PowerReviews Announces BrandConnect™; Helps Brands Drive Sales by Listening to and Engaging Customers

PowerReviews (www.powerreviews.com), a leading provider of customer reviews and social commerce solutions, announces BrandConnect™, a new social listening and amplification suite that uncovers detailed, actionable community feedback and drives stronger customer commitment and word-of-mouth.

According to recent findings from the 2009 Community and Social Media Survey by the e-tailing group and PowerReviews, brands are more focused than ever on leveraging social tools to connect with their customers. In fact, 75 percent of respondents said that brands in their categories have taken a more aggressive stance in their use of social media in the past six months. The study also found the number one reason marketers are aggressively adopting social media is for “greater customer engagement,” followed by “mobilizing their advocates to drive word-of-mouth” and “building brand loyalty.” In addition, the study found the top two social media tools that merchants and brands plan to deploy in the next 12 months are “social listening tools” and “Facebook Connect applications.”

"Current social listening solutions utilize ‘sentiment analysis’ across a broad range of social media, which provides general analysis of a company’s brand in social media discussions,” says Andy Chen, CEO of PowerReviews. “BrandConnect, however, enables a brand to track the discussion down to a product and category level with explicit scoring of product attributes consumers think are important, producing much more accurate and actionable information.”

The BrandConnect Suite consists of two offerings: Listen and Megaphone. Listen is a social listening and analytics tool built on broad-based consumer feedback that enables brands and retailers to track, understand and act on fast-rising issues and opportunities coming out of customer communities. Unlike other social listening tools on the market, BrandConnect is the only product that utilizes Structured Listening™ to aggregate consumer feedback resulting in highly accurate trend and comparative analysis. Structured Listening is based on PowerReviews’ patent-pending tag-based technology, which drives the aggregation of structured social feedback for maximum accuracy and insight.

Key features of Listen include:

• Segmented consumer insight using product-specific consumer lifestyle segments in more than 2600 categories.
• Head-to-head competitive product assessments, and brand category assessments, from the consumer’s perspective.
• Real-time tracking of “Detractors” to minimize the impact and velocity of negative word-of-mouth.
• Real-time “Watch List” and alerts for tracking key products and programs.
• Keyword-based alerts to track fast-rising product issues, topic-specific marketing/merchandising copy opportunities and suggestions for product improvements.

“At Callaway Golf Interactive (CGI), we can definitely benefit from the detailed and structured customer feedback that BrandConnect will provide us,” says Chris Burkhart, Vice President of Marketing for Callaway Golf Interactive. “BrandConnect will specifically help us by providing consumer intelligence that can drive CGI’s transactional marketing and merchandising efforts as well as Callaway Golf’s brand marketing, research and development, and customer service efforts. BrandConnect will help us get more actionable information to the right people, quicker, allowing them to make better decisions, thus improving business results.”

The second product in the BrandConnect Suite is Megaphone. According to a survey of 112,000 people by Powered Inc. in 2009, 65 percent of users are more likely to purchase products they learned about through social media. Megaphone harnesses a brand’s customers – and their followers - to quickly and effectively spread the word on the brand and its products. Specifically, Megaphone encourages consumers - at the time they’re most likely to share their opinions - to publish their product reviews on Facebook, Twitter and blogs.

For example, Megaphone’s Facebook sharing feature works in the following way:

• Reviewers are notified of the opportunity to share their review on Facebook while they are actually writing the review on the Brand’s website (in effect, encouraging them to write a more complete and helpful review).
• Once the review is submitted, the user clicks on the “Connect with Facebook” button and logs into Facebook (utilizing Facebook Connect functionality), if they are not already.
• After connecting to Facebook, the user can preview the post and add a short comment introducing the review. The user then clicks “Publish” and the review is immediately posted on their Facebook wall.
• Importantly, the review is posted as a “snippet” – just the first line or two of the review – with a “read more” link that takes the friend directly to the product page on the Brand’s website with the full review on top.

As a result, in addition to engaging existing customers with an option to publish their opinions to friends, Megaphone drives traffic and sales for the brand or retailer that initially sold the product.

“Facebook is a healthy source of traffic for Onlineshoes.com, as well as a key part of how we engage with customers,” says Jimmy Healey, Product Manager at Onlineshoes.com. “PowerReviews’ Megaphone product has allowed us to dramatically increase the amount of branded content our customers share on Facebook, which in turn drives their friends back to our product pages. It’s a proven revenue-driving part of our social media strategy.”

About PowerReviews

PowerReviews (www.powerreviews.com) provides customer reviews and social commerce solutions to retailers and brands. The company's innovative tag-based approach to collecting, organizing, structuring, and moderating reviews significantly boosts product sales, driving the highest sales uplift in the industry. PowerReviews works with over 800 retailers and brands on over 2600 websites, including Staples, REI, Drugstore.com, Gardener’s Supply, Diapers.com, Callaway and Jockey. In addition to its Enterprise solution, PowerReviews offers an on-demand solution for small- and medium-sized businesses called PowerReviews Express (www.powerreviewsexpress.com). PowerReviews also operates a product reviews and recommendation site for consumers, called Buzzillions.com (www.buzzillions.com).