Shop.org Annual Summit 2007

It’s Vegas Baby

Well, I’m just back and recovered from a incredible and informative three days in Vegas at the annual Shop.org Summit! And not only was it the biggest to date, but I found it certainly to be the best. The content was rich, motivating and inspiring and the trade show floor well attended with both retailers and vendors armed with questions all about customer reviews!

In fact, user generated content seemed all the rage during the show. And not from just a retailer perspective, but vendors seemed more engaged than ever and interested in how their services would be enhanced and further leveraged by incorporating reviews and such.

I hosted a great roundtable the first day on the topic of Best Practices in Internet Video. Joining me from the vendor perspective were Jason from elasticpath and Bill from ExpoTV. Besides sharing with the group the some of the fun and unique videos that have been uploaded within the PowerReviews network of 150 clients, (check out this video of the Roomba automatic floor cleaner), other great factoids included the average view time of a product review is 2.5 minutes as experienced in the more than 1 million product reviews of ExpoTV. And, if you haven’t heard the latest news about Amazon, they are now actively adding video product reviews to their site and shopping experience. Videos are getting even hotter folks in the world of product reviews – in traditional and not so traditional ways!

All the news that is fit to print

We released several big news items while at the show including two partner announcements and an update on our shopping portal, Buzzillions.com. In addition to announcing our new partnership with MyBuys.com, we also were proud to have been selected by Endeca as an integrated partner with their new Discovery Suite of products where our shared clients can fully leverage the power or reviews on their respective sites through enhanced guided navigation. In fact, that new experience has already been in place on our shopping site Buzzillions.com since April of this year! And speaking of that site, we have now crossed the 500,000 review threshold with offering of more than 130,000 products – adding more than 1,000 new products every day! So if you have not yet checked out this new way of shopping, please do so!