We are very pleased to be recognized by Internet Retailer as the Solution Leader in the Customer Reviews and Forums category – click here for the full article (screen shot from their email announcement below).

We founded PowerReviews four years ago based on a revolutionary idea that not only are reviews useful to consumers at the end of the shopping process (validating their purchase decision), reviews done a certain way – using structured (tag-based) content – can fuel a personalization and social commerce revolution.  For example, using our 3rd Generation Tag-based review technology, Brands like Jelly Belly and retailers like REI are able to present meaningful at-a-glance review summaries to help shoppers in the middle of the shopping process quickly compare products.

Review Snapshot® – REI HalfDome Tent

In addition, using our 3G tag-based review engine, PowerReviews empowers customers of retailers like Dicks Sporting Goods and Kiddicare at the start of the shopping process with the ability to narrow product selection based on Social attributes like Uses and Pros.  For instance, finding baby strollers recommended for Newborns when you Travel a lot.

Social Navigation – Kiddicare Strollers

We believe that tag-based reviews, and social media in general, have empowered consumers to make significantly more confident purchased decision with social advice at every step in the buying process.  Buying online is still riskier than buying in a store.  But with social recommendations early in the process and social feedback late in the process, consumers are making far fewer purchase mistakes when taking that risk.

I’d like to thank our customers who are driving this revolution so that their customers (and them as a result) fully reap these sizeable benefits!

Full full listing of Internet Retailer Top 500 Awards click here.

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.

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.

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!

Okay, then, beyond asking for them in an email, what is the next best way to generate customer reviews? Well, I ‘m glad you asked because the next best way is as simple as the first. Just show your shoppers how important reviews are to the shopping experience you provide and your customers will follow suit and will be eager to share their thoughts too!

Our friends at REI do a fantastic job at getting that message out – that reviews are an important part of their shopping experience. In their latest catalog that just hit the streets this past week, the inside cover gently boasts the following:

We can help you accomplish your summer dreams with expert advice and a huge selection of quality gear. REI.com customer gear reviews and articles.

It goes without saying that “customer gear reviews” is a stroke of brilliance by these leaders in their space. It sends a clear message that fellow recreation enthusiasts have lots of insightful information just waiting for the eager researcher.

Using their catalog is just one of the many ways these forward thinking guys have been promoting reviews to their shoppers. Earlier this year they embarked on a huge in-store campaign alerting their shoppers that they not only had product reviews online but encouraged them to go home, use their newly purchased product and then go on line to write a review of their own.

Other great examples can be found at Jockey.com where they teach shoppers how to shop smarter by using product reviews (click on “submit a product review” banner) in their buying decision, or at Ace Hardware where they prominently dedicate and display Top Rated items on their home page or at Danskin where write a review reminder pack-ins are inserted in every shipment, the earlier and more obvious in the shopping process merchants promote reviews the more reviews they will generate.

To sum it up, clearly communicate to your shoppers the importance you place on customer reviews early and often in the shopping process. If you do that, you set the expectation that after they should write a review too – right after they make that purchase!

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

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

Buzzillions as an affiliate

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

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

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

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

The SEO ”duplicate content” rumors are total nonsense

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The decision is yours – please remember that.

So I couldn’t think of a better place or way to announce the launch of one of our newest clients, Sun & Ski Sport! And although they are of course in the middle of their winter merchandise offerings, these folks are 100% year round fun!

We here at PowerReviews are thrilled to add Sun & Ski Sports to our more than a dozen sporting goods clients that included the ever impressive large retailers as well as some of the most exciting niche players in the space. I am sure you won’t fault me for saying that we are the leaders and experts in this market segment, too!

Our review system with its highly expressive tag-based feedback has become the chosen favorite for gathering user generated comments in one of the most passion driven consumer industries today – outdoor recreation! If you have the time just see what some of the customers on these client sites are saying:

• REI
• Sports Authority
• Dick’s Sporting Goods
• Eastern Mountain Sports
• Callaway Golf (pre-owned)
• TREK
• Alpine Sports Outlet
• Divers Direct
• WaterWorld Sports
• Olympia Sports
• Evogear
• Mountain Gear
• Fit Couture
• Modell’s

In talking to our friends at Sun & Ski, here is what they had to say:

“PowerReviews allowed us to easily deliver customer-friendly, highly-informative product reviews,” said Scott Blair, eCommerce General Manager of Sun & Ski Sports. “Not only was the integration and start-up process was quick and easy, but the feature has caught on quickly and been very popular with our customers. User-generated content in the form of written comments and photos has been a huge plus for our site.”

Not only do they have five stores in the Houston area and one each in Austin, Grapevine, San Antonio, Miami, Atlanta, Charlotte, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Cincinnati and Nashville, their e-commerce websites (www.sunandski.com and skichalet.com) offer more than 1,000 specialty products representing 100 brands.

Welcome to the family Sun & Ski!

(I’ll be blogging all week while down here at the eTail show so stay tuned!)