Firm Rolls Out Suite of Social Listening Tools

Customer reviews and social commerce solutions firm PowerReviews has launched a new suite of social networking measurement tools, designed to help brands listen to and engage with their customers.

The new BrandConnect Suite comprises analytics tool Listen, and Megaphone which is designed to encourage consumers to publish their product reviews on Facebook, Twitter and blogs.

Listen enables brands and retailers to track, understand and act on issues and opportunities that arise from customer communities. Unlike other social listening tools, the firm says it utilizes its own 'Structured Listening™' tag-based technology, to aggregate consumer feedback, which it claims results in accurate trend and comparative analysis.

The tool examines consumer insights using product-specific consumer lifestyle segments in more than 2,600 categories. It provides competitive product and brand category assessments from the consumer's perspective, while offering real-time tracking of 'detractors' to minimize the impact of negative word-of-mouth.

The second product Megaphone notifies reviewers of opportunities to share their reviews while they are actually writing them on a brand's web site. For instance, on Facebook, after a review is submitted, the user clicks 'Connect with Facebook' where they can preview the post and add a comment introducing it. This will then be published and posted on their Facebook wall.

Just the first few lines of the review appear, with a 'review more' option which links directly to the product page containing the full review on the brand's web site.

'BrandConnect 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,' stated CEO Andy Chen.

PowerReviews, which works with more than 800 retailers and brands on over 2,600 web sites, is online at www.powerreviews.com .