As a customer, I never look beyond the first half-dozen reviews. If ANY of them look spammy … bye-bye — that’s like catching your service mgr. in a lie before I get my car worked on — it’s a deal breaker. If you bought a 50-pack of comments, your money was wasted on me.

Thanks. As you point out in your article and I point out above, money works if done right.

Again the big question, are reviews really that powerful? Our limited testing and implementations across a host of clients gives us a “plateau effect” which again leads to the assumption that with factors which are “internally controllable” (yes, I am assuming review generation is thought of as an internal business process) tend to help a bit and then their effect fades off. This is just like internal linking for routine SEO. With a lot of keyword focused internal anchor text, we have seen a negative effect too, we are yet to observe that with reviews and Local algorithms.

@John
All of local search will move towards a model of trusted recommendations. Within that there will be high value reviews and low value reviews.

Google is already culling out the really obviously bad ones and starting to add a more social element to their recommendations. They also have access to and are including your search history and actions into the process.

There really are multiple components to providing the right answer in local and at the moment, despite some bad reviews at Google, I wouldn’t count them out of the game. At this point, they are one of the only search providers that is sending significant quantities of customers to businesses.