Trust. It’s a valuable commodity, possibly THE most valuable commodity, and once it’s been spent. Zip. It’s gone – for good.

This is a story about Ink. Printer Ink. (I know, I know. That’s well boring – but please don’t stop reading just yet…)

I ordered some printer ink on Amazon. I put it in the printer, it works, so it’s fair to say I’m pretty happy with it. But fast forward a week or so, and I receive a letter offering me a £10 voucher if I leave a 5* review.

Now call me old fashioned, but that stinks right? I mean, the ink is fine and it probably deserves a half decent review. But bribing for 5* reviews seems really shitty to me.

How often do you see a product listed on Amazon that has 5*, but when you delve deeper all the recent reviews are god awful. So what happened? Did the product suddenly change? A new manufacturer? A new design? Or was it just dodgy reviews bumping up its rating to get sales rolling? Because even though I don’t trust reviews – I never buy anything that doesn’t have any. They are THAT important to me – and to all of us. If you’re in a new town, you don’t visit an empty bar or restaurant – you go to the one that’s full of locals having a good time.

But 5* star reviews aren’t the only problem – something caught my eye this morning on the BBC News website. Amazon’s murky world of one-star reviews. 1* star reviews are now being weaponised to drive competitors out of business. Reviews are just too easy to fake.

So what can we do to fix reviews before it’s too late? How can we fight back? When anyone can say anything online, how do we know what to trust and what to file away in the scam folder? What we really need is companies to show a little bit more authenticity

And that’s what’s great about smartphone and user-generated video. It allows your company’s true colours to shine through. Reviews and testimonials can too easily be faked – written by some poor soul in a sweatshop. But smartphone user-generated video reviews and testimonials? From any customer, anywhere in the world? That’s much more difficult to fake. As a viewer you can instantly tell when something isn’t quite sitting right – so you’ve got no choice but be for real.

It’s easy to do without any fancy tech – all you need is a smartphone with a half decent camera.

And the Capture Captain app takes it one step further, and makes collecting authentic customer testimonials at scale ridiculously simple, whilst giving you control and consistency over what’s being submitted. That’s what we’re all about; giving people accurate information so they can make informed decisions.

That way, as consumers we can make informed decisions about what we buy, and how we buy it. And hopefully in the process make the world a better place.