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.

In the infinite space of the blogosphere (as of August 2009, there are over 200,000,000 blogs in existence, with 34% containing opinions about products or brands), who’s playing dirty and who can you trust?

With the announcement of the FTC regulations earlier this month, and the thought-provoking debate that has ensued, articles are surfacing, pointing to the inherent corruption that has been breeding within the blogosphere. CBS News writers Jean-Louis Gassée and Frederic Filloux write: “readers will be good at sorting out the good from the bad. Some blogs – or review systems – will fall into the fishy (or corrupt) category while others will emerge as trusted brands.”

We agree: consumers are smart. And powerful. If they want the truth, not only will they be able to “handle it”, but they will seek it out.

So the question remains, especially when it comes to product reviews, who can you trust?

If you know about our Verified Buyers, Affinity Reviews™, Staff Expert Badges, and our one-review-per-person, per-product rule, then you know that authenticity and credibility drive the technological design process of each of our social commerce solutions.

Our three-pronged approach ensures that your shoppers can trust customer reviews by PowerReviews – 100% of the time.

Verified Buyers
Credible verified buyer badges build trust among shoppers in your customer community. A Verified Buyer is an individual who has purchased the reviewed product through us and submitted their review through a specific process that tracks purchase history. This designation (above, and circled below) is intended to clearly identify those members of our community who are submitting reviews of products that they own.

See an example here:

Affinity Reviews™
Help shoppers easily find reviews from people with similar lifestyles and experience levels. Why is this important? According to the the Edelman Trust Barometer , consumers are likely to trust persons like themselves when it comes to making purchase decisions. Given the highly segmented interests and lifestyles of consumers in most product categories, our Affinity Reviews™ provides a more personalized approach designed to match shoppers with the best product for their needs.

Finally,  you might recall our post earlier this year on our one-review-per-person, per-product rule. We have a team dedicated to identifying, culling, and removing any suspicious reviews, which can include  duplicate reviews or an unusually high volume of reviews submitted by a singular user on the same product. Vigilantly tracking this unusual behavior helps raise red flags that might warrant deeper investigation.

These are just some of the ways PowerReviews helps you empower your customer community with real, credible information that they (and you) can trust.

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.

In the last year, my work has focused primarily around leveraging reviews and other user generated content before and after the validation stage of shopping – to attract new shoppers to their site, help shoppers sort through and find the right product for them and get more engaged with the Brand after they leave.  I wanted to share with you some of the key lessons I’ve learned in this process that will help you get the greatest sales uplift value from customer reviews.

1.  Maximize the number of credible reviews on your site

It’s no secret that the most important step to getting full leverage out of reviews is sending an automated email to invite customers back to write a review after a purchase – commonly called a post-transaction follow-up email.  This is the proven method to generate the most reviews on your site from a very credible source – your known customers!  In fact, one client recently increased reviews by 26 times by implementing the follow-up email.  Our system marks these reviews with a “Verified Buyer” badge, which creates trust among your customers.

We recommend that you send the follow-up email to all past purchasers from the previous 6 months prior to launching reviews on your product pages.  Within the first month, you should have 20% of your total SKUs have at least 1 review, with 100% review coverage for your top sellers. Further, as the Netshops Case Study shows, it’s the number of reviews per product that drives sales uplift, with 4-7 reviews per product being enough for 75% of shoppers to “have sufficient confidence to judge the product” (etailing group study of 1200 typical internet shoppers).

Did you know the follow-up email also ensures a more balanced and improved overall product rating?  Because the email captures reviews from a wider cross-section of customers, our customers have experienced a 15% increase in the average product rating across their site once they implemented the follow-up email!  If you need help, let us know.  We’ve created a tool to help you send the follow-up email.

2.  Make a great first impression

It’s one thing to collect customer reviews, but if you don’t display the reviews in a user friendly way, with an informative and easy-to-absorb review summary, you’re not getting the greatest sales impact from these reviews.  That’s why we created the next generation of our review summary, called Review Snapshot 2.0.  Initial tests showed an 18.3% reduction in product page bounce rate and a 16.7% increase in product page conversion.  Check out the Review Snapshot at Jelly Belly.

3.  Maximize SEO Benefit

Since the inception of our review solution, we’ve provided customers the ability to increase natural search traffic from customer review content via our SEO Mini-Site.  This solution leverages a set of SEO-optimized review landing pages, which drive traffic through the landing page to the product page.  Late last year, we launched our next generation SEO tool called – In-Line SEO(tm), which enables customer review content to be indexed directly on the product page itself.  Early customer review adopters, such as eBags, Newegg and Zappos, created home-grown review solutions to achieve the SEO benefit of reviews directly on the product page.  Now everyone else can benefit from this approach without having to manage the review display themselves (so you can easily adopt all the review enhancements in the future).  Check out Robert Chea’s blog post last week for more details.

4.  Take review content everywhere it can drive more sales

After you’ve spent the effort collecting credible, high quality reviews, make sure you leverage those reviews throughout your site and in your email marketing efforts.  In our case, the review content is “tag-based”, which means you can take it entirely new places in social merchandising and social marketing.

• On category pages and anywhere you list products, include the star ratings snippet.  Thirty days after adding ratings on the category page, Diapers.com experienced a 15% increase in product page views and a 14% increase in conversion.

• Highlight Top-Rated products on your site.  Check out REI’s Top-Rated products section on REI.com.  Utilizing our tags, you can also take it one step further by creating more personalized Top-Rated pages.  See Top-Rated women’s comfortable shoes for travel on OnlineShoes.com.

• Embrace Social Navigation to its fullest by adding ratings and review tags to your site navigation so people can narrow by “use” or “pro” or “lifestyle” (about me).  Check out Social Navigation implementations at sites such as OnlineShoes.com and Dick’s Sporting Goods.  For a very different Social Navigation interface, using tag clouds, check out Kiddicare.com.

• Add ratings and review tags to your email marketing campaigns.  By adding ratings to their email, Mountain Gear increased click-through by 8%, conversion by 17% and Average Order Value by 85%.  Impressive results!

5.  Take your online reviews offline

With the retail market still dominated by offline sales, it makes good business sense to bring ratings and reviews to your offline customers.  PowerReviews allows you to provide customer reviews in store with mobile applications that fully leverage the powerful Review Snapshot feature – high impact in a small form factor.  We also can suggest ways to maximize the display of customer reviews in store by leveraging both the ratings and the tags in store signage.

I encourage you to fully harness the amazing content your customers are creating for you every day.  These are just some of the ways you can do that, with clear wins for you and your customers.  As always, if you have any questions about the information shared, please contact your Account Manager.

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.

In his shopping research, Graham found his way to Kiddicare (as you might expect, a client of PowerReviews), and discovered two other innovations that were helpful in making sense of reviews for him – filtered navigation using review keywords (we call “Social Navigation”) and summaries of reviews (we call “Review Snapshots®”), both uniquely enabled by our “tag-based” approach to reviews.

I’ll let Graham describe his experience shopping on Kiddicare.com in his article, How to organise e-commerce product reviews.

I’m not surprised at all that people are trying to “game the system” and influence product ratings and reviews, and particularly friends of people who work for a manufacturer. It’s something we’ve been worrying about since the company was started, and something we regularly try to find ways to minimize (it can’t be eliminated completely). The “Verified Buyer” feature from PowerReviews is one way, together with the proactive “survey engine” we set up with tens and hundreds of thousands of surveys being sent out every day by retailers to people they know have purchased the product they are reviewing. The biggest benefit this provides is to “drown out” the few reviews that aren’t real, i.e. gamed.

The other mechanism to minimize the effect of fake positive reviews is the voracity of the community itself, and of the individual reviewer. We believe that most people who read reviews are fairly sophisticated, and can sniff out fake reviews (few specifics, no concerns voiced at all, limited comments…). Plus, most review systems have the question “How helpful was this review?” at the bottom of every review, so the readers/shoppers can vote their suspicions. That way, other shoppers can then sort reviews by “most helpful”. In addition, we believe that having “most helpful” as the default sort order is the best way to empower the shopper to make a confident decision, which is how we do it on our product research portal, buzzillions.com.

The part that did surprise me was the outward and open advertisement for positive reviews. if, in fact, it was the Belkin business development person, then it’s one of the less smart moves I’ve heard of in a while. Especially, given the huge and hungry community of “citizen reporters”, together with Goggle alerts, that get the word out so quickly. But I could see people who have a lapse in judgment actually do something like this…once.

My initial instinct was that this was actually a move by a competitor (or personal enemy) who put up an ad like this with that person’s name on it, know it would be found out and distributed widely (like it has been). But if that was the case, Belkin would have immediately disclaimed it.

Bottom line…I think that gaming will become more of a problem, and, unless we continue to advance our abilities to minimize it, it will become worse. Of course, that’s where we come in.

Internet Retailing fake reviews mention: “Keeping the trust in user reviews”

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!

In our industry, the past three years have brought an explosion of technology for product reviews, enabling more active communication between consumers and retailers. Our technology continues to evolve as we find and develop new and engaging ways to encourage people to voice their experiences, concerns and opinions through our patent-pending Evolving Tags, AnswerBox and customer added videos and images. Consumers are communicating with their retailers with real time feedback like never before – and the retailers are listening.

The public seems to have voted loud and clear that they would like to be heard by their politicians more often than just on Election Day. It will be very interesting to see how our newly elected politicians continue to engage the millions of invigorated voters past November 4th and we at PowerReviews encourage retailers to continue to leverage the many tools we make available to reach out and listen to their customers as well.