While Web marketers have long been tracking the growing influence of online consumer reviews, a new study from Opinion Research Corp. reveals that the influence of these reviews has reached a tipping point. Specifically, an eye-opening 83 percent of all online shoppers responding to the study said that the evaluations and reviews they find on the Web are now influencing their purchasing decisions. Moreover, another 32 percent said they had personally posted feedback or a review on the Web after an experience with a product or service.

“Businesses today exist in an era in which it’s nearly impossible to escape the likelihood of being evaluated — there’s nowhere to hide,” says Linda Shea, a senior vice president at Opinion Research, which also does national polling for CNN. “Even a single negative review, when posted in a very public forum, can have a significant impact on a prospective buyer’s decision.”

Not surprisingly, there is no shortage of independent consumer review sites rating water-related products or services. Click to Rate it all! (see sidebar for Web addresses of companies mentioned in this article), a consumer review site, and you’ll find reviews of 30 brands of bottled water. Viewpoints is another consumer site where reviews of bottled water are proliferating. And on Angie’s List, one of the pioneers in consumer online reviewing, you’ll find unvarnished reviews of service companies.

Amazon.com, best-known for online book sales and one of the first online retailers to offer an online review domain, also regularly posts ratings of bottled water products. And even phenomenally successful YouTube has gotten into the act, hosting videos about water contamination and bottled water as well as critical examinations of products.

Interestingly, the bravest of the review site pioneers — including heavyweight online retailers Amazon, eMusic and eBay — have decided to embrace reviews on their sites that are both positive and negative. Essentially, these companies buy into the “Brave New Web” theory that a company demonstrating complete “transparency” on the Internet earns the greatest respect — and the most repeat business — from today’s most sophisticated online shoppers.

But others are hedging their bets, convinced that by posting only glowing reviews of goods and services, they’ll be able to look trendy while bringing in more business to boot.

Either way, if you’re looking to take control of the review frenzy that has seized the Web — a frenzy that could negatively impact your water treatment dealership with just a few, well-placed, unflattering reviews — you may want to consider creating a review domain on your site.

Such domains can be overseen, guided and edited by your company. And while these review domains cannot erase a negative review posted elsewhere on the Web, you can at least control public opinion where it matters most: on your Web site, where customers do business with you.

Paul Gillin, author of The New Influencers: A Marketer’s Guide to the New Social Media, observes: “Blogs, discussion boards and other forms of interactive media are the most cost-effective customer feedback mechanism ever invented. You won’t get a representative sampling of your customers. But you will get your most passionate customers.”

Don Philabaum, CEO of Internet Strategies Group, agrees: “It’s a good time to become a niche online community and do it right,” he says. “You have millions of people who have learned the value of being a part of an online community, and they’ll bring experience, enthusiasm, content — and their network — to your online community.”

Fortunately, there are plenty of service providers ready to help you create a wide array of online review communities, which can be run on the service providers’ computer servers, or brought in-house.

Generally, these online review communities currently break out into three categories:

• Most popular are simple social hang-outs, which offer a review domain component. These communities borrow from the MySpace and Facebook model, and attempt to offer as many community features as possible to attract as many visitors as possible.
• A second breed of online review communities are completely private, invitation-only affairs. While these are generally much smaller than the public sites, many firms had discovered there’s a big payoff when they pick-and-choose who will belong to their review community.
• Meanwhile, a third genre of review community exists solely to solicit reviews from extremely happy customers, and post those reviews on company Web sites. Many of these communities are driven by highly sophisticated review software packages, which walk visitors through every step of the review process and find all sorts of ways to encourage them to expound upon a company and its goods and/or services.

No matter which type of review community appeals to your business, it appears the ongoing rise of such gathering places is inevitable.

“Expect at least one-quarter of the Fortune 100 to announce online communities, in which they learn about and create higher levels of engagement with their customers and markets,” says Brad Bortner, co-author of “Top Market Researcher Predictions for 2008,” from market research firm Forrester.

If your firm is interested in going with a MySpace clone, which includes a review domain component, Web marketers say you’ll only be able to achieve that look and feel by offering a full array of community-fostering amenities, including discussion boards; chat rooms; instant messaging; blogs; photo, audio and video posting; and similar community-building services.

You’ll also want to jump-start the community’s nerve center — the discussion board — by posting commentary on a dozen or so topics, and then encouraging visitors to offer their own reactions and opinions to the discussions you’ve started.

Service providers who specialize in creating MySpace-type communities include Affinitive, Webcrossing and Capable Networks.

Meanwhile, the second breed of online review communities — small, private, invitation-only affairs — are the type preferred by Communispace, an online community service provider that specializes in designing and helping companies run private meeting places.

“When a few hundred members are participating on a regular basis, the quantity and quality of the content is deeper and richer than from large public sites,” says Katrina Lerman, co-author of the Communispace white paper, “The Fifth P of Marketing: Participation.”

Lerman adds, “For companies that truly want to connect with their customers, smaller may in fact be better.”

The third genre of industry review communities — sites that limit all activity to pubic reviewing of a company’s products and services — are being used by some of the biggest names in business, including Dell, Macy’s, Petco, Sears, Charles Schwab and PepsiCo.

One of the leading service providers in this space, Bazaarvoice, is a review community builder that urges companies to go the transparency route. Its flagship product, the “Ratings & Reviews” module, is designed to solicit unvarnished reviews about a firm’s performance, which are published on the company’s Web site — although still subject to company approval.

If you’re still a bit skittish about the concept of publishing bad reviews about your product or service on your own Web site, you’ll probably be more interested in a solution like Genuosity’s KudosWorks. Essentially, this is a glowing-testimonials-only approach, through which extremely enthusiastic customers offer accolade-filled write-ups on a company.

Genousity solicits the testimonials with contact tools it places on your Web site, as well as in marketing e-mails. Customers expressing interest are directed to a post-your-own-testimonial module, which includes tips on how to write a humdinger of a fan letter about your company.

Another service provider offering the keep-it-positive route is Zuberance.

If you’re not ready for any of these choices, but still want to monitor what’s being said about your company on review sites, blogs and the like, there are plenty of monitoring firms that can provide that kind of business intelligence.

The importance of such reputation-monitoring cannot be underestimated, according to Bruce Arnold, founder of Caslon Analytics, a Web marketing firm that counsels clients on managing company reputations online.

“Some posts are little more than a repository for juvenile humor: graffiti, comments that ‘X’ is the devil, animations of creatures urinating on the corporate logo,” Arnold says. “Others feature detailed and sometimes persuasive critiques, including ‘insider’ documentation, and are associated with newsgroups.

“Financial analysts have attributed falling share prices to particular campaigns, noting that some domains claim a regular audience of 20,000 to 50,000 visitors, and that information on those sites has been accepted and echoed by the mainstream media,” he adds.

Specific service providers you’ll want to evaluate for reputation monitoring include Factiva Insight: Reputation Intelligence; Nielsen BuzzMetrics; BlogSquirrel and WebClipping.com.

Joe Dysart is an Internet speaker and business consultant based in New York City. He may be reached at: phone: (646) 233-4089; e-mail: joe@joedysart.com; or at this Web site: www.joedysart.com.