Word of mouth refers to the sometimes mysterious way that one customer might contact or influence another potential customer. From the beginning, the web has been a powerful vehicle for referring a friend … to just about anything.

Now there are tools that can help you go beyond a simple email referral, such as BazaarVoice. It’s a service that lets businesses put user-generated content like comments, ratings and reviews to work with no help from your IT department. While it does take some IT effort to get it implemented, this company will actually host all of the content and do the heavy lifting. The point here is that it doesn’t take much to let your customers provide reviews and feedback.

If you want to build an Amazon-like customer community, here’s how. Relevant and credible customer-reviews influence online purchasing more than traditional marketing channels. Just talk to your friends.