RMM

The latest edition of BBC Click is a great view for anyone interested in peer reviews and the continued problems online with astroturfing (i.e. faked reviews). Even with clever algorithms and spam bots a lot still gets through the net (not least via Google reviews). This, as the artice on BBC Click demonstrates, can cause small businesses a lot of ballache heartache.

However, whilst I watched Click, I was struck with how increasingly I don’t rely on the aggregated wisdom of any old crowd (be it the Trip Advisor community, the Amazon reviewer community etc) but rather I rely on my own, hand-picked personally filtered network of people via Facebook and Twitter. It is to them that I often turn when needing a recommendation, not the unwashed masses anonymously green inking their way through review sites. I can’t believe i’m alone in this.

Of course we’ll always, to an extent, use ordinary peer reviews to help inform a purchase decision but increasingly the emphasis is shifting on to personalised, user-curated, networks to provide advice/recommendations/warnings and this is good news for those businesses that have been the victim of negative astroturfing.