But the Internet allows businesses to take this one step further.

Features such as reviews, ratings and comments are a common sight on many websites.  These websites, such as Google Local and Yelp, offer simple ads to full page profiles, complete with invitations for visitors to leave reviews, star ratings and comments about your business.  All in all a good marketing tool and for most these websites work well, returning a healthy amount of customers.

However, there are a growing number of businesses finding themselves being targeted by malicious postings both on their own websites and on third party sites.  Sometimes these postings can be traced to rival businesses, disgruntled employees or past clients.  In other cases it is simply malicious spam.  But what can you do if you find yourself victim to these unkind words?

First, if you use third party websites to promote your business where comments, reviews and ratings are all features, ensure that not only does the host site monitor what is posted, but that you check the sites yourself on a regular basis.  Many third party sites will only have filters in place to wheedle out spam and to flag up suspicious postings, so they are unlikely to pick up on everything.  Carry out your own checks on websites you are thinking of advertising on – if you notice a high level of spam-like comments or lots of postings with a less than complimentary tone, you should perhaps go elsewhere.

If you are running your own website with comment features (or a blog) have them set to a review status so only you can publish comments once you have read and approved them.  Don’t be so quick to delete postings that may include negative comments though.  A website that only contains hundreds of glowing reports may lead potential customers to be a little suspicious and even to conclude you are writing the comments yourself!

Spam postings and particularly malicious spam have become a real problem in recent years particularly with the growth of online forums and social networking.  If someone has posted a bad comment about you on one site, chances are they will have posted to many others as well.  Protecting your online reputation means spending time monitoring sites you know your business is advertised on and performing regular searches for anything that may include your business name or reference to you.

Unfortunately, many third party websites do not go far enough to stop spam comments or malicious postings meaning you will need to contact them yourself to get postings removed.  Some sites do have a ‘flag’ function on all postings, where visitors can flag up something which they feel is not right, but then how many of us bother to do this?  If you are being specifically targeted another option is to pursue matters through the courts, but this could be a lengthy and expensive process.

Ultimately, protecting your online reputation and that of your business will rely on your own vigilance.

Over the coming days, all Gmail users with individual accounts will be able to access it.  If you use Gmail as part of Google Apps availability to Priority Inbox may depend on whether your domain administrator has allowed you access to ‘pre-release’ features.

Priority Inbox has been developed by Google in response to Google’s conviction that email overload is a problem that is increasing and which is forcing people in to spending far too much time and energy in organizing their inboxes for both personal and work related emails.  It will work as an optional view of inbox messages and users can toggle between other views such as listing messages by timestamp or in alphabetical order according to senders’ names or subjects.

When you activate Priority Inbox, the inbox is divided in to three sections, important and unread emails will appear at the top; flagged messages will appear in the middle and everything else will be in the last section.  Google’s director of product management in its enterprise unit, Matthew Glotzbach, has promoted this new feature as a kind of inverted spam filter allowing emails to be prioritized instead of blocked or set aside as unsolicited and which allows users to instantly see the most important messages first.

Glotzbach said, “If you’re in meetings and you come back to your email and you have five minutes between appointments and you have 50 emails, which five messages do you spend your time on in that window of time? Priority Inbox aims to automate that and simplify that decision”.

Google’s own in house tests showed that users of Priority Inbox were typically spending around 6% less time managing their email or for an employee who would usually spend 13 hours per week on email, an entire working week per year could be saved.

For more information, check out Google Priority Inbox.

Paypal launched an app for smartphone transactions only last year and as the uptake of smartphones have increased so has the growth in mobile transactions.  This year alone Paypal has predicted a turnover of more than $500 million in mobile payments and that more than 5 million of its members will be actively using Paypal via their mobiles.  Now they have made it even easier to pay for goods through smartphones with the release of the new Mobile Express Checkout app.

Up until now checkout procedures could be time consuming so this new app aims to streamline the process with a one-click buying option.  If you have regularly bought goods from Amazon you will already be familiar with this type of service, which stores consumer’s shipping and payment details for the next time they place an order.  All a customer will need to do is login with their Paypal account details.

Of course, making payments through smartphones have been met with some concern over fraud, identity theft and the like.  Paypal however says the new app has been optimized specifically for smartphones and features strong fraud detection.

Initially the app has been released to users of the iPhone and Android 2.0 or higher and is only available to customers of a select few retailers like Nike and Buy.com.  Paypal are working to make the app available to more retailers over the coming months.

The launch of this app means that Paypal’s 85 million users will now be able to purchase goods via their smartphones faster than before and unlike other mobile payment apps, users will not have to input their credit card details each and everytime.  Users of smartphones are sure to welcome this as inputting shipping and billing details on a phone is an arduous task at the best of times!  So it would seem that Paypal gets a jump on the competition once again and is leading the way when it comes to the future of automated mobile payments and mobile ecommerce.  I don’t doubt though that Mastercard et al will soon be following suit!

Taken as true, it would seem as if Yelp is playing the part of the Internet version of the Cost Nostra, soliciting protection money from its customers.  Those who refuse to pay risk getting a digital brick through their online store’s window.  While taking no side one way or the other without a healthy dose of the facts, I believe that this is potentially a matter of major concern for the Internet viewing public.  However, the bigger concern comes from the selective censoring of negative reviews.  Currently, millions of people visit sites like Yelp to hear what their fellow citizens think of local businesses offering food, goods, and services.  If those businesses can put a muzzle on any comment that they don’t agree with then, really, what is the point?  Impartiality has gone out the window, and the site’s visitors might as well forego the process all together…and if sites like Yelp don’t like what I have to say, then I’d be happy to move it to somewhere less noticeable, for a small advertising fee.