Nielsen’s latest Global Trust in Advertising report, which surveyed more than 28,000 Internet respondents in 56 countries, shows that 92% of people trust recommendations from friends and family, followed closely by 70% trusting online reviews.

Here are the highlight stats. Read the great piece about it over on Social Commerce Today.

We’ve been in the reviews business for quite a few years so we’re not remotely surprised by this data. But our experience over the past 12 months is that small businesses are now realising the importance of reviews and adding customer reviews solutions to their sites and Facebook. This is as true in rural Ireland as it is in Del Mar California.

Vista la grande richiesta da parte dei nostri partners in italia ed in Svizzera, LouderVoice è ora disponibile in italiano.

Come in ogni nostra assistenza in lingua straniera, ciò include sia l’esperienza dell’utente finale che la gestione delle recensioni da parte delle imprese.

Naturalmente anche tutte le nostre integrazioni con i social networks funzionano perfettamente in italiano, fornendo la completa esperienza della recensione sia sul vostro sito che su Facebook.

As the first company to do Social Reviews on Twitter, way back in 2007, we have finally given in to all the (many!) demands for a Facebook-only solution.

All of our Packages have had a powerful Facebook component since 2009 but this Package enables small businesses, who may not even have their own web-site, to show and solicit customer reviews on their Facebook Page.

Many of the businesses who have contacted us had previously used the old built-in Facebook reviews App. Whilst it was pretty awful, it worked, and they miss it! So we love being the company to put a smile back on their faces.

More and more sites are moving to WordPress as their platform. We have long been WP users and all of our sites are built on it.

The LouderVoice reviews system has always supported WordPress sites but we recently decided to make it even easier to deploy on them.

The new LouderVoice Reviews plug-in is now available and included in the price of all of our Packages. With a few quick clicks, you can install the plug-in and configure reviews for one or more pages on any WP site.

I had the pleasure of being interviewed recently for the leading French Business Magazine, Stratégies. It was about doing business in Ireland and some of the positive aspects of setting up here despite the recession.

You’ll need pretty fluent French to read the entire article but there are some good nuggets in there.

Enjoy!

Strategies Ireland LouderVoice

Due to ongoing strong demand both in France and Canada, LouderVoice is now available fully localised to French.

As with Spanish and Russian, this includes both the entire end-user experience and the review management back-end for businesses.

Of course all of our powerful Social integrations work seamlessly in French too and provide the full 360 degree view from reviews on a businesses site to reviews on Facebook and back again.

LouderVoice was one of the first reviewing apps on Android and was the first ever Irish Android App. It made full use of our powerful API and was a great calling card for our capabilities.

We’re now thrilled to tell you that our API is being used by another mobile application. This time it’s the fabulous Riverdance. If you are a fan of the show, as we are, you are going to want this on your phone. It’s available for both iPhone and Android and has everything you need to enjoy Riverdance even more.

Our development team have been hard at work this summer building a ton of new features for LouderVoice. The first fruits of their labour is the full front-end and back-end localisation of the service. We’ve always been internationalised but now our clients and their customers can use every part of LouderVoice in their own native language.

The first two languages that are available right now are Spanish and Russian with French coming soon. If you have a requirement for any other language, just let us know.

There is a great piece over on Econsultancy about negative reviews. Well worth a read. It can be hard for businesses to display negative reviews on their site but in the end, everyone benefits. My take-away quote from the article:

Thinking of reviews as positive or negative is not helpful. It stops us from considering and building on what this information is really about, which is informing and influencing the decisions others will make after reading it.

The Enterprise Ireland eBusiness Live Newsletter interviewed me about the value of capturing customer feedback, both positive and negative. Enjoy!