Today we announced that the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office just issued a key patent to PowerReviews related to our tag-based review technology – specifically, the ability to present at-a-glance review summaries that make reviews more informative and easier to use. This is the first of seven patents we have filed around next-generation product reviews.

We believe that these innovations have enabled three major advances in social commerce:

• More informative, easier-to-use product reviews
• Social recommendations, based on a person’s lifestyle and intended uses
• Structured analytics, driving more actionable product and marketing insights

We look forward to bringing you further innovation that drives confidence and engagement for your customers and greater sales and customer loyalty for you.

For more information on our patent and the full press release, click here.

We’re both proud and honored to be able to share this news with you and look forward to bringing you further innovation in the years to come.

You may have visited the new PowerReviews website in the last month.  Or come to our booth at Shop.org.  Or downloaded one of our Case Studies.  If so, I would venture to guess that your eyes widened, and your mind started to ask questions.

Yes, we just completed a soup-to-nuts re-branding and re-design of EVERYTHING PowerReviews.  We called this massive project “PowerReviews 2.0”, and it was truly transformational.  We realized that so much of what we do has expanded beyond our name, and our brand.  So we wanted to state clearly what PowerReviews means now, and why we are so excited about our growing footprint in the social commerce and social media arenas.

We decided to tell this story in video.  First, a video of me discussing the underlying positioning and design goals of PowerReviews 2.0.  Then, a video of our amazing design team – Project6 – discussing the creation of our new look and feel, logo, website and collateral materials.  The Project 6 team did an amazing job of tapping into the core essence of our company personality and effectively communicated PowerReviews in a visually impactful way, throughout every touch-point to our customers.

Enjoy!

A study by Sirius Decisions revealed that 32% of marketers online are creating customer communities around their products or services—and it’s paying off. One particularly notable use of customer communities to build significant business value is the development and recent launch of Microsoft’s Windows 7. Having been involved in the Windows 95 launch at Microsoft, I know that Microsoft has enlisted its customers and developers in the beta testing and bug reporting for decades. Windows 7 marks a significant broadening in the way it values the feedback of customers in the development of its flagship Windows product. With Windows 7, Microsoft actually involved customers at the very beginning of the product definition and development cycle – engaging them by soliciting their feedback and suggestions up front.

How did the Microsoft Team engage their customer community? A simple, but effective solution: they asked for their help.

The Microsoft team started with a blog, penned by the lead Windows 7 engineers. This community-focused approach to the development of Windows 7 was deemed by engineers as “systematic learning from customers of all types,” opening up the discussion of bugs, complaints, and praise to “PC makers, hardware developers, enterprise customers, developers, and more.”

The dedicated blog to the engineering of Windows 7 stated as its mission: “We strongly believe that success for Windows 7 includes an open and honest, and two-way discussion about how we balance all of these interests and deliver software on the scale of Windows. We promise and will deliver such a dialog with this blog.”

According to Wikipedia, The Windows 7 Beta was released on January 7, 2009 to TechNet and MSDN subscribers.  And, on January 10, due to overwhelming demand, both 32 and 64-bit versions of the Beta were made available to the public until the 10th of February.

Here’s a snapshot of Windows 7 Beta testing by the numbers:

• 8 million = the number of participants in Customer Experience Improvement Program
• 4,000 = the number of business customers from developing and emerging markets who participated in testing
• 2,600 = the number of customers involved in usability studies and user research
• 600 = the number of new features tested
• 200 = number of countries in which product instrumentation and usage data was compiled

Source: Ars Technica

Another essential component of the community-centric approach to product development entailed the implementation of a community engagement tool, which allowed Microsoft to identify 250 influential subject matter experts in 29 countries, scaled their community engagements from dozens to hundreds each week, and helped them to garner positive feedback from within the IT professional community. (Source: Visible Technologies)

This example from Microsoft may feel a bit unattainable because of their size, but we’re seeing examples of Brands enlisting their customers in product “co-creation” through customer reviews and communities that directly impact their product design and result in extremely positive gains from doing so.  This further reinforces the well known fact: when customers are excited about you, they’re also game to co-create with you by sharing their feedback candidly. And, if you listen, you can reap the benefits of higher conversion, more word-of-mouth and higher overall sales. (Just ask our client Wine Enthusiast – who built a hugely successful product line [read: sold out] guided and inspired by customer reviews. But look for more on that next week.)

The result? A sea of praise and glowing testimonials by techies the world over: “Faster” proclaims the New York Times. “Ready” according to Computerworld. “Don’t wait” from Gartner. And candidly, CNET declares, “Strong design and Microsoft don’t always go together, but they do in Windows 7.”

And even more numbers: CNET reports that Microsoft sold 234 percent more boxed editions of Windows 7 than it did Vista in the initial releases of both products.

Extending community to all aspects of its Windows® 7 launch, Microsoft proactively brought customers into its core marketing campaign. Take the television ad campaign for Windows® 7 known as “Windows 7 Was My Idea,”  in which an entertaining exchange depicting the jovial dialogue between Microsoft enthusiasts and engineers takes place:

We’d love to hear about your experience with Windows® 7.

Was part of it, any, or all of it your idea?

A New York surprise.  I’m in New York visiting PowerReviews clients and partners.  A great trip on its own.  It also happens to be the wrap-up of the World Series, and I find myself in Time Square, a half block from Virgil’s BBQ where I had just eaten (a whole other story).  To my surprise, I find a long line of people (naturally) waiting to sign a 50 foot “graffiti” wall and have their picture taken in front of it.  Besides a huge World Series emblem, there’s a State Farm logo on it… which explained most of what was happening.  Being a big Yankees fan, and an even bigger Social Media marketing fan, I promptly jumped in line (or as New Yorkers call it “on line”).  As I was waiting for my turn “at bat”, I mentally listed the marketing levers that State Farm might be using… a photo to share with friends, an easy posting to my Facebook home page, a posting to State Farm’s fan page, talking about my experiences as a State Farm customer (if I was one), or my frustrations with my existing insurance provider. 

Reaching the front of the line, the social coordinator handed me a red card with some numbers on it to retrieve the picture online, pointed me to the wall and booted me over to the wall for my NY photo opp. 

I actually did strike an “at bat” pose (surprising the crowd for some reason), then picked up a World Series/State Farm towel, and went about my way.  A fun, and definitely engaging experience.  I thought about State Farm for the first time in years, appreciated all the time and money they spent to do something nice for people, and enjoyed connecting with the people in line and the promotion coordinators.

When I went to retrieve my photo, the experience wasn’t quite as rewarding.  The questions they asked me were fine – good research for State Farm and it made me feel “involved” with State Farm (they asked for my opinion).

The one big flaw in the experience for me – the consumer – was that the picture I retrieved was of the woman just ahead of me in line (and she wasn’t striking an “at bat” pose).  And I’m not a woman.  Details.

But after an email to Eshots.com, the company that hosted the pictures, mentioning the pose (and that I’m writing a blog about it), they quickly found the right photo and sent it to me.

Altogether, it was a good experience, and it caused me (and probably hundreds more) to blog and tweet about it.  They didn’t ask for my experiences, or ask for my permission to post on their fan page, but they did get me involved.  They even asked me  if I’d like to speak with an agent and get an insurance quote. I don’t know what the cost of the program was, but I do think it’s a clever use of social media and social commerce.  One which I’m sure will get better with all the social feedback they’re probably getting right now.

Congratulations, State Farm.  And congratulations YANKEES!!

With online retailers gearing up for the holidays, there is no shortage of tips and tactics out there to tap into social to supercharge sales.  We decided to poke around the social web and take a look at how a couple of big name retailers (who also happen to be our clients) are doing interesting things to power social forward this holiday season.

Electronics retailer RadioShack® uses one of several hero banners on their homepage to promote a particular product that will help shoppers connect via social networks:

Notice the prominent use of the Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace icons, as well as the headline “The SHACK leaves no social network behind…” This caught our attention as a great way to use the momentum of social to stand out.  And while the retailer could have picked any product to spotlight, RadioShack® chose one that explicitly serves the function of connecting its users to the “social universe” of Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.  Extending the social circle across multiple touchpoints, RadioShack retail partner T-Mobile airs a TV commercial plugging this product as the “first phone with social skills.”  RadioShack® gets props for effective multi-channel marketing the social way.

We also took a look at how REI is taking social cues seriously this holiday season. Much like the famed Threadless  folks, REI gives crowdsourcing an edge by opening up a contest calling for artwork submissions  to be featured on an Arbor snowboard. The invitation comes complete with a catchy, user-centric tagline: “Ready to Ride Your Art?”  Winners also have a chance to win a $500 or $1000 gift card. Talk about viral potential – the participatory nature of this contest will likely fuel word of mouth and share of mind, engage shoppers and artists, and get them involved with the brand.  It’s also worth mentioning that this type of promotion is likely to drive repeat purchase.  We tip our beanies to REI for this smart use of social to build community around a seasonal theme and top-rated product. 

If you lean in a bit further and look a little more closely, you’ve known this thing called social media for years.  It’s ripped right out of those social studies textbooks that weighted many a sixth-graders’ backpacks, in their curricular insistence on opening young minds to the strands that define culture.  It’s really not any different from moms sharing recipes and dropping off pies at the neighbor’s house to welcome a newborn.  Sharing “space” and exchanging ideas, knowledge and information. This natural human behavior to reach out is the fabric that binds neighborhoods and communities, cities and countries.

What is different about social media, however, is that the “media” part of it has made all of these social activities scalable. Social media can happen at home and within your community, but you can engage in it whenever and among whomever you want, across continents and time zones.

And when you bring business into the equation, the dynamic shifts.  Personal versus business goals shape the way each of us approaches this behemoth that binds.  Social media has opened up creative possibilities for social commerce: customers are active participants of the marketing and development of products, and businesses are actively cultivating relationships with their customers.

Businesses have come to find that peer-to-peer trust is the engine that drives social commerce—and this “engine” is fueled by community.  But how do businesses and consumers sift through the vastness of the information out there to get to what they really want? With the possibility of scalability comes a more critical question:  how can customer communities form around seemingly endless spaces?

Invoking Seth Godin’s mention of Dunbar’s Number might help here. Dunbar’s number references the number of 150 as the maximum capacity of one’s ability to sustain engaged relationships (people can’t have more than 150 friends and still maintain meaningful connections).  Where the idea of separating noise from truth in online conversations persists, social commerce solutions address the challenges that have surfaced as a result of the infinite ways to connect and the insistence of online participants on the web to gain true value from this vastness.  Social commerce solutions hone in on and make sense of what businesses should focus on based on the needs of their customer communities.

The scalability that social media affords is a phenomenal opportunity for businesses – but we have now entered the phase of social commerce in which we are learning that maximum growth potential can only be tapped into if businesses sharpen their focus on how to effectively harness scalability and find ways to create those meaningful connections, and, ultimately, build robust customer communities. That’s where our solutions come in. You could say we’re majoring in Social Studies. We’ll be the first to tell you that it’s not easy, but with each client success story we help build, we’re learning more to provide you with better solutions that help you stay ahead of the curve.

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!

The Wall Street Journal featured a story yesterday that credited PowerReviews with helping ecommerce businesses boost customer review volume and build trust among online shoppers. The results: shoppers feel more comfortable buying online, while merchants are better able to identify problems with their products or services.

The article highlighted the success stories of PowerReviews clients drugstore.com and Diapers.com.

Drugstore.com’s 300% lift in review volume after implementing our software and launching a follow-up email campaign (a PowerReviews best practice) not only helped to lend credibility to their products, but garnered a legion of verified buyers, adding even more authenticity to the reviews. Layering on the lasting benefits of the follow-up email, drugstore.com CMO David Lonczak said that this practice helps customers receiving these requests in their inbox “feel important” and “increased our brand’s connection [to drugstore.com customers].”

Our AnswerBox solution also received an honorable mention–with a focus on its capability to help merchants “reap the benefits of input from consumers before a sale is made, by posting questions from people thinking about buying a product and the answers, including comments from other consumers.”

Bazaarvoice’s capability to link customer reviews to users’ Facebook profiles was also mentioned, reinforcing the viral nature of peer-level feedback online.  (Read about our own Facebook publishing feature – Social Megaphone.)

When consulting online reviews, a shopper’s level of comfort largely depends on feeling that sense of connection to the person making a review. Director of E-commerce Solutions at Diapers.com Josh Himwich remarks, “the most important recommender is going to be people who are in a very similar situation to yourself.” However, not all reviews solutions provide this crucial information.

The article pointed to Diapers.com’s use of our Affinity Reviews™ as a feature that sets PowerReviews apart from others in the industry. This PowerTags™ technology, unique to PowerReviews, captures structured customer feedback to help shoppers “distinguish one reviewer from another” (’first-time parent’ or ‘grandparent’), and is critical to helping to guide their purchases online.

The common denominator here: social commerce solutions that drive measurable results for businesses – through more sales and deeper customer relationships.

If you’ve been following our tweets and the latest social buzz, then you already know about the 2009 Community and Social Media Research Study that we conducted with the e-tailing group. The study revealed that companies rank customer engagement as the number one goal in using community and social media tools. Taking this a step further, the Altimeter Group’s landmark study of the world’s top 100 brands (among them: Starbucks, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Mercedes-Benz) uncovered a direct correlation in companies’ deep engagement in social media and top financial performance. Companies who earned the designation of “social maven” were remarkably proficient in their efforts to engage with their customers using social media tools. On average, social mavens experienced 18% revenue growth over the last 12 months alone. Conversely, their socially uninvolved counterparts experienced a 6% decline in revenue over the same period. In short, “Money talks and it’s declaring that it pays to engage meaningfully in social media.”(Source: Altimeter Group).

What does this mean for your business? Engagement is not only a key metric for companies today; it is absolutely vital for business growth and fundamental to understanding your customers.  Read on to find out how one retailer transformed a challenge into an opportunity to increase customer engagement.

Abe’s of Maine Uses AnswerBox to Increase Customer Engagement and Gain A New Traffic Channel

If your customers have product-related questions and can’t find the right answers on your site, it makes sense that they’d surf elsewhere until they find what they need. How do you prevent these potential customers from leaving your site? How do you find ways to truly engage visitors, increase conversion and build word-of-mouth?

Well-known camera and digital electronics retailer Abe’s of Maine was faced with this challenge. Visitors to their site had tons of questions, and this meant countless resources were spent addressing the same types of inquiries for multiple customers on the same products.  Worse, customers who didn’t find answers to their questions right on the product page were lost to other sites or online forums. Abe’s of Maine wanted to find a more efficient way to keep their customers better informed, keep customers on their site, and increase conversions.  Net-net, they wanted to find an effective way to better engage their customers.

Abe’s of Maine turned to AnswerBox, our solution that allows shoppers to ask product-specific questions and receive answers from customers and designated staff experts. Customers who ask a question are given the option to leave their e-mail address to be notified when their question receives an answer. The retailer was able to quickly and seamlessly plug the solution into their web site in a matter of days. Unlike the traditional one-to-one support channels (such as e-mail and phone) that Abe’s of Maine had previously relied on, AnswerBox captures conversations, answers, and insights by displaying them directly on the product detail page for all current and future customers to see.                                                                      

The Results

Within seven months, the implementation of AnswerBox demonstrated significant gains in customer involvement on the retailer’s website. During this timeframe, more than 5,200 questions were posted to the site, with 97 percent receiving an answer. Of the people who requested email notification, more than seven percent returned to Abe’s of Maine to make a purchase via the email link. Further, the return rate for these purchases was 40 percent lower than Abe’s average.  Through all of this, AnswerBox provides Abe’s of Maine with a new traffic channel with a customer acquisition cost of less than $24, a strong number in comparison to their $30-$40 CPAs from many other channels, including comparison shopping engines. 

While these business metrics are noteworthy, particularly amidst a challenged economy, Abe’s of Maine was equally excited about the opportunity this solution provided to build its brand long-term.  AnswerBox helped the retailer increase engagement by:

• Keeping visitors on their site and  eliminating the need for shoppers to seek answers elsewhere
• Initiating dialogue with the 73 percent of customers who provided email addresses when making inquiries via AnswerBox
• Building trust and credibility in the highly competitive world of online digital electronics  by offering user perspectives and real-world scenarios
• Using customer feedback to improve site usability

Listening and responding to its customers’ questions and concerns is continually helping Abe’s of Maine discover more about what their customers want, allowing the company to become better informed and more relevant. The retailer’s success story clearly demonstrates that going social means more than diving in and waiting to see what happens. If money talks through social, then it is earned by allowing your customer community a voice to help tell the story of your brand. It is now critical for companies to engage in the conversation, and Abe’s of Maine did just that, by addressing specific questions and providing answers, thereby building on interactions and deepening relationships with their customer community.

To learn more about how Abe’s of Maine achieved customer engagement success, download the full case study here.

Insights from our 2009 Community and Social Media Study

According to a well re-tweeted presentation by Social Evangelist Marta Z. Kagan, most of you reading this have some sort of involvement in social media. Kagan points us to the fact that three-fourths of Americans use social technology (Forrester, The Growth of Social Technology Adoption, 2008). And, among the legions of users of social media technologies, 93% believe companies should have a presence in social media (Cone, Inc. Business in Social Media Study, September 2008). So what social media platforms are your customers using?  And how are you going to leverage the involvement and insights of your customer communities in order to stay relevant to your customers and drive real business value?

PowerReviews commissioned a social media study with the e-tailing group to answer these vital questions and find out how far social media adoption has come. And, of equal importance, to uncover the problems businesses are trying to solve with the use of social media tools. The study surveyed 117 companies, including multi-channel retailers (44%), brands/manufacturers (26%), pure-play retailers (12%), catalogers (9%), and suppliers/agencies (9%).

Adoption of Social Media Tools. The How and the Why.

How are merchants and brands engaging in social media? According to the survey, social media tools are already part of the customer experience and marketing mix for most merchants, where 5 out of 10 tools have a  50%+ usage penetration, with top contenders being Facebook Fan Page (86%), Twitter Publishing (65%), Customer Reviews (55%), Blogs (55%), and Viral Videos (50%).

When asked what tools brands and merchants plan to use within the next twelve months, the responses were significant: the highest growth in social media adoption by Merchants & Brands is expected in Facebook Connect (31%), Social Listening tools (31%) and Customer Reviews (26%).

After uncovering what social media platforms are most commonly employed, this still begs the question: what are brands’ and merchants’ primary goals in using social media?

The study reveals that apart from the objective of increasing sales, brands’ and merchants’ responses point to the following social media trinity at the top of the list: greater customer engagement, mobilizing advocates to drive “word of mouth”, and increasing brand loyalty, in priority order.

The study’s findings reveal that Kagan could be onto something. As are the hundreds of thousands of others who have felt, witnessed, or realized that ‘social media’ is fundamentally changing the way we communicate and sell, especially in ecommerce.  But what problems are merchants and brands trying to address?

What’s The Problem Anyway? Brand and Merchant Pain Points Concerning Social Media.

As stated above, we set out not only to identify the patterns of adoption with social media tools today, but also to find out what problems brands and merchants are trying to solve by using them.  The top three are:

1)      Business risk: “People can trash my products in front of a large audience” (49%)

2)      Career risk: “I am using outdated marketing/merchandising techniques” (34%)

3)      Competitive risk: “Customers might leave my site to find a more socially-engaging site” (26%)

As “pain points” go, these are very significant.  In my experience, the rate of adoption is directly related to the severity of the problem people face.  With the widespread use of social media tools by consumers, marketers and merchandisers are faced with a very different set of rules to succeed.  As a result, this study shows that they are faced with business and competitive risks, as well as career risks, given the degree of change that is occurring.  We interpret these as the primary drivers of such a dramatic movement to assess and actively embrace social media tools they believe will “engage” their shoppers and significantly grow their sales.

Consensus: Reviews Are The #1 Social Media Tool for Driving Both Engagement and Sales

When asked about social media tools that drive the most sales and customer engagement, customer reviews came out on top by a wide margin for both, as 78 percent of those polled list customer reviews as the #1 social media tool for generating sales, and 61 percent list customer reviews #1 in driving customer engagement. Plus, in addition to the 55% of respondents who have already deployed customer reviews, another 26% plan to deploy reviews in the next 12 months, and 13% plan to do so the year after that. This means that 94% of all brands and merchants will have reviews on their sites within 2 years.

Impact on Customer Engagement

Impact on Sales

The Implications: What’s Next

What does all this mean? Of the study’s findings, Lauren Freedman, President of the e-tailing group, remarks, “The integration of community and social networking within e-commerce has reached critical mass and as such is now a benchmark that we will be tracking annually. Customer engagement has become a metric to be reckoned with, where failing to engage consumers via community and social media will have brand and bottom-line implications. All merchants must test and understand how to effectively deploy it for their brands to retain customers, encourage sales, and avoid abandonment to competitors who’ve better embraced its marketing potential.”

Freedman’s comment underlines the core concept that customer engagement will play a critical role in marketing strategy for brands and merchants moving forward. Forrester has proposed that customer engagement be added to the traditional marketing funnel model – on par with the “sale”.  So not only is engagement a key strategy, but a key objective along with sales, as measured by influencers/advocates that will drive another wave of sales through word-of-mouth they generate.  We are a firm believer in this updated view of the marketing model and marketing philosophy, as you will see with two products we just announced at Shop.org – BrandConnect (social listening and analytics) and Social Megaphone (Facebook Connect and Twitter “amplifiers”).  As it happens, these two areas came out to be the top two types of social media tools that brands and merchants plan to deploy within the next 12 months. It’s important to note that we didn’t have the results of the e-tailing group study when we committed to these projects, but in speaking with our customers within the last six months, it became very apparent that these social media tools would be at or close to the top. And because we make it our business to identify your needs and create solutions to address them – it sure feels good getting it right.

To download the PDF of the “Topline Findings” for the 2009 Community and Social Media Study, please click here. (We ask that you leave your contact information before you download; thank you.)