Although, people have differing views on who deserves the largest slice of blame, they unanimously agree that a golden opportunity was squandered.

Wanting to deepen my understanding of the causes behind the crisis and figure out who really should be blamed for Ireland’s economic woes, I read the acclaimed ‘Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger’ by Irish Times stalwart Fintan O’Toole and felt compelled to pen this review.

O’Toole is well-known for his frequent baiting of politicians, particularly those who have been guilty of ‘dig-outs’, ‘errors of judgement’ or outright corruption and the book starts by defining Ireland’s story of growth as two distinct chapters.

Students of Irish history will know from 1995-2001 the economy grew rapidly, driven by an increase in worker output and manufacturing exports. Unemployment and poverty fell too, all of which led to a rise in GDP to 111% of the EU average, but O’Toole makes the case early on Ireland was merely catching-up with Europe.

However, this new and exciting period was characterised by investment from organisations like Pfizer, Intel and Microsoft which created highly paid and skilled jobs. No doubt they were enticed to set up shop thanks to favourable corporation tax, a well-educated, English-speaking workforce and proximity to London.

These factors coupled with migration giving way to immigration and the shaking off of what O’Toole termed ‘authoritarian religiously’ saw the emergence of a feel good factor in the Irish psyche. The key point O’Toole makes is that despite the headlines about impressive percentage growth, it was from a low starting point.

Whilst huge changes were afoot, some things remained and the author makes the case that cronyism, self-interest, and corruption was not only tolerated, but allowed to develop, thanks to light regulation and little enforcement. O’Toole draws on the evasion of Deposit Interest Retention Tax (DIRT) and the Ansbacher tax avoidance as examples of how law-breaking had been a characteristic of the Irish elite’s behaviour.

O’Toole pins a generous portion of blame on the Central Bank, which in an abdication of responsibility viewed its role as merely ensuring banks were solvent, not ethical. A huge difference. Government failure to address this issue as investment poured into the Emerald Isle undoubtedly helped foster a culture of risky and unscrupulous behaviour that set the tone and foundation for what was to come.

In hindsight, holding us this era of unprecedented growth as an example of free-market globalisation at its best, as it often was, is hugely ironic. O’Toole suggests this phase was in fact a product of complex social, historical and political processes and sheer good fortune, rather than the nous of Bertie Ahern, who comes in for criticism for his lack of ideology, vision and latterly scandal.

The book prescribes the second part of Ireland’s story from 2001-2006 where the economy began to slow, with growth and exports falling. Crucially, during this time manufacturing jobs were lost and replaced with construction, financial and public sector roles as signs of overheating emerged.

O’Toole states that two economies began to emerge; one in which people created goods and sold them and the second of facades and fiction. He draws the significant distinction that consumption replaced production as the means to keep the economy growing.

The author reveals from 2002 onwards the largest single source of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) into Ireland was from the Netherlands, courtesy of ‘high-level financial juggling by American owned transnational corporations, with their Dutch based treasury-management subsidies routing capital flows through Dublin’.

Despite the prominence of IBM, Eli Lilly and Merck et al, the majority of FDI was channeled into the International Financial Services Centre (IFSC), a small district in Dublin with low taxation and light regulation – the latter once again rearing its head as dubious practices were allowed to flourish.

Meanwhile, the rise in house prices was huge and unsustainable; between 1994 and 2006 house prices in Dublin grew by 519%. This property bubble bore no relation to reality or wages and was primed to burst. Conversely, whilst house prices rose, what are now ‘ghost estates’ sprung up as developers continued building. For many, these abandoned shells which scar the landscape are the legacy of the Celtic Tiger.

There is now what I would define as a third chapter of this economic story which began in 2008. It will be remembered as the year when things began to unravel for the global economy. Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in September 2008 and within a couple of months Ireland had its own scandal as Anglo Irish Bank found itself wildly overexposed to construction and property investments.

Controversially, the bank was deemed ‘too big to fail’, nationalised and despite protestations to the contrary, was insolvent. It later emerged that Anglo Irish, as O’Toole put it had been ‘cooking its books’ with former Chairman, Sean FitzPatrick taking out a staggering €87 million in secret loans from the bank. Once again the notion of regulation was conspicuous by its absence.

O’Toole also vilifies Brian Cowen. Although, BIFFO will be remembered as the man responsible for signing the financial rescue package with the Troika of the European Union, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund, it is his complicity in the role of Minister for Finance, a period where casino banking grew and regulation shrunk that Cowen perhaps deserves greatest censure.

Reading ‘Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger’ it is apparent how difficult pinning the blame on one person is. The book describes in detail the myriad micro and macro-economic, cultural and technological factors that simultaneously struck to tame the Celtic Tiger, but for me, it highlights one of man’s eternal problems; that of too much power being held in the hands of just a few.

With construction bosses sitting on the boards of banks which lent freely to their companies, whilst simultaneously making lavish donations to politicians as regulators sat back and did nothing, it is little wonder things turned toxic. Granted, this is an oversimplified version of events and there were more shades of grey than O’Toole concedes, but undoubtedly the Celtic Tiger was Ireland’s opportunity to usher in an era of sustainable growth, prosperity and development.

O’Toole surmises that the few, termed the ‘Golden Circle’ were allowed to ride roughshod over the dreams of a generation, not to mention saddling them with huge debt thanks to a combination of incompetence, greed and criminality. Although, O’Toole uses the book to tell how the famed luck of the Irish ran out, it’s difficult to think that those responsible, those who have yet to be held to account are doing anything but riding theirs.

Regardless of the philosophical argument about whether or not Word of Mouth (WOM) can be classified as paid media, it comes as no surprise to see review websites, essentially posts by ‘people like me’ are again amongst the most trusted sources of information.

Yelp, Google Places and Qype are virtually omnipresent within certain types of search results and whatever you are looking for; from holidays to cars to PCs, there’s going to be a review site for that niche. In fact, every time you search for a product, service or experience, numerous reviews and a map will be included (see below for example).

The reason being is that Google understand people search for two things; information and opinion. People want answers to factual questions, such as location, opening hours and price, but they are also looking for subjective answers and opinions on the product quality, service and atmosphere to guide their decision.

Quickly providing users with links to quality information and genuine opinion are a fundamental part of Google’s success, but it has dramatically increased the prominence of review websites. They have been elevated to a place of authority, truth and authenticity.

However, this elevation alone does not explain the success of review websites. Instead, we need to look at human behaviour and recently, I stumbled across a behavioural model called the Four Human Core Drives by Harvard Business School Professors Paul Lawrence and Nitin Nohria.

The premise of the Four Human Core Drives is quite simply the more human core drives your offering has, the more appealing it will be. It is made up of the following drives:

• Acquire
• Bond
• Learn
• Defend

Marketers are well acquainted with communications models, but we should not be afraid to borrow and adapt models from wider disciplines, and the thinking behind the Four Human Core Drives model was that it would be applied to products. However, I’ve used the word ‘offering’ as I think the model works equally well when used in the context of community management, blogs and apps.

Indeed, when you critically evaluate review websites against the Four Human Core Drives you’ll see that most encompass three of the four drives.

Review websites typically enable participants to gain status and influence by offering their views (acquire), feel a sense of community by interacting (bond) and many people frequently return to find out new information and satisfy their curiosity (learn).

I’m yet to find a review website that enables people to defend (in the truest sense of the word), but encompassing three out of four core drives is hugely important and offers the clearest explanation as to why review websites are so popular, trusted, engaging and influential.

Although, there are several candidates all vying for the top job, in reality it’s a two horse race and according to YouGov, Boris is the favourite with a 6 point lead.

As a digital marketer, I’m a big proponent of the hypothesis that online conversation offers insight into offline behaviour, so I thought it would be interesting to look at the London Mayoral contest and see if it is at all possible to accurately predict the outcome based on social data analysed from online conversations.

To do this we need to begin by understanding the volume of conversation about the Mayoral race, and thanks to social media monitoring tools this is a straightforward enough exercise. Indeed, over the last 30 days UK online conversation about the three main candidates has, as you would expect increased dramatically. Interestingly, Ken Livingstone is trailing Boris Johnson in terms share of voice, whilst the other main candidate, Brian Paddick is struggling to be heard. 

Encouragingly for Ken, the volume of people searching for him closely matches the number of searches for Boris, whilst Brian is once more trailing in third. It is more difficult to make firm conclusions about search data, for instance are people searching because they want more infomation to support or attack a candidates policies?

Nonetheless, I’m working on the basis that with only a short period until election day, having people search for you is most likely a sign of positive intent.

Whilst, online mentions and search data are a useful indication of communications activity and subsequent awareness, they do not shed any light on voting behaviour and it is sentiment which we should focus on.

Using a range of tools I found 34.6% of conversations around Boris are positive and there is a similar figure (33.8%) in relation to Ken, but an impressive 56.8% of mentions of Brian Paddick are considered positive. This high proportion of positive sentiment for policeman Paddick is most likely a reflection that the Johnson and Livingstone camps have concentrated on attacking each other, rather than Paddick.

Before we go any further, I recognise no social media monitoring vendor has perfected sentiment analysis, but many are very good at it, so I’m taking these figures as indicators not facts.

Based on the level of positive online conversation for each candidate in relation to share of voice, as well as taking into consideration that other candidates usually receive 10-15% of the vote, I’ve created the above chart and it perhaps offers the best indication of how people intend to vote – and Boris emerges with an 11 point lead.

I appreciate this methodology could be enhanced and that the online population is not reflective statistically of the electorate, as well as there being many more unknown factors, so I’m going to give myself a margin of error of  5% and that’s why as things stand, I’m backing Boris to remain in City Hall with a winning margin of between 8-13 points. If something dramatic happens before 3 May I may revise this prediction, otherwise I look forward to returning to this post when the votes have been counted.

Who are you backing to win the leadership race for London? Do you agree that online conversation offers insight into offline behaviour? How do you think big data can be leveraged to guide our decision-making process?

Big data was traditionally thought of in the context of areas, such as sensor networks, call records, military surveillance, complex scientific research and the like. However, in recent years its definition has been broadened to include data arising from social networks, Internet search and large-scale e-commerce, which are the focus of this post.

McKinsey, Forrester, HBR and the Economist have offered expert commentary on the wealth of big data in this new, social context, as well as thought leadership on how it can be mined and analysed to create strategies that  touch upon a range of business functions. The salient point all make is that big data impacts not only the usual players in social, such as marketing, PR, sales and customer service, but areas as diverse as supply chain, R&D, HR and much more besides.

We have been forced to broaden the definition of big data thanks to the growth of User Generated Content (UGC), the impact of which means we now create as much information every two days as we did from the dawn of man through to 2003. The unstoppable surge of content and data has contributed to what we are now calling ‘information obesity’ and led Edelman’s Steve Rubel to coin the term ‘Attentionomics’; focusing on the difficulty of cutting through the noise to captivate people’s attention, amid infinite content and finite time in the big data age.

But how do you go about using big data to make better business decisions?

Listening tools like Radian6, Sysomos and Synthesio are fantastic for reporting and evaluating external, digital marketing activity. However, there’s an unrealised opportunity for organisations to utilise these tools to mine data and extract meaning from online conversations to support their internal, operational and strategic decisions which can help them evolve from a social brand to a social business.

Navigating the complexity of big data and formulating social business insights is not easy though. It’s an emerging area that requires a broad and changing skill-set, meaning that all too often organisations can be data rich, but insight poor from their listening efforts.

Amongst all the discussion about big data there are already some fantastic examples of organisations leading the way and utilising it to make enhanced decisions for themselves or their clients.

Recorded Future is a software company with CIA and Google funding that specialise in web intelligence and predictive analytics. They have developed something called a ‘temporal analytics engine’ that scours the web to find relationships between people, organisations, actions and incidents so they can more accurately predict events, such as outbreaks of disease, terrorist threats and economic swings.

Another good example of tapping into social data to make better business decisions is that of Derwent Capital Markets. Using listening technology they compares fluctuations in the online national mood with stock market movements, the results of which help guide investments.

Thirdly, some major supermarkets are already using data mined from social media to enhance their supply chain. By studying local online conversation they are able predict demand and determine new products they should stock.

This trio of examples show how organisations are beginning to use big data to make better decisions and offers an exciting look into how online conversations may be used to predict offline behaviour in the future.

Although, we are only at the beginning of this journey, the potential uses of big data are wide, varied and exciting. For me, this is where things get interesting and it’s great to see big data rightly used beyond its traditional application in communications strategy to now guide the business one too.

The nitty gritty
PR jobs are highly sought after and people often look at it as a glamorous career choice, which is can be if you end up working in entertainment or fashion. But as with anything, it’s all about what company you work for.

“If I was down to my last dollar, I’d spend it on public relations.” – Bill Gates

In terms of your work tasks, you’re likely to do much of the following…

• Coming up with PR strategies
• Building relationships with the media
• Writing press releases and calling around whenever you’re trying to generate publicity
• Writing reports on media coverage data
• Overseeing content production (adverts, videos, social media and online PR stunts)
• Arranging press conferences and events
• Overseeing market research
• Bringing in new business opportunities
• Managing client relationships
• Overseeing social media PR strategies

However, this is by no means an exhaustive list.

Money, money, money
Actually, the salaries for PR jobs aren’t too shabby, especially for anyone with a solid understanding of social media. Of course, you won’t be in the same bracket as financiers but a £16,000 – £24,000 starting salary isn’t to be sniffed at.

The good points…
PR jobs offer a huge amount of career options; after all, most companies need some kind of PR to succeed. You can work anywhere from top fashion houses through to small charities trying to raise awareness and you can use your own personal interests to choose where you end up. Then there are the endless parties and events!

…and the bad
PR jobs are tough. You often have to work long hours and schmooze clients and the press on a regular basis – you can forget having your free time completely to yourself. It’s also a difficult, targets-driven job where clients have high expectations of how good a job you need to do for them.

Is there study involved?
There aren’t any set qualifications needed in order to become a PR; however, realistically most applicants have a degree, although the subject isn’t important. What IS important is work experience. If you can demonstrate experience of media, marketing, communications or even direct PR then you’ll be in with a much better chance of getting a great job. Time to start volunteering or apprenticeships!

OK, I’m interested… But is it really the career for me?
The most important attribute a PR needs is the ability to build relationships with people – particularly cynical journalists. The media is a powerhouse for PR opportunities but getting your product or brand into the pages of the best newspapers and magazine or on the trendiest websites can be difficult to say the least – unless you’re chummy with the editor!

Disclosure: this is a sponsored post.

From 30 March 2012 there’s going to be some significant changes; most notably to the front-end, with the new template enhancing the position of images and posts, which will dramatically alter the look and feel of pages. Essentially, Facebook is now giving brands a greater opportunity ‘to tell their story’ and engage with fans via much richer content.

In terms of the back-end and from a community management perspective, there’s been some tweaks which enable you to draft future content and more easily moderate posts, as well as the introduction of premiun ads and reach generator for larger pages.

I see the introduction of Timeline as Facebook once again laying down the gauntlet to challenge brands to do more and to do better. But, it’s not only a challenge. With more online media vying for our attention, Timeline presents a fantastic opportunity for brands to create a better, more visual and ultimately more engaging experience for their fans.

Check out the infographic for a more detailed look at what Facebook Timeline means for Brand pages.

Facebook Timeline [INFOGRAPHIC]

Coca Cola are a great example of a company adopting a content led approach to adapt, grow and ultimately thrive in the digital age. To mark this change they released two videos showing their point of view at the turn of the year called Coca Cola Content 2020 - and they were (of course) outstanding pieces of content.

Meanwhile, Eloqua and JESS3 have emerged as content marketing leaders during this period, having created the Blog Tree: New Growth Infographic and Social Media ProBook, whilst nimble start-ups like XYDO have spotted the opportunity to tap into this trend and curate existing content to businesses seeking to better engage their audiences.

XYDO’s approach currently focuses on content in emails and it has been hugely successful; recently I was lucky enough to catch up with Eric Roach, CEO of XYDO to hear more about the company, as well as the opportunities, benefits and challenges of content marketing.

Initially conceived in May of 2011 as a news-based social network, XYDO’s broad range of curated news feeds quickly gained traction among businesses and non-profits.

You can find out more about XYDO from its website, blog, YouTube Channel, Facebook Page and Twitter stream.

1. What is XYDO and your USP?
XYDO is a content marketing platform that gives businesses the ability make every interaction with their customers meaningful. The XYDO platform uses a sophisticated content system that processes 250,000 articles, images, and videos every day, and can identify the hottest, most relevant pieces for almost any vertical. Our clients can then leverage that 3rd party content to drive serious engagement with their customers.

Our first release combines XYDO content with email newsletters, and our customers have seen a 500% average increase in click through rate.

2. In your view what are the main advantages of content marketing?
Engagement – Great content endears your customers to your brand, and gives them a reason to interact with you. It’s amazing how many people reply to our customers’ mailings, thanking them for sending such a great email. When was the last time that happened with a promotional email?

Lead Generation – If what you send to your customers is good enough, they’ll pass it along to their friends. In fact, 10-40% of the clicks in our clients’ emails are their customers sharing content to their social networks, which in turn builds our clients’ audience (and sales funnel) .

Retention – Content marketing helps you stay top of mind with your customers in between purchases. By interacting with them consistently – and providing consistently good content – you increase your chance of a subsequent sale immensely.

3. What do your clients use content marketing for?
Email is the first distribution channel we’ve developed for, and the results have been astounding. One of our first customers, Lendio (www.lendio.com), saw an 800% increase in their click through rate after one week. The Utah Jazz, another customer, has seen consistent increases in their open and click through rates, such that they use XYDO mailings for the majority of their email communications.

4. How would you describe XYDO’s approach to content marketing in general?
The XYDO approach is twofold. First, we focus delighting existing customers by making sure every piece of content is absolutely engaging. Content marketing is worthless unless the content itself is amazing, and our system does a great job of identifying what will resonate with people. Second, we focus on helping our clients grow their audience by providing them with content that has a high viral potential. One of the by-products of the way our system judges content is that we know beforehand what people will share with their friends. It’s like giving our clients a loaded deck, and they see huge improvements to their social reach because of that.

5. What is your long term vision for XYDO?
While email was the first channel we developed for, we’re focused on becoming the best content resource for smart marketers regardless of communication channel.

6. As a marketing discipline, what more can agencies do to demonstrate the value of content marketing?
As large brands shift towards a content marketing approach, the argument for content gets easier to make. American Express is a classic example, with Coca-Cola following closely with a new content focus. Following with quantifiable results from their own experience should close the argument for content marketing.

7. In your opinion, what is the biggest misconception about content marketing?
The biggest misconception that we’ve seen is that content needs to come from within the company. The conversation doesn’t start in the marketing office – it starts and often ends with your customers. Providing great content, whether it originates from your company or not, is an extremely effective way to participate in that conversation.

8. How do you measure and evaluate the value of content marketing activity?
The metrics you use to measure content marketing efforts should depend on your distribution channel. For example, we’ve found open rate (change over time), click through rate, and % clicks to social shares to be great indicators of content marketing effectiveness when distributed through email.

I would like to put on record my thanks to Eric for taking the time to talk to us about XYDO and providing us with such a fascinating insight into content marketing. I wish him and the rest of the team all the very best for the future.

The game itself is in the same style as the arcade classic Breakout, with the twist being that when you hit special Tweet blocks, it shows you a recent Tweet from someone you follow – the whole idea being that Social Break is “the fun way to check Twitter”. Thrown into the mix are a challenging set of positive and negative power-ups, to keep players on their toes in what is a hugely enjoyable game.

I’ve been playing Social Break over the last few days and found it lots of fun. Given that Breakout is probably one of the most addictive games ever and the popularity of Twitter, Andy and his iPhone app developer outfit Wicked Little Games could be on to something special here.

You can download the game at http://bit.ly/socialbreak for £0.69p/$0.99.

Andy has kindly given readers of Social Web Thing some promo codes to get Social Break for free. If you’d like to receive a code, leave your Twitter handle below and I’ll DM it to you.

The reason for this post is that I often receive emails about an ‘awesome infographic’, ‘innovative Facebook app’ or ‘exciting launch’ which are all well and good, but too often there’s very little reason for me to open up the laptop and blog. Most of the time there’s nothing wrong per se with the outreach, but equally there is nothing right that compels me to respond in the way the PR would like.

However, a little more thought and care in the approach would pay dividends. PRs are untouchable at communicating news, but they need to become better at articulating benefit; all too often outreach is overly focused on client messaging. For blogger outreach to be effective there needs to be some middle-ground, to establish something that is mutually beneficial for both parties.

In its most brutal, blogger outreach can be thought of as a transaction e.g. an exchange of value between two or more parties. For instance, the blogger may have a niche audience the PR wants to reach, therefore reaching this audience has a certain value. Subsequently, the PR needs to offer something of enough perceived value to the blogger in order for them to write about the client and enable them to reach the niche audience.

I’ve mentioned value as it is a deliberately broad term, but its one PRs should be thinking more about. Monetary value is easy to understand, but PRs can offer value to bloggers in many different forms.

I’ve designed this list to help PRs make their proposition more valuable, so I will be more likely to write about their client; then everyone can benefit and achieve the desired outcome. Whilst, I would never claim to speak for anyone but myself, I’m sure many of these tips will ring true for other bloggers.

1. Content co-creation
I frequently receive outreach describing in great detail an initiative, milestone or other good news story and whilst, news is interesting, I blog as a hobby and want something more exciting than that. The opportunity to co-create content has much greater appeal than simply receiving a press release. By this I mean, instead of emailing about the appointment of a new Marketing Director, let me have a Q&A session with them or even better let my readers submit questions.

2. Exclusivity
If you want me to write about a new product, launch or event etc, let me or my readers have some form of exclusive access. It surprises me the number emails I get from PRs who blindly hope I will write about their client with absolutely no exchange of value mentioned. A more effective approach would be to give readers something exclusive, such as a money off voucher for the product, beta access to the app or discounted tickets to the event. All of this is more valuable and engaging than receiving a news release.

3. Competition prizes
Competitions have always been an effective tool to get people reading and talking about your clients and raising awareness. From my own experience bloggers are normally receptive to hosting a competition and writing about your client if the prize is valuable enough. The exchange of value when hosting a competition is easy to understand as they often have monetary value. Quite simply, if you’re launching a new product, you will increase the chances of someone blogging about it if there is a prize to give away too.

4. Product trials
In my opinion, a press releases on its own is probably one of the least effective tools to get bloggers talking and writing about your client. Instead wherever possible try and get your client’s product into the hands of bloggers. This can be expensive and time-consuming, but will undoubtedly add serious value to your outreach proposition and they will feel more compelled to blog; resulting in a greater chance of the desired outcome.

5. Experiences and events 
Finally, if you are serious about enticing bloggers to write about your client, offer them a fantastic, unique and exclusive blogger experience they will want to share with their readers as soon as possible. Over the years I’ve been involved in ‘money can’t buy’ experiences for bloggers including whiskey tasting hosted by a master distiller, the opportunity for bloggers to learn fuel efficiency tips from a cricket legend and arranged behind the scenes access at a major leisure brand.

Experiences and events are expensive to manage, but they have a high perceived value and will strengthen any outreach proposition. If you genuinely want to build long-term relationships with bloggers it’s an investment worth making.

I’d be interested to hear what ingredients are more likely to compel you to write about a pitch. Skilled PRs can fashion and add value to opportunities, but all too often I’m left thinking PRs need to think and work a little bit harder for their earned media.

We all know Google operates as a shop window for many businesses and the influence reviews and WOM can have on purchasing decisions, but how can you be sure the review, either good or bad (there is evidence to suggest bad reviews can lead to increased purchases) is genuine?

It’s undoubtedly a contentious issue, but it seems every week there’s another story which alleges the ‘gaming’ of TripAdvisor, Yelp or Google Places and co in what Cornell University have termed ‘deceptive opinion spam’.

Recent news that the ASA forced TripAdvisor to stop claiming its reviews are ‘trusted’, coupled with claims that an Irish hotel chain urged its staff to write positive reviews only add weight to the argument that urgent reform is needed.

We are now reaching a point where review websites need to up their game if we are to break  a disingenuous cycle of fake reviews that not only damage the reputation of businesses, but that of review websites.

There has been calls by the judiciary to criminalise ‘untrue’ web claims, but the reality is online legislation and enforcement have been hampered by a lack of political will and appropriate resource. It is against this backdrop of increasing mistrust and legislative apathy that review websites must now step up to the plate and raise their levels of verification.

Although not a definitive answer to the question of verifying online authenticity, enhanced safeguards, verification and transparency will improve the situation.

What could this look like?

In practical terms it could mean publishing IP addresses, requiring people to post their full name and link to their social media profiles. Perhaps reviews sites could move to a situation where they offer a trust rating like eBay does for its customers? For instance, people who are willing to publish their name, list their various social media profiles, have been a member of a review site for several months would have a higher trust rating than somebody hiding behind a username, who has just joined the review site and posted a negative review.

All of this would help improve the verification of authentic online reviews.

Obviously, such measures would mean people open their reviews up to increased scrutiny, but I see this as a positive, progressive step. At the moment it is simply too easy for somebody to abuse the system.

Given this year’s Edelman Trust Barometer finding that trust in ‘people like me’ has increased, review sites should be in a for a great 12 months ahead, but if the validity of reviews continues to be questioned, then their license to operate will be fatally undermined.

Review websites are a fantastic, informative and useful source of information, but in the absence of greater levels of verification, the cracks in trust which have emerged may become a fracture and that really could signal the beginning of the end of the of the game.