Review sites are jumping up across the internet at a speed which is dizzying. Why is this the case? Is there much money to be gotten from them or are the owners making these sites up for altruistic reasons?

In a nutshell, there are so many because it’s great for business. Whatever type of business you are involved in, review sites are now an ever more important part of your marketing mix. We are living in a world which is getting ever more distracting through a bewildering array of choices given to us daily.

We as a consumerist society simply do not have enough time to carefully look into the choices we want to make and as a result we need to take shortcuts in our decision making.

Think about the last high price thing you bought. Did you pull out the credit card on the spur of the moment and make a purchase. I’m betting not – I’m betting you probably asked around with friends and neighbours to solicit their advice and see if they had previously bought the item in question.

You were looking for their advice and their opinions count.

Like it or not, we are all very alike when it comes to this buying decision making activity. We are at heart a “marketing herd” and are swayed by other peoples opinions – even the opinions of total strangers!

There are reviews on pretty much every conceivable subject known to man, from cause-related marketing all the way through to the best types of plants you should purchase. Conduct a quick search on any search engine and you are next to guaranteed to locate some useful reviews very quickly.

Should you trust all the reviews you come across? Definitely not. There are lots of of nefarious people out there submitting reviews with their own hidden reasons. You cannot simply rely solely on the say-so of a single review. Instead, you need to put the review in context, try to find a few more reviews (maybe put in some extra searches with phrases like “scam” as an example to find some differing points of view.

Review sites work, have worked and will work because they provide us the seductive promise of discovering useful information about things we are interested in and saving us the most important resource we have – time.

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