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?

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.

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.)

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.

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.

A number of our clients and partners have been forwarding these stories to us with notes of disbelief – they are surprised there is still a fear of negative reviews out there despite the numerous reports and findings that stress the importance and value of “negative reviews” (e.g. Forrester’s “Myths and Truths about Customer Reviews” report, Dec. 2008). I set out on a cross-country tour, speaking with several of our clients and hearing their questions and insights about recent events and the state of customer reviews in general. I’d like to share some of those conversations (as well as some internal analysis) with you:

Having collected nearly 5 million customer reviews from more than 350 retailers, we have a pretty clear picture of the distribution of product ratings. We have found that 92% of all reviews are positive (with star ratings of 3 or higher). That leaves only 8% of reviews that are negative (ranking of 2 stars or lower). And since these 8% negative reviews are dispersed among many thousands of products, the negative impact to particular products is quite low. But there are, undoubtedly, products that have consistently negative reviews, and to be able to identify those “less than stellar” products early and confidently enables retailers (and even brands) to enhance their product offering by addressing these concerns in the product (or in the case of the retailer, pulling them from their shelves) so future shoppers don’t have a negative experience as well. More importantly, we know that some negative comments (including “cons”) add credibility to reviews and actually increase the chance of selling that product. It’s all about getting the “complete picture” of a product. Since consumers don’t believe there are “perfect” products, they just want to be informed about the cons (or shortcoming) of a product and decide for themselves whether they can live with them.

In short, if you’ve decided to give your customers the opportunity to communicate with you and other shoppers about your products, it’s important to allow them to voice all of their experiences (whether they be good or bad). Today’s consumers are extremely savvy and can identify fraudulent reviews and unethical business practices with ease – we encourage you to use reviews as an open and transparent communication channel with your customers, not a vehicle with which to dilute credible user insights by adding (or removing) content.

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”

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 their retailers on Cyber Monday. Good for them, I am happy that their servers held up and that they didn’t have CTOs calling them asking why their product pages were hanging on their SaaS provider when people were trying to buy stuff (especially in this “don’t-risk-revenue” year).

Retailers already have fully scaled web hosting capabilities in-house, and at PowerReviews, we have built a system that leverages this to provide a low cost and low risk Review Solution through our Asymetrical ASP. From the start, we invested in and built more efficient technology that helps our entire network of retailers use the systems that they have already built without loss of control or downtime risk. Our clients’ CTOs and IT departments truly appreciate the fact that they are not dependent of someone else’s system for page reads. Bazaarvoice’s solution has them hosting the reviews for you. With PowerReviews you control the data and it’s your choice whether it is hosted by us or you.

None of our clients are worrying about the servers staying up. They can focus on collecting volumes of trusted reviews and then leveraging their value for things like SEO improvements and Top Rated Gear sections to sell more of their best products.

Looking back to 2006 when a minority of the retailers on the Top 500 had customer reviews and answers on their websites, I would say that we have all come a long way in empowering the customer’s voice. That being said, you might want to carefully consider the implications of the “progress” you read about as it relates to the delivery of these benefits.

Some friendly advice: Big Macs and Big Hosting Fees might not always be what the doctor ordered.