I was reading Xavier Casanova's (former Co-Founder of Fireclick, now the Co-Founder and CEO of Perenety) blog the other day, and he had a posting about two up-and-coming word-of-mouth service providers: see "PowerReviews vs. BazaarVoice."

I have had the chance to speak with Andy Chen (former Co-Founder of Fogdog Sports, now the Co-Founder of PowerReviews), Brett Hurt (former Founder of Coremetrics, now the Founder and CEO of BazaarVoice) and Sam Decker (former Dell Marketing guru, now the VP of Marketing and Products for BazaarVoice...check out his blog at DeckerMarketing.com), and Xavier is right...their business models are quite a bit different.  BazaarVoice will focus on a different portion of the market than PowerReviews, and BazaarVoice's value proposition will be the word-of-mouth marketing and its resulting analytics while PowerReviews will be known for the word-of-mouth portal that will be created on their Web site.

Regardless of the method, technology, pricing model, etc, I'm just glad to see more word-of-mouth marketing becoming available to marketers and consumers.  Right now, many naysayers would probably list some caveats to the consumer reviews that we find online.  "Consumer reviewing is not mainstream enough," they may say.  They might point out that we generally hear from a couple of extremely satisfied customers and a lot of dissatisfied customers, so we get a lot of "A+" ratings and a lot of "D" and "F" ratings.  The aggregate reviewal of a product, brand or company would need to be taken with a grain of salt.

I would contest that, regardless of the statistical significance of the consumer sample size, consumer reviews are always going to be more credible than product packaging, retailer or manufacturer marketing and even media reports.  Isn't everything we hear from those people an "A+ review" by default?  A friend of mine is the President of his local Macintosh users group, so he publishes a monthly newsletter about Apple products and Macintosh-compatible software.  You can safely bet that if he gets a free version of whatever he is reviewing, he's going to write something good about it  ; )  Last night, tons of Americans watched the Oscar awards.  Sure, the awards show is fun, but do we trust the Motion Picture Academy's opinion of these movies or would we rather hear from our own peers?  I saw Crash, and it was well-written, but any of my friends would have told you that Wedding Crashers was easily the top movie of the last year  ; )

So, long live the empowered consumer.  As BazaarVoice and PowerReviews pick up steam (and judging by the success of Coremetrics and Fogdog Sports, we know they both will), we'll start hearing from more of the consumers who had "B" and "C" experiences and we'll find a lot of credibility in what they have to say.  If both companies are able to execute the plans which they have created, they will both get an "A" from me.