THE MARKETING SPOT — In my recent podcast interview with local search expert Mike Ramsey, he emphasized the importance of customer reviews in the local search results: "Google, as well as gathering business information data, they gather reviews from all across the web...Companies that have reviews, especially those that have large amounts of reviews, it helps rankings." Mike Blumenthal has an excellent piece on his blog about Asking for Reviews, explaining how Texas apartment locating service, UMoveFree, collected and leveraged reviews. It's a great piece with some strong take-aways...

TECHCRUNCH — Last August, we wrote about Lunch.com, a reviews site that’s setting out with the goal to make the world a better place by changing the way people think about each other (as I wrote then, it’s a pretty lofty goal). Today, the company is launching a new feature called Communities that lets users build their own review sites around any niche topic. The new feature can be likened to a ‘Ning for review sites’. As a community founder, you select a topic on whatever you’d like, then invite other users to contribute reviews and other content (you can elect to moderate this as it comes in)...

IMEDIA CONNECTION — Researcher Daniel J. Howard conducted a study to see if small personal interactions make a difference in phone sales. Dallas residents were called and asked if they would let a nonprofit representative come to their homes and sell them cookies, with the proceeds to be used to buy meals for the needy. Only 18 percent agreed. But when the caller started by asking, "How are you feeling this evening?" and waited for a reply, almost double the number of residents -- 32 percent -- agreed to a visit from the cookie seller. Even more astounding? Once someone followed up by paying a visit, nearly everyone (89 percent) made a cookie purchase...

TECHCRUNCH — When Chomp launched eight weeks ago in the iTunes store, it launched as an app for reviewing other iPhone apps. The app shows you a stream of realtime reviews, which you can filter by everyone or just your Facebook freinds. The app is showing some traction and should hit 300,000 active monthly users sometime tomorrow, according to co-founder Ben Keighran. While it started out as an app, today Chomp launched a complimentary Website with full app search capabilities and links for each app...

E-COMMERCE-GUIDE.COM — You happily launch your online user-reviews section and wouldn’t you know it -- waiting for admin approval is a customer‘s negative product review. Before you hit delete and pretend you didn’t see it, there is positive news about negative reviews. It may sound a bit counterintuitive, but a negative product review can actually be helpful to your online business...