Reviews

Just send a cease and disist email to the website owner. Give them 24 hours. If no reply or they dont respond with 'its done' or 'will be done' just contact their hosting provider and rinse and repeatm cos they have to tell the website owner to remove any libellous content.

It's becoming a frustrating fact of life, but a serious one, and you should take notice of reviews, as online reputation management becomes ever more important.

In your case, if you know the name of the company and you are happy you have your facts right, then I'd pick the phone up and as to speak to the MD. If he ducts you, threaten legal action unless he takes the review down.

After that its a game of poker, and you have to decide if the stakes are worth it.

We are in the process of redesigning our own review system, which I freely admit is flawed, but meeting up with the owner of KwikChex later this week, who specialise in reputation management and are currently taking on Trip Adviser and their bogus reviews. Hoping to get some input, but by March, I should finally have a fully functioning positive/negative review system.

Would be interested to know how you get on with kwiikchix - certainly seems like a growing business area as more and more people will be affected by it.

As for trip advisor, I've never really rated it and I know Duncan Bannatyne is currently having a public spat with them at the moment.

Would you say that many of the reviews listed on this site are self written by business owners themselves or by genuine customers of these businesses? Google local map reviews seem to be so obviously fake, especially when I check my competitors, one of them has over 50 glowing reviews, they were posted every other day for around 9 months 2 years ago, nothing negative written, like they arrived late or something, this company was totally faultless. Yet since the last review was posted there has been nothing, even some of the negative reviews written about other businesses seem to have been written by competitors. So how do you currently monitor how reviews are written on here? Or can I spend the rest of this evening tapping out glowing reviews of myself till the early hours of the morning?

That's the million dollar question. Personally I think the majority of reviews on trip adviser are genuine, and I always look up a hotel on there to get a feel for what people think about it. You can spot fake reviews, likewise you can spot jobsworths "there was dust under the lampshade". Also the traveller candid photos are invaluable, and I know my missus always leaves a review on there when we get back from somewhere.

But trip adviser needs a better method to moderate and mediate when a dispute is filed, not simply say "take the rough with the smooth".

But review sites, ours included are flawed and the trick is to design the fairest system with the technology currently available.

Google map reviews are a variety of google ones, and reviews pulled from sites using the google tags (hreview tags), such as Qype, Yelp, and from March, us! Fake ones, including negative are easy to spot, so reviews overall do have some value.

The key thing is having the right to reply, so you can have your say if someone does slander you, whilst behind the scenes you can try and get it taken down.

We currently only let you leave one review, which is cookie based, but this can be defeated by loging on to someone elses computer, so we will also add in email link activation, and checking that email hasn't been used before, as well as a few other things we're working on.

Still not foolproof, but makes it more hassle and effort, plus having to activate with a valid email should get rid of some of the really nasty stuff that we currently delete.

Trouble is with genuine reviews, we all love to bitch, but rarely take the time to say thanks.

When we've got ours revamped, it will be interesting to get some feedback, and as always, open to any suggestions!

Hoping that Kwikchecks or something similar will lead to somekind of half decent standard.