Here’s something I saw on techcrunch about this.

I think its bad that businesses can’t respond to reviews, don’t you.  Yelp responded to this with a feature to let businesses respond privately to reviewers, but I wonder if that is not just making the problem worse?  Brownbook.net doesn’t prevent business owners from joining the discussion about their business and responding to reviews, in fact we let them do it openly.  A business owner is clearly identified as such, so why not just let them speak.

I’d say its a bit like comments on blogs, the comments/discussion adds value to the whole, it would be dull if responses were all private – we’ve had that for years, its called email.

We just added a neat new feature to Brownbook.net to help you build great reputation and word of mouth for your’s and your friends’ businesses.

Its called ‘invite reviews’ and you useit to ask people to review any listed business. So, for your own business you might use it to ask your ten most recent customers to give you a testimonial, then tell new customers to check out your reviews at Brownbook.net (or just link to them from your own website). Or, for your friends business, how about a review about their integrity and attention to detail.

Give it a try now, and start to build up your online repuation and word of mouth to win new customers.