There's no denying the importance of online reviews, ratings, and social media for small businesses. Consumers are using those signals more and more before, during, and after the buying process.
From vetting a company or product to rating the website and social media content, consumers are using online reviews and ratings to publicly evaluate companies and products.
What does this mean for all of us? Simply put, we need to embrace and promote a culture that is catered to the online review world - free of spam and unethical businesses gaming the system.
For the past couple months I have been working with WikiReviews, a better place for online reviews, to help them launch their platform, and we put together couple statistics that inspired us when we thought about the value we can deliver not only to the review and wiki communities, but also to small businesses that suffer from spam and negative reviews which pollute existing platforms.