Entries Tagged as 'Research'

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

PowerReviews 2.0 : New Reality, New Brand

By Darby, Williams, VP of Marketing
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 [...]

Friday, November 13th, 2009

Microsoft® Engages Customers Start-to-Finish in Windows 7 Development

by Darby Williams, VP Marketing
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 [...]

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

Keeping the Faith In Customer Reviews

by Yvonne Gando, Social Commerce Analyst
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, [...]

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

“Money Talks” with Social Media: Measuring Customer Engagement Success

by Yvonne Gando, Social Commerce Analyst
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 [...]

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

Why Does Social Media Matter? And What are Companies Doing About it?

by Darby Williams, VP Marketing
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 [...]

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009

Mining the Gold: 5 ways to really leverage customer reviews

As head of Client Services at PowerReviews working with many of our 300+ clients, I’ve seen a significant shift in how customer reviews are being employed by retailers and Brands in the past 18 months.  In the early days, my work centered around educating clients on the importance of customer reviews in closing sales on [...]

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

Making Sense of Reviews. Are there too many of them?

I wanted to share an article I read this morning from eConsultancy reporter Graham Charlton, who was recently shopping for a travel cot online.   In his research, he encountered long lists of cots to sort through, as well as pages and pages of customer reviews to read for each cot.  Having written on the topic [...]

Friday, February 20th, 2009

Negative Reviews – From a Retailer’s Perspective

The number of articles and blog postings has been mounting in response to Belkin’s “fraudulent reviews” posting and, most recently, Yelp.com’s “business of extortion” coverage (Yelp denies any wrongdoing and have issued an official reply). These cases, regardless of their merit, are of concern to us at PowerReviews, since they question the value that legitimate [...]

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009

The Belkin Blunder…How Widespread a Problem is the Fake Review?

Because product reviews have been proven to increase conversion rates and drive sales (e.g. Netshops Case Study), it was only a matter of time before a major corporation got caught trying to game the system to their benefit. I first found out about the “Belkin situation” (advertising and paying for 5-star reviews), when an analyst [...]

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

“Super Charge Me” – Cut out the extra fat in SaaS solution fees

“1.2 billion impressions served!!!”
Assuming it is accurate, this is a huge number and all I can think about are the costs associated with serving those impressions and the risks to retailers of having an outside vendor hosting this content.
Our competitor recently issued a press release saying that they served up mountains of review content for [...]