I single it out not because I hate critics but because it was voted 'helpful' by 205 out of 236 people.  In other words, this reviewer is speaking for a population of customers who simply ignore critics and trust each other instead.

Consider this ground-zero proof on a trend that continues to take hold.  We have briefed you on research about trust many times, and here are five of the 'most helpful' Bazaarblog posts on this topic:

1. Customer Recommendations Are Most Trust Forms of Advertising
2. 80% of Online Customers Trust Brands More with Reviews
3. 84% Trust User Reviews Over a Critic (MarketingSherpa)
4. 78% of Online Consumers Have More Trust for Brands with Reviews
5. Can Customers Trust Online Reviews?

Regardless of whether you trust them or not, critics do make us laugh with their witty writing style.   I got a chuckle out of Chris Farnsworth's quote on the movie, "Stallone looks like an overcooked Ball Park frank".  The lay customer may not be as witty, but they may be more trusted and therefore more influential at driving box office sales – and that's what really counts.

There have been many exciting research moments for our industry in the past two years:

• When we discovered the Ratings J-Curve, including how it looks for apparel (a category that many expected not to follow the J-Curve trend)

• When Jupiter and Forrester showed how many shoppers read reviews (77% and 70%, respectively)
• When MarketingSherpa showed how many consumers preferred sites with reviews (58%)
• When we showed how negative reviews have a bigger positive impact on conversion than positive reviews and how smart retailers think about negative reviews
• When we worked with the Keller Fay Group to find out why consumers write reviews (primarily, to help each other) and how many of them are buying offline and then reviewing their purchase online (66%)
• When comScore and The Kelsey Group showed how online reviews impact offline purchasing (released this week)

• When we discovered how Ask & Answer impacts conversion (up 22%), how many users participate in questions and answers even though it is such a new medium in eCommerce, and how clients like The Home Depot are leveraging this new offering to differentiate and benefit their customers
• When we saw how reviews impact customer acquisition and documented our extensive findings in a whitepaper
• When Nielsen announced that consumer recommendations are the most trusted form of advertising (78% trust versus 34% for search-engine ads)

• When Deloitte (one of my former employers) showed how many consumers are influenced by reviews (82% of those that read them)

And this new holiday tradition is another major finding.  It shows just how much influence reviews online are having on offline shopping behavior.  This especially hits home for me because when Brant and I started this company in May of 2005 only around 10 retailers in the U.S. (including online-only, like Amazon.com) had reviews.  Now MarketingSherpa reported that 43% of retailers do (as of Feb-07).  That is having a broad impact on consumer expectations – reviews are quickly become a must-have for retailers and a norm for online shopping.

Most of these are intuitive findings and could be easily dismissed as "obvious".  But data informs strategy, as I learned so many times while working with clients as the founder of Coremetrics.

So, what do you do with this new data?  Here are a few ideas:

• Promote reviews for the same products featured in your Thanksgiving circular on your home page the week of Thanksgiving – this will make it easy for the 70 to 77% that are seeking reviews (and the 82% that are influenced when they read them) to realize that you have them

• Send an email about reviews on Thanksgiving morning with a subject line like, "Read Thousands of Customers' Reviews Before You Go Shopping on Friday".  In that email, feature the same products or categories of products that you have in your Thanksgiving circular
• Create distinct shopping paths linked for your home page such as "Our Best Friday Deals on Customer Top-Rated Holiday Gifts" and so on for all of your major categories featured in your in-store (and online) sale
• Push reviews again on Cyber Monday – both in email and on your home page – but with a distinct focus on online shopping
• Put top-rated circulars in your stores for greeters and category managers (like HD TV) to hand out to help in-store shoppers
• Feature reviews in your print circulars so that readers know that your site has reviews before they go online to research them

Want more?  Watch the holiday webinar that our Community Management team recorded.  And please don't forget to tell us your ideas as well!

And, finally, please support the Ray M. Greenly Scholarship Fund this holiday season by shopping at Shop.org's Cyber Monday portal.  All proceeds go to honor a great man that I had the pleasure of working with.  He helped grow Shop.org into the great organization that it is today.  And you will be helping to fund the future visionaries of the eCommerce industry.

Last year Edelman told us that "trust in someone like me" tripled in two years, from 20% to 68%. Jupiter found that 77% of customers seek product reviews. And eMarketer found that 91% seek word of mouth.

Today, MarketingSherpa reports 84% of online customer trust reviews from another customer over a critic. So…I guess Time Magazine got it right. The Person of the Year is "You".

Some other interesting findings…

• 44% of large ecommerce sites use reviews.
• And 58% of buyers prefer sites with reviews.
• When asked what sources of information they are “very likely” to consult before making a decision about their entertainment options, 62% named Web sites with user reviews as their top choice, even beating out a knowledgeable friend (59%)
• MarketingSherpa data confirms that even among older consumers, online reviews are one of the most widely adopted features for online purchasing behavior. While 50% of consumers ages 18-34 said they had posted an online comment or review of a product or company, 45% of consumers ages 35-54 said they had as well, and 34% of consumer over age 55 weighed in with an online opinion.
• And this paragraph:

One positive review might not carry the same influence as a recommendation from someone a user knows and trusts. However, seeing positive reviews from a range of happy customers changes the equation. Web users tend to study online reviews for someone just like themselves, whose opinion, experience and needs are similar. And even if they don’t find a response from someone who appears to have the same taste and needs, the weight of 10, 20 or 30 positive reviews can give them confidence that a product or service delivers on its promises.

• But the best part is the summary at the top

If you are thinking about adding user reviews to your Web site, do it now. Otherwise, you're losing out. We have exclusive new data on just how important it is to include user reviews. They are as persuasive as close friends and way more effective than so-called expert critics.

During a little downtime this week, I have seen three profound examples of user-generated content in action:

1. Today, MarketingSherpa released a new case study on how President's Choice (large Canadian grocer) is leveraging online customer reviews of their private-label products in their stores, circulars, loyalty program, and product lab.  It is well worth the read; it is one of the most powerful multichannel examples that we have worked on with any client to date.  I also encourage you to look at the creative samples they provided.  Note that free access is only available for seven days from the publish date.

2. Yesterday (and again tonight), I saw a new Ford Fusion commercial that uses customer review content from Yahoo! Autos in the ad as the primary selling message.  I think this may be an industry first.  I have seen user-generated content used in many forms, but not actual customer review content on a major television advertisement (it ran on American Idol's session finale tonight – that can't be cheap).  The commercials are branded with Ford's new website: Ford Challenge.  I wrote about General Motors doing something similar last year, but not quite as profound.

3. On Monday, I read an article on Yahoo! about 45 million people globally voting on the new Seven Wonders of the World.   Quick – can you name the historical Seven?  I couldn't, and only one of them survives today.  This is notable news to me for two reasons.  First, 45 million (and one) people globally are now engaged in caring about important historical places in the world (although it somewhat saddens me that, by comparison, 74 million people voted on the new American Idol winner).  Second, it taps into three trends that I have been following: the wisdom of crowds (and crowdsourcing), the power of the new globally connected individual (see Kryptonite mention), and the upheaval of traditional power structures (this one being the intellectuals in 200 BC that selected the historical Seven). 

On that last trend, I am reading David Weinberger's new book, Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, which covers this trend extensively.  It is a pretty good read by one of the ingenious authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto (one of my favorite books – I consider Chapter 4 a must-read for marketers).  The basic theme of the book is that the laws of the physical world have constrained the desires of individuals for the purpose of organizing the masses.  For example, you can't dynamically rearrange a physical retail store for a specific niche shopper to make it easy for them, but you can do that online.  This may be obvious to many of you by now, but Mr. Weinberger has a unique style and writes of the history behind (including such topics as the invention of alphabetized lists) and the implications of this very important trend.

I think it is very cool that the Internet has enabled projects that would have never been possible before – like the new seven wonders voting.  Frankly, most would trust the opinion of 45 million people globally than a few intellectuals anyway.

And I was also very happy to see Shop.org announce this week that David Weinberger is one of the four keynotes at the Annual Summit this year in Las Vegas.  I hope to see you there!

You can read the summary here. In short the study found that 58% of online shoppers prefer sites that feature ratings and reviews…

This is one more data point to support others (see our stats page):

• 71% of online shoppers read reviews, making it the most widely read consumer-generated content. (Forrester)
• 77% of online shoppers read consumer product reviews and ratings (Jupiter)
  
• Ratings and Reviews is the second most important site feature behind search and online buyers who site ratings and reviews most useful site feature has more than doubled from ’05 to ’06.  (Jupiter)
• 92% deemed customer reviews as “extremely” or “very” helpful and ~ 71% used keyword searches to find products. (eTailing Group)
• After their order, PETCO asked customers, "What online tool most influenced your purchase decision?" The #1 answer was Product Ratings & Reviews, with site search coming in a distant second. (PETCO)
• CompUSA exit survey: 81% consider the availability of customer reviews to be Very important (33%) / Somewhat important (48%) (CompUSA & iPerceptions study)
• 63% of consumers indicate they are more likely to purchase from a site if it has product ratings and reviews. (CompUSA & iPerceptions study)
• 39 percent of those who bought from sites with reviews cite the reviews as the primary factor influencing the purchase decision. (Foresee Results Study, 2006)
•  48% of online shoppers seek reviews before purchasing (eVoc Insights)

This is third party research. We also have about 20 case studies demonstrating different ways clients are using reviews to make impact in conversion, AOV, margin, loyalty and lower returns.

Is there enough support that ratings and reviews are effective. Um, yeah. But we are always looking for more!

• 63% of users prefer sites with ratings and reviews (eVoc Insights)
• 48% of shoppers seek reviews before making a purchase decision (eVoc Insights)
• Conversion of customers buying a single product nearly doubled after the product received a five-star review, going from .44% to 1.04%. (Marketing Experiments / Shopping.com experiment)
• 59% of users considered customer reviews to be more valuable than expert reviews. (BizRate)
• Users who contribute product reviews visit a site 9 times more often than average users, and they remain twice as loyal and buy twice as often. (McKinsey)

These are great stats about customer impact, coming from multiple sources, all which seem to concur that ratings and reviews are effective. But for skeptics, it would be helpful if several different sources survey the same question and come up with the same answer.

That just happened. 

After a presentation from Lauren Freedman of e-Tailing Group at this week's Internet Retailer show, we know that Shop.org, MarketingSherpa and the eTailing Group have all surveyed retailers and come out with essentially the same result — Ratings and Reviews are the most effective merchandising strategy:

96% of retailers rate customer ratings and reviews very or somewhat effective
Shop.org 2005 Annual Study

94% of retailers rate customer ratings and reviews very or somewhat effective
MarketingSherpa Ecommerce Benchmark study, March, 2006

92% of retailers rate customer ratings and reviews very or somewhat effective
JC Williams/e-tailing group Survey; 2006 

Of course we like the fact that retailers are rating ratings and reviews with 5 stars!