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!

How It Works
Facebook Connect is integrated directly into the write-a-review process so it’s super easy for users to publish their reviews to Facebook.   In the past, users could post content to Facebook, but only if it was already on your site.  This meant that users had to keep checking back to see when their review was posted on the site.  How many people do you think remembered to do that?  Once it was live, they could then post the product page to Facebook.  Even then, their review may have been one of many on the page.  This posed too many barriers to the user to be an effective marketing tool for you.

With Facebook Connect, users can now post their review to Facebook immediately after they write it, while their excitement about a product is fresh in their mind (and before they forget to do it).

Facebook Connect highlights their specific review content in the post and allows them to add their own comments.

The key is that PowerReviews posts only a “snippet” of the review on Facebook, requiring their friends to click on a link to read the rest of the review – which takes them to your site — and that’s what drives the immediate traffic uplift.

When their friends arrive on your site, the review is highlighted, making it a fulfilling experience once they arrive.

Why Use It
Facebook is the largest social network in the world.  In April 2009, Facebook reported an estimated 200 million monthly active users.  This is a powerful network that you can use to spread the word about your products and your site, driving significant short term and longer term traffic to your site.

During Citysearch’s initial beta testing of Facebook Connect they found:

“In the four months the site has been testing Facebook Connect, 94 percent of reviewers have published their reviews to Facebook, where an average of 40 people see them and 70 percent click back to Citysearch. That has translated into new members: daily registrations on Citysearch have tripled.” New York Times

That’s an average of 40 people seeing a post about your site and 28 people coming to your site for each review posted to Facebook.  Not bad.

If you are interested in using Facebook Connect with Reviews on your site, contact us at info@powerreviews.com.  If you happen to be at the Internet Retailer Conference East in Boston, June 16 and 17, stop by Booth #1036.

On a smaller scale, PowerReviews has undergone its own significant changes this past year.

1. We now have more than 350 Enterprise clients (up from 150)
2. We launched PowerReviews Express to help small and mid-sized retailers take advantage of our solutions
3. We launched some some exciting new products including AnswerBox, an iPhone App to aid in-store shopping, Social Cross-Sell and Hero Images
4. We expanded internationally to the UK, France, Germany in multiple languages with La Redoute, KiddiCare, iRobot, Shop Direct and many more leading retailers
5. Buzzillions broke past 4 million reviews and established itself as a leader in using reviews to help customers make smarter shopping decisions. See the write-up on Buzzillions in the WSJ

Although there are many factors that contribute to this huge success, we truly believe that it was primarily resulted from building true partnerships with each individual client. This spans from working together to collect as many highly-relevant reviews as possible to drive conversions, to working together on experimental ideas through Buzzillions, to SEO optimization methods and Social Navigation deployments. Our original vision of creating a highly-aligned network of retailers, manufacturers and partners has solidly taken root this year.

Looking ahead into 2009, we see a lot of exciting new trends in the world of ratings and reviews (and other customer-generated content/community).

1. Reviews will be ubiquitous.  Most of the IR Top 500 retailers will have deployed reviews and that trend will continue to the smaller/niche retailers. Brands and luxury retailers will also start to adopt these technologies.
2. Because reviews will be everywhere, consumers will actively seek out those sources that are more CREDIBLE and RELEVANT…which means that consumers will become ultra-sensitized to reviews that look like “testimonials” or “marketing copy” vs. “unbiased reviews”. I also expect that more unethical marketers will try to sneak fake reviews into the system.
3. Reviews will morph into a 3-way dialog between other customers, the retailers and the manufacturer. Everything we build (Customer Reviews, AnswerBox, etc) encompass the idea of a “network” where content can be easily aggregated, analyzed, shared amongst all the partners.
4. Retailers & Manufacturers will start tapping the rich data to improve their businesses. Manufacturers will use customer feedback to improve their product development and product marketing processes. And Retailers will do the same to tune their product assortment and merchandising strategies.

What are your predictions?

On a closing note, as we contemplate all the opportunities (and challenges) ahead, I want to thank all of our fabulous clients who have worked so collaboratively to make PowerReviews successful, our network of partners who have evangelized our products and leveraged the reviews in creative ways, and the entire PowerReviews team whose talent and dedication have made this year successful.

Thank you again for another great year, and have a relaxing and well-deserved holiday!

-Andy

As of this week (October 15) our 2008 Total Sales YTD (year-to-date) have surpassed total sales for all of 2007. With three consecutive quarters of record growth, sales in Q3 ‘08 were the highest quarterly total this year and in our company’s history.

Besides growing sales we have been growing and diversifying where these sales come from. We formally established our U.K. presence this last quarter with a localized sales, account management and review moderation team. We have more than a dozen sites launched in the UK already, with more to come before the end of the year.

Along with our enterprise efforts, we soft-launched PowerReviews Express, our on-demand solution for today’s smaller online merchants. We have more than 180 additional clients participating in this beta program with more signing up every day!

But the good news doesn’t stop there. Our reviews and recommendations site, Buzzillions.com had equal success adding more than 1 million reviews on more than 100,000 new unique products in the just the past 3-months.

So a BIG KUDDOS to everyone at PowerReviews for this incredible achievement and a special shout-out to our sales and Buzzillions teams for managing this continued growth in business.

And helping us in this regard is our dear friends at Venda, the global leader in on-demand e-commerce solutions. In fact, I am thrilled and honored to announce that we are the exclusive customer review solution provider to their entire US and UK network of clients. This is a very big honor indeed. You can read all the details at:

http://www.earthtimes.org/​articles/show/​venda-enables-retailers-to-significantly-increase-revenues-through-alliance-with-powerreviews,427478.shtml

We actually had the chance to celebrate this partnership last week at the Internet Retailer show in Chicago where we held our first, of what will undoubtedly be many, co-marketing sponsored events.

Many thanks to our new friends at Venda and look out world, here we come!

This past week at PowerReviews we celebrated our 3rd Birthday – Yippee! And are we on a roll!

We have already signed 80 new clients in just the first five-months of this year, our reviews and recommendations site Buzzillions continues to inspire, impress and perform beyond early expectations and we crossed the 300 mark in terms of live clients.

Undoubtedly, as they say, the best is yet to come. We have some incredibly BIG announcements that will be made in the short months ahead as well as know we will be putting up some BIG numbers on board at this year’s end.

But enough of that, I’d like to take a moment and just say thanks to all that have helped us get to where we are today and to the many, many merchants that have been such a pleasure to team with as we continue to blaze our own vision in the customer review arena.

So in closing, I’d like to celebrate the incredible achievements our young organization has already achieved. We were the first enterprise review solution to develop/launch

• tag based review structure and format (which has been the inspiration for so many other deployments outside our network)
• social navigation (don’t let them fool you with all their claims – this was and is OUR idea folks)
• social cross sell up sell
• upload images and video with reviews
• master merchant
• merchant response
• add to blog functionality
• review snapshot
• 2nd level review moderation

The list goes on folks so I better just stop here. So let me close by saying Happy Birthday to PowerReviews – wishing us many more years of success as the Originator, Innovator and Leader in the Customer Review Solutions arena!

Not only have our 250+ network of clients contributed more than 1 million reviews to the site from their more than 2,000 websites (yup, that makes PowerReviews the most implemented review solution in the world!) but other merchants, including those with their own in-house solutions or use a third party solution by Bazaarvoice, eagerly send us their product feeds and joined our site as well. Why you might ask?

Because companies like Overstock, Petco, HSN, Moosejaw and Drugstore.com fully understand the power of reviews in the shopping process and intelligently want to leverage this content on Buzzillions, which has now become one of THE TOP converting portals in the shopping site arena.

Buzzillions as an affiliate

Buzzillions has earned top-affiliate status at Commission Junction, LinkShare, Share-a-Sale and Performix because of the consistently high converting traffic that we send to our merchants – we send those merchants buyers not browsers. And folks, get this – the traffic we send them is proving highly valuable as well and here’s why.

Buzzillions operates almost entirely on a CPA (revenue share) basis that:

• brings all our merchants unlimited FREE traffic
• shares only in the merchant’s success meaning we make money only when they do!
• is non-coupon based traffic
• delivers highly loyal buyers who are focused on product performance, not price

Many merchants have documented that shopping by “Top-Rated” produces higher AOV and higher converting orders compared with any other merchandising strategy. Buzzillions does the same thing on a network-wide basis… which makes us one of the most profitable and highest performing affiliate for many of our merchant partners.

The SEO ”duplicate content” rumors are total nonsense

I know there are those of you out there that already saying to yourselves “Jay, this sounds too good to be true! What about all this SEO nonsense we are hearing these days, that Buzzillions is the SEO Devil?” Well, I am glad you asked, because it is nonsense and here’s why.

By intention, the Buzzillions site is optimized for the keywords “review”, “reviews”, “top-rated” and the like. That is where we make our money and that is where our focus lies. And even with that said, we are the inventor and originator of the SEO mini-site, which we create for our clients, is hosted on their site, and contains ALL the review content that is entirely “crawlable” by the engines. Basically, we created a page for that directly competes with our revenue generating efforts! We do this because we believe that we are NOT competing for the same customer… the retailer is targeting the directed shopper who already knows what they’d like to buy, while Buzzillions targets the researcher who is just beginning their shopping investigation.

That being said, with more than 250,000 products on Buzzillions, there might be those rare instances when a search generates a result that is perhaps one or two listings higher than the client’s. That is neither our intent nor our goal.

At the end of the day, if there was truly a significant negative SEO impact as is being claimed by our competition, then our direct clients like Staples, REI, ToysRUs, Walgreen’s as well as Bazaarvoice’s top clients like Petco and Overstock (who voluntarily send us their feeds) – all who have full-time staff devoted entirely to SEO efforts – would certainly have shouted loudly by now and demanded that we change our functionality. They have not done so because there is no problem. In fact, we hear nothing but the opposite with clients sharing with us that we are bringing them some of their highest quality and converting traffic – both through their SEO mini-sites as well as through Buzzillions.

Finally, Bazaarvoice actually engages in exactly what they accuse us of doing via SyndicateVoice to Smarter.com and other Price Comparison Engines, which deliver CPC based traffic that may not deliver a positive ROI and ultimately drives low price shoppers that are loyal only to price and not to the merchant. At the same time, these comparison shopping engines are competing directly with the retailers for the SAME CUSTOMERS, using the SAME STRATEGIES (SEO, SEM), with the SAME CONTENT.

It’s funny to think that, while BazaarVoice criticizes Buzzillions with claims of duplicate-content, its SyndicateVoice “solution” does exactly that – it duplicates their client’s content across dozens of price comparison engines.

Of course, you are the retailers and are faced with decisions like this on a daily basis; specifically where to send your traffic and who are you going to trust.

I want to leave you with this. You know me, my years as an online retailer and my passion for the customer experience. I could never be involved with something that I thought was intentionally detrimental to the rest of my network of merchant friends. In my heart I know there is no SEO problem because if there was we certainly would have heard it by now, loudly in fact.

What you are hearing these days is simply competitive nonsense, meant to do just one thing: stir enough fear into you that will keep you from doing business with our company – no matter what the cost in terms of lost revenue and opportunities.

So, do you want to join the ranks of REI, Staples, ToysRUs, Radio Shack, Overstock, HSN, Petco and nearly 300 others, maybe even for a 60-day trial period? Or do you want to sit on the sidelines because of something someone whispered into your ear without any real supportable evidence.

The decision is yours – please remember that.

I am thrilled to share with you that PowerReviews is the most implemented customer review solution in the world! We are now partnered with more than 240 merchants across every major retail category and now power the review solution on more than 2,000 websites! Yes, you read that correctly.

From retailers small to large and in between and whether offering gifts, consumables, clothing or household goods – heck almost anything for that matter – we are there.

To see the real power of our review network all you have to do is go to Buzzillions and visit the “Labs” section of the site, scroll down and click on “Real Time Reviews” to see it larger than life.

Do this and you will see just a sampling of the reviews as they are being processed and then pin-pointed to the U.S. map and beyond (thanks Google Maps). I don’t want to say more on this as the actual visual experience is more impressive than anything I could put into writing – so make sure you see it for yourself.

And speaking of Buzzillions, we continue to be impressed not only with the performance of this customer review/product research site of ours, but with the enormous attention and interest that some of the most popular and well know merchants outside of our client network are giving us! Besides Petco and Overstock, other merchants sending us their product review feeds whether generated by their own proprietary in-house system or another service provider include HSN, Moosejaw and soon to be launched Zappos and Shoebuy.com. I am sure I am forgetting someone else, but to be honest, I am having a hard time keeping track these days.

And as always, I say never just take my word on it folks, see and experience it for yourselves!

And if you really want to take the pulse of London, or any metro area for that matter, just ride public transportation and you will see and hear all that is afoot especially in terms of media advertising. So what did I immediately see while looking around the Tube, well lots and lots of dot.com advertisements!

Besides the overabundance of broadband service, there was the familiar Match.com as well as these: lastminute.com that caters to last minute travelers in search of deals, there was confused.com, insureandgo.com, both about insurance needs.

Why I am blogging about dot.coms and Mind the Gap, you see, is that the gap in offline and online behavior in the U.K. has significantly lessened or “shrunk” since my last visit in March 2007. Last March, before joining PowerReviews, I had the distinct honor of serving on Mercado’s Customer Advisory Board. And it was at that time that they sponsored a brief speaking tour for me here in London to address a few crowds of their customers and prospects. It was then that I took a significant inventory of the online business in the U.K. as well as made some projections of my own in terms of how fast this metro would further embrace the online world of ecommerce and “catch-up” to the U.S. pace and adoption.

And from what I have seen since my arrival, this capital city is now on par with the best that the U.S. has to offer in terms of awareness, penetration and adoption of online shopping. Besides the mini-billboard type advertisements in the underground, every fun and trendy shop I have passed these past days has their URL firmly painted and planted on their storefront windows.

So while there will always be a gap between tube trains and their platforms, the gap in online shopping adoption between the U.K. and the U.S. has notably changed for the better. Now, I guess I better just Mind the Doors as this train is ready to depart.

It’s no surprise then, that putting things in order has become a daily regiment around the office. And with so much organizing going on I couldn’t help but capture some of that energy to put a few marketing things in order as well. I’m slightly embarrassed to admit, that topping that list was a much overdo revised client list which had not been updated in more months than I care to admit.

Why am I blogging about this you say? Well, this was no easy task considering everything else that was going on around here! Our sales, marketing and account management teams worked diligently these past weeks securing more than 100 new client logos, then organizing them for display across more than a dozen retail segments.

But instead of me telling you about all their hard work, why not just show you…

I am both happy and proud to present the new client section of our corporate website that showcases more than 120 featured clients across all key retail categories. (They told me I was crazy to want to list all 220+ clients!)

http://www.powerreviews.com/social-shopping/clients/

Again, hats off to the entire PowerReviews team with special thanks to Blake Brysha, Yury Polnar and Cathie O’Callghan for making this truly a showcase of all our hard work and successes.