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By Andy Chen, Co-Founder

I’m pleased to announce that Pehr Luedtke has joined PowerReviews as CEO. This move is the next step in PowerReviews’ expansion into broad-based Social Commerce Solutions. Pehr brings a unique combination of marketing and merchandising experience at branded retailer Levi Strauss and consumer online marketing and operations experience running Epinions, the largest user-generated product reviews site on the Internet.

I will remain active in the day to day operations at PowerReviews, focusing on strategic alliances and strategy. With Pehr’s leadership and the strength of the PowerReviews team, I’ve never been more excited about the future and our ability to deliver innovative Social Commerce Solutions that truly engage, connect, and sell.

The Foundation… What’s in a Name?

When Robert, Jim, Gautam and I first envisioned PowerReviews four years ago, we wanted to find a successful model to describe what we wanted to build. Unfortunately our model is quite unique and we were hard-pressed to find something equivalent. So, instead, we looked for attributes of great companies that we wanted to emulate. The resulting codename was….(drumroll):

In a nutshell, KaGooForce is a mashup of 3 companies:

1. Kana: CRM/Email management for retailers. They pioneered the idea of harnessing customer communications (inbound support emails) to drive efficiencies across all aspect of the business. PowerReviews would do this with Reviews and Q&A.
2. Google: Uncompromising focus on innovation, simplicity and delivered value to its customers. PowerReviews delivers great technology and service, not marketing spin or hard sell-tactics.
3. SalesForce: Salesforce delivers a product with a self-service SaaS model vs. the traditional Enterprise sale with hefty Professional Services fees…and ate Siebel’s lunch despite being outspent and outnumbered. PowerReviews products are built with self-service at its core so that our clients can easily start with us and grow as they receive value.

We all knew that the name was pretty goofy (believe it or not, this was in our actual Series A investor pitch!), so we stuck with the more mundane “PowerReviews”. However, the characteristics that KaGooForce represents have truly defined our path, in terms of products, culture, and business model.

In fact, we recently surveyed our clients, and here’s a snapshot of what our clients are saying about us:

I’m truly proud that words such as “partners”, “innovative”, “service”, “enjoy”, “relationship” are used to describe PowerReviews. And I’m also excited that, with the thoughtful feedback from our 850+ clients, we are now on the forefront of this transformational “social commerce” trend.

How far we’ve come

Because PowerReviews is in the “customer feedback” business, it makes sense that we take a lot of time to listen to our customers. There are two specific things that I’ve heard very clearly from our customers recently: “innovate faster… the world is changing quickly and we need PowerReviews to help guide the way”; and “build a great business, we love what you do and want to make sure that you are a partner for the long-term.”

And so, we’ve been working really hard on both of these demands. Here are some of the results of our efforts so far:

• We have introduced 3 major new products in the past year: AnswerBox, In-line SEO and BrandConnect (as well as lots of enhancements to our core reviews solution)
• We struck a major licensing deal with Shopzilla in the EU
• Buzzillions continues to grow its share and awareness with consumers (~7M reviews, 2.5M visits/month!)
• We have added over 50 enterprise clients in 2009, including Orbitz, Advance Auto Parts, Warner Brothers, GNC and Jelly Belly
• We launched PowerReviews Express to serve small-to-mid-sized retailers…with over a dozen partnerships such as eBay Prostores, Shopify, Infopia, Zoovy, BrandLabs, and Shopatron

It’s truly been a banner year for PowerReviews on all levels. The (not so) amazing thing is that all of these successes were driven by our customers, who freely and thoughtfully gave their ideas to us. Thank you!