bit too consistent in format for my comfort level) — no way to tell anything beyond reading the words.
But in our case not only are the sources very different — you can even see the texture of paper some have used — and some people have even shared their vacation photos. We could have more, we just hate to impose too much on people but I believe more would share if we asked.