This week I am returning to the theme of online reviews which are exercising a stranglehold over page ranking and search. In a previous post, I discussed the failure of the Search Engines to equate popularity with quality and how review sites impacted on your own business website and I wanted to return to that. Just how do businesses set about counteracting the tyranny of the review? And is such a bad thing, since it is said that 90% of people say they will be influenced by a positive review?

But before I do, I just wanted to remind us all why I think that the whole review process has got out of hand.

There few individuals left who can't see that the internet has become THE indispensable marketing tool for your business, no matter how small or large you are.

People have realised that the web is no longer about tech-savvy individuals coming up with clever ideas, but a bread and butter marketing opportunity that every business should be exploiting to the maximum. Just as email, SMS and Instant Messaging have largely replaced the letter and supplemented the telephone, websites, social media, paid advertising and e-mail marketing have replaced the newspaper advertisement as the preferred way to secure more customers. The same people have also began to understand that the web is a place for brand awareness and reputation building as much as it is for customer acquisition. Increasingly they are trusting the web to store and handle their data as more and more cloud services become available. It is the place business is increasingly done.