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!!

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!

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.)

What does this mean to a Shopify client?  We took an easy implementation and made it downright simple.  The usual integration process has three steps.  The first step is to upload a product feed.  With Shopify, we pull it directly from the Shopify platform with a click of a button.  The second step is to select the appropriate “write-a-review” forms for the product categories (that’s important because we have product-specific review forms with tags for the “pros”, “cons”, “best uses” and “reviewer profiles” that relate to each category).  Since this is very straightforward, we didn’t need to simply it.  The final step is to put our JavaScript code on their pages in order to display the review content.  With input from their CEO, Tobi Lütke, it was decided that their technically-savvy merchants would have the option to select exactly where to display their customer reviews.

Last, but definitely not least, we are about to launch a fully automated “Follow-Up Email” program with Shopify — automatically sending their clients’ customers an email 3-4 weeks after their purchase asking them to review the product.  Why is this a big deal?  As many of you know, a review solution on its own doesn’t guarantee success.  All of our ROI studies indicate that review volume is the primary driver of sales uplift, and follow-up email drives 95% of that review volume.  (one such ROI study is with Netshops)

So, welcome Shopify merchants to the PowerReviews family!  We are excited to partner with Jaded Pixel to offer you our award-winning review solution for Small and Medium-Sized Retailers fully integrated into your eCommerce Platform.

A joint client of ours – PetWellBeing.com – had an in-house testimonials engine on their site and decided to enhance their system by implementing the PowerReviews customer reviews solution in an attempt to overcome two challenges:

1. Adding new testimonials was a lot of work, and therefore didn’t get done frequently enough
2. Some customers probably doubted how representative or authentic the testimonials were, as they were clearly hand selected by internal staff

Here’s an example of a past product testimonial:

Conversion Rate Increase:

After just a few months of launching reviews on PetWellBeing.com, “The results exceeded even our wildest expectations, ” writes Michael S. from VKI Studios. PetWellBeing.com has collected dozens of (overwhelmingly positive) reviews for many of their products in that time, but what’s even more notable is that fact that, “conversion rates of all products have increased…even those products that have received some negative reviews,” adds Michael.

Handling Negative Reviews:

VKI Studios offered a final tip in their posting: “Embrace the occasional negative review. Consider it a wonderful opportunity to improve your credibility and gain customer trust.”

PetWellBeing.com received a negative review from a “Verified Reviewer” (one who has entered his/her email address but is not verified to have actually made a purchase) saying that the product didn’t work well for him/her and doubting that any of the “testimonials” on the site were real.

Despite initial fears that such a review might be from a competitor trying to tarnish the company’s reputation, that it might plant seeds of distrust in the minds of other shoppers, or that it could decrease sales for that product, PetWellBeing.com expertly decided to allow the review to stay up on their site. By allowing the review to stay, they effectively discounted the accusations in the review and showed the reviewer (and all others) that these are in fact real reviews, written by real people and that they are not unfairly filtered to only display positive comments. With this simple act of transparency, the company has shown its customers that they encourage honest feedback, regardless of the star rating, and they have reaped the benefits as a result.

As we’ve discussed on numerous past occasions, negative reviews tend to elevate both credibility and resulting sales for entire product offerings, and PetWellBeing.com is a perfect example.

Our hat goes off to VKI Studios and PetWellBeing.com for overcoming those “surfacy” fears that many companies face when implementing and maintaining customer reviews. And a much deserved “congratulations” for increasing conversion rates through fair and honest business practices.

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

Because Buzzillions.com acts as a consumer facing testing-ground for innovative new services and features, we are in a unique position to observe how shoppers use and interact with reviews. And as we gather those critical insights, our clients benefit both from the high quality traffic we send from Buzzillions and from the enhancements that we develop for our clients.

Measurable Results

With online shoppers becoming savvier and demanding more thorough and objective product information, many have turned to Buzzillions for honest reviews and answers to their most pressing product-related questions. Despite the tough economic climate this year, we have seen an increase of more than 300% in site visits over last year, and the affiliate traffic we send converts at a site-wide-average of over 3% (significantly higher than the retailer’s normal conversion rate) – with some retailers consistently receiving traffic that converts upwards of 18%.

But the real reason consumers are visiting Buzzillions and clicking through to our affiliate partners is because of the large number of high quality reviews – in 2008 we grew site content from 1 Million to more than 4 Million reviews.

Seeing how Buzzillions sends highly qualified traffic to more than 350 retail publishers, several retailers outside of the PowerReviews solution network (those with in-house reviews solutions as well as BazaarVoice clients) have approached us with the goal of featuring their products and reviews on Buzzillions too. We are now proudly featuring review feeds from several marquee clients including Walmart, Sears, Best Buy, Home Depot and Macy’s.

Media Coverage

In addition to increased attention from leading online retailers searching for a proven affiliate partner, major media publications are noticing Buzzillions too. Walt Mossberg and his associate Katherine Boehret of the Wall Street Journal gave Buzzillions a very positive and surprisingly long (1/2 page) review: WSJ Article. And ABC News reported that “Buzzillions” was a top rising search term in Google: ABC News Video. To see a more comprehensive list of media coverage, please visit the media center page on PowerReviews.com.

Behind the Numbers

While these metrics, client signings and media attention are indeed interesting (and encouraging given the economic climate), essential are the driving forces behind these accomplishments. Allow me to give you a behind-the-numbers look at Buzzillions (according to actual users).

In our recent Buzzillions site re-design, we introduced new tools and functionality designed to engage shoppers and empower them to buy confidently at our affiliate partners’ stores. To hear whether our efforts were successful, we reached out to several lifestyle blogs and invited their readers to visit Buzzillions and share their honest opinions in the public sphere for a chance to win some holiday cash.

Needless to say, people were anxious to share their opinions about Buzzillions and we were anxious to hear them. Here are a few interesting comments from those blogs, but I encourage you to visit the blogs and view all of the comments:

“…They even categorize reviewers, ie. if the review was done by a first time parent, a working parent, a parent of two or more children. Very cool. Terrific site that will save shoppers a lot of time.” Read all comments here.

“I like the review format which gives large picture of what’s good and what’s bad and groups them by like categories (Pros, Cons, Best Uses) so you don’t HAVE to read every single review of a product.” Read all comments here.

“It’s a great review website. I love how the pros and cons are very clearly listed…” Read all comments here.

Through our consumer-centric focus, we were able to learn, design and implement major new features on Buzzillions that both enhanced the shopping experience for shoppers and drove significant traffic and conversion growth for Buzzillions and its affiliates. And we’re really pleased to be getting the attention from bloggers and the press as well.

Thanks for a great year, Happy Holidays and please stay tuned for more great sucesses in 2009!

In an ongoing effort to build and maintain presence within their industry and compete with larger retailers, SMB retailers actively seek out the most cost-effective and impactful ways to help engage shoppers, build trust and grow their business. Faced with an inherent distrust factor due to a lack of brand awareness, smaller retailers started turning to customer reviews to prove to their shoppers that they carry quality products. I was hired to explore and develop the opportunity of providing a review solution to address the very issues  smaller retailers were most concerned about.

In the past 6-months, there had been a noticeable uptick in inbound calls to the company from $10-Million online retailers and they all complained about similar issues with existing review collection options. Forced to develop an in-house reviews engine, pay for an enterprise solution or settle for a very basic and un-managed open-source solution, these retailers yearned  for something better. So we gathered some folks who were intimately familiar and experienced with the needs and limitations of SMB retailers and developed PowerReviews Express.

After speaking with dozens of small retailers who had called us early on, we heard the message loud and clear – they wanted a review solution that was easy to implement, effective at minimizing operating expenses and increasing conversions and overall sales.

Quick and Easy:

Most businesses of this size don’t have in-house developers, and if they do, they are extremely busy. That’s why we created a simple 5-step Integration Wizard for them – we took our full enterprise functionality and simplified implementation to make it possible to launch in less than a day without sacrificing any of the proven benefits of PowerReviews’ tag-based review structure. Instead of setting 7 or 8 JavaScript variables on the page, retailers can now just cut and paste a block of JavaScript code from the Wizard that is already custom tailored for them. The best part is they only need to put the code on their product page once. And since most online retailers are very particular about how their product and category pages look, we enabled them to do all kinds of customization via the UI or a CSS Style Sheet – think Google Ad Sense but for reviews. What this means, then, is you can style your review elements to your heart’s content with a single developer who is comfortable with CSS.

Fully Featured:

So with a name like Express, you might be tempted to think it has been stripped of all the goodies the Enterprise version has – We Didn’t!  SMB retailers get all the goodies including Full Content Moderation, Review Snapshots, Verified Buyer Badges and Category Specific Review Forms. Unlike open-source solutions, Express includes a 3-tier moderation service that has trained human moderators screen each review to makes sure only high quality content makes its way to your site – not “website graffiti”.  Just look at Discgear.com’s standard PowerReviews Express implementation…can you tell the difference that they are an Express client?

Plug and Play Partnerships:

An even simpler “Click-Through Integration” process was the vision we had for this solution and we accomplished that in November with Infopia – the first PowerReviews Express platform partner. We created a custom implementation work flow for all Infopia clients that steps those retailers through the entire integration, beginning to end. The best part is that since Infopia has already put the code on the page and styled it, business owners can integrate Express themselves – NO DEVELOPER NEEDED. With a couple of clicks of their mouse, a client can be up and running with Express in a matter of minutes. And Infopia is just the start. Within a couple of months, “Click-Through Integration” will be available through lots of SMB platforms.

Out of the Gate Performance:

Considering reviews have become a standard for all e-commmerce websites, we want Express to be an easy choice for the SMB market. With an enterprise-class functionality that was preferred by shoppers 2-1 over Amazon style (free form) reviews in a keynote study, SMB retailers now have a review solution that has been proven to increase trust, conversion and the bottom line. It’s no wonder, then, that PowerReviews Express has become the fastest implemented solution with more than 300 retailers signed up already!

Stay tuned for more good things from PowerReviews Express!

Working with our friends at MyBuys, one of the leading providers of product recommendations for online merchants, we combined our technologies for our shared client Essential Apparel to achieve very impressive results!

By integrating PowerReviews customer ratings and reviews with MyBuys product recommendations, Essential Apparel, which offers more than 20,000 SKUs to their wide customer base, achieved more than 9% conversion in their targeted email alerts.

You can read the entire announcement here.

Congratulations to Essential Apparel for their progressive and forward thinking approach to making highly relevant product recommendations to their customers!

And while Raul Vasquez from Walmart.com (www.walmart.com) may have hobbled up to the stage on crutches on Day 1 (poor guy tore a tendon) and secured audience empathy, Fiona opened her keynote on a brighter note. She shared with us all that she was a safari child. Yup, the former CMO of Circuit City and CEO of Circuit City Direct and now EVP Partner Strategy and Marketing, GSI Commerce (www.gsicommerce.com) grew up on the plains of the Africa. That’s a hard one to top indeed, and we were all captivated from that moment on.

Her family runs a safari “company” which has just been voted “World’s Best” Tour Operator and Safari Outfitter by Travel & Leisure Magazine for an unprecedented sixth time in a row! I have already ordered my brochure from them, Micato Safaris, (www.micato.com) as the website teaser was enough for me – I am safari bound soon!

But I digress…

Given her background, it was no wonder that Fiona opened her keynote “Online Merchants: Agents of Change Today, Leader of Tomorrow” by citing an old African proverb involving antelopes and lions. Skipping the eloquent and colorful aspects of the tale, (sorry Fiona) let me just get to the point – we all better be waking up every morning trying to outrun the competition or we may find ourselves someone’s meal ticket!

She wove this message – of course in a more eloquent format – throughout the entire presentation which highlighted several retail sites doing exemplary work in moving the online shopping experience needle forward. Showcased sites included Sears (www.sears.com), Toys R Us (www.toysrus.com), Ace Hardware (www.acehardware.com), and REI (www.rei.com) – that last three of which put huge smiles on my face when I saw them as they are PowerReviews (www.powerreviews.com) clients.

In addition to inspiring merchant examples, Fiona showcased two technology breakthroughs in her “Leaders of Tomorrow” segment, one of which was our new Mobile App. This functionality allows customers to read product reviews right on their iphone while shopping in physical stores…and that is all I am going to say about that at this time, as Fiona did some hard arm twisting for us to allow her to share what she did. Come on, who can say “no” to her?!?

In closing, here is proof that the Shop.org event is guaranteed to at least put a smile on your face. Thanks yo my photo-mate Portia La Touche of Certona (www.certona.com) one of my dearest e-commerce friends and special thank to another dear friend Bryan Eisenberg www.futurenowinc.com for his photographic talents!