We have updated our privacy policy to include GDPR provisions. This includes information on how to request that your personal information be deleted from our systems.

In addition, anyone submitting reviews using our solution on our clients’ sites must now actively provide their consent that their name and email address can be shared with LouderVoice.

Sometimes it’s the simple features which provide the most value and that’s definitely the case with two of our most recent updates.

Extra Questions

Clients now have the ability to ask up to 5 extra optional questions from reviewers. This is not intended as a replacement for questionnaires or surveys but is more for extra context. For example, some of our hotel clients use it to ask for the room number. But feel free to use the feature in whatever way makes sense for your business. We’d love to hear what you come up with!

We always strongly encourage our clients to request reviews using every channel available to them, particularly if the bulk of their business is not online. This can be done using receipts, invoices, compliment slips, phone calls or, in the case of our latest restaurant client in France, using an iPad!

This is simply a superb idea by l’Auberge des Trois Pucelles near Grenoble and our partners Thierry André FOUCHER and WSI Belledonne Digital Strategies. They have an iPad at the cash-register with their reviews page pre-loaded in the browser. As customers wait to complete payment, staff members ask if they’d like to leave a review. A few moments later that review is live on their site and on their Facebook Page too.

We were very interested to see an MSNBC article on how hotels are embracing online customer reviews. It matches our own experience, as our reviewing solutions are proving a major hit with businesses in the hospitality and travel sectors everywhere. We have seen a string of deployments in UK, Ireland, France and the US in recent months.

As part of this growth, we’re delighted to announce that we have have just gone live with the Dalata Group’s 11 Maldron and 14 partner hotels in Ireland.

LouderVoice and WSI have been working together globally since early 2011. We have now joined forces to offer a compelling Social solution for SMEs in the UK.

Online marketing is an ever-moving target and it can be hard for SMEs to feel on top of everything. To solve this, WSI’s offerings and LouderVoice’s Social Reviews are now available as an off-the-shelf solution that is optimised for the UK. Every business can have their online presence live and social-powered with almost no effort.

One of the most common requests we get from partners and customers is to have the same reviews SEO functionality on ASP.NET as they do for PHP and WordPress sites. And we’re delighted to say that this is now available.

All of our Packages provide Google Juice and Star Ratings in Search results to client sites via our review Hub, LouderYou. The advantage of this approach is ease of deployment. Our code can be added in seconds to a web-page and reviews are then live. Those reviews are indexed on our hub within hours.

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.

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.

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!

The power of Twitter to connect people has proven itself yet again. Ann Donnelly of O’Mahony Donnelly E-Business, down the road in Clonakilty, pointed us to an article by TMG Custom Media in Washington DC. A few tweets later and we were having an email exchange with Andrew Hanelly in TMG.

The result is a great Q&A over on TMG about the 5 Myths of Customer Reviews. We think it deals with the number one issue that still stops people from adding reviews to their site – fear.

The IIA is running a follow-up to their very successful retail event late last year. Called “8 More Ways to Sell Even More Stuff“, it’s all about selling online and multi-channel.

The focus this time is “Content and Analysis” and therefore it’s no surprise that LouderVoice will be there talking about Social Commerce and how you can power that with Social-enabled Customer Reviews. No serious online business can ignore what their customers are saying about them and we’ll show just how easy it is to benefit from those conversations.

To describe Riverdance as a global entertainment phenomenon is to undersell it. Over the past sixteen years, millions of people have seen the show in places ranging from Sligo to Shanghai.

The Riverdance team decided to go with a totally new site towards the end of 2010 and the result is an absolute triumph. When they contacted us about powering the reviews for them, we couldn’t have been more excited. We quickly deployed our Social Commerce Reviews solution on the site and you can now review both the overall experience and every individual show. Of course we have Facebook and Twitter baked in so everyone can get the message out about how much they love Riverdance.

The Europas, the TechCrunch Europe Awards for European tech companies, will be held on November 19 in London. Entrants will be voted on by the industry and these results will guide a subsequent voting round from The Europas Advisory Board of experts.

LouderVoice is listed in the “Best Business or Enterprise Startup 2010” Category. If you think we deserve the award, why not head over to the site and cast your vote. There are lots of great companies in the other categories too!

Last year’s Hotel Website Marketing Conference was a superb event. I spoke on the value of customer reviews but I learned 10x that from the other speakers on all of the online marketing (and other) challenges/opportunities being faced by hotels.

Ciarán and the team have outdone themselves this year with the speaker line-up. As we just couldn’t miss it, we’ve decided to exhibit there too. Keep an eye out for the LouderVoice stand and pop over for a chat. We can tell you how these businesses and others in the the hospitality industry are benefiting from customer reviews and how your hotel could too.

We have just added a new Facebook capability for all of our customers. They can now show all their latest reviews in a dedicated “Our Reviews” tab on their Facebook Page. Whilst our Facebook Connect implementation has always given reviewers the ability to post their reviews to their personal wall, this new feature enables our clients to showcase their reviews from all their products and services in one place.

Now a simple review written on a client’s site or submitted by SMS can appear on their Facebook Page within minutes, building confidence and guiding others who want to know more about that business. Fundamentally it’s about selling by word of mouth.

There is a fantastic block of stats about consumer reviews over on Search Engine People. If you are wondering why this is such a strong growth area, wonder no longer!

A few of their gems:

1. 90% of online consumers trust recommendations from people they know; 70% trust unknown users, 27% trust experts, 14% trust advertising, 8% trust celebrities (Econsultancy, July 2009, Erik Qualman, Socialnomics)
2. 70% consult reviews or ratings before purchasing (BusinessWeek, Oct. 2008)
3. 7 in 10 who read reviews share them with friends, family & colleagues thus amplifying their impact (Deloitte & Touche, Sept. 2007)
4. 45% say they are influenced a fair amount or a great deal by reviews on social sites from people they follow (46% say reviews in newspaper or magazine influence them.) (Harris Poll, April 2010)

Thanks to Richard Hearne, SEO god from Red Cardinal for the link.

Business books will be written about the amazing story of the new Fastnet Line Ferry to Ireland. This much needed service operating from Swansea to Cork is proving to be a major success for the region. So you can imagine our excitement at LouderVoice becoming part of this story by powering the customer reviews on their site.

Whilst reviews are important for any business, their importance to new businesses cannot be under-estimated. The response from travellers has been phenomenal since reviews were turned on last week. The unique direct feedback has enabled Fastnet Line to immediately discover what is working very well and what can potentially be changed or improved.

Head on over to Krishna De’s site to learn how you can get the LouderVoice Standard Package (normally €49+VAT per month) for free for a whole year!

Having customer reviews on your site has moved from nice-to-have or cutting-edge to something you simply must have to compete online.

We are often asked what types of business are most suited to reviews. Our answer is “all of them”! LouderVoice recently went live with a UK site called Parcel2Ship which offers a brilliantly simple but powerful service. They have aggregated all the parcel and document delivery services so that you just enter a destination and package size and they show you all the options and prices available.

If only we had known about the service when we were going to Internet World in London in May! We bounced from site to site to site trying to find the best price/delivery combination. Parcel2Ship would have saved us hours of effort and stress.

The hospitality industry is a big focus for LouderVoice at the moment. Hotels have long led the way in their use of technology to grow sales and build stronger relationships with their customers.

West Cork Hotel is based in Skibbereen in Co Cork and has been doing an amazing job with revamping every aspect of the business and then getting that message out to the world through Facebook and Twitter.

If you picked up one of our special Internet World show-offer flyers last week in Earl’s Court, you can easily sign-up with us now.

Just fill out this form here and quote the discount code and we’ll get you setup at the reduced rate.

Want to know what LouderVoice can do for your business? Got 2 minutes? Watch this speedy screencast by Karl Llewellyn, our Head of Sales, to get all the important facts.

LouderVoice 1,2,3 from Conor O’Neill on Vimeo.

The Internet World show is on in Earl’s Court, London, from April 27th to 29th and LouderVoice will be there in force.

As sole sponsors of  the Wireless Lounge, you’ll need to talk to us if you want a decent free wifi connection! We’re on Stand E1060.

Despite the volcano, a massive crowd is expected for the show, as in previous years. Whether you are interested in e-commerce, digital marketing, social media, content management or any aspect of operating online, this is the UK show to attend.

This is the kind of news we love to get on a sunny Monday morning in West Cork. We have been shortlisted in the Innovation Category of the Irish Internet Association Net Visionary Awards. If you think we deserve the award then why not head over and vote? Don’t forget all the other categories too, lots of fantastic companies and people in there.

Those of you who have followed LouderVoice over the past few years have probably noticed that things have changed a lot in the last few months. All of those changes have been for the better and much of it is due to Karl Llewellyn, our new Head of Sales.

Karl is responsible for driving our new partner strategy and recruiting web professionals as partners so they can offer LouderVoice to their customers. Loudervoice already has customers internationally, but partners are a key part of our formal launch into the UK this year.

We really are jumping up and down with excitement to finally announce that LouderVoice’s first US client went live just before Le Web recently. Klipsch USA now has the LouderVoice customer review system across the entire klipsch.com web-site.

For those in Europe not familiar with this legendary US brand, it had defined high-end audio since 1946 and is adored by audiophiles everywhere.

Wow.

Jolie O’Dell just did the Top Ten International Web Products of 2009 on the always brilliant ReadWriteWeb.

We didn’t make the Top Ten yet but that’s OK, we’ll be there in 2010 🙂

What we did make was the Honourable Mentions list!

The only Irish web company to do so.

The Golden Spiders award was national recognition for what we’ve been doing this year and now this is global.

To be in the same story as Spotify, Moshi Monsters, Tweetmeme and all the others is a real honour.

The LouderVoice customer reviews system for business has moved into high-gear in 2009. Clients are deploying our EasyReview widget on their e-commerce sites every week. Our first US customer will go live this month along with many more Irish sites. Our second UK site will go live early in the new year.

The most recent research by Internet Retailer tells you everything you need to know about how important reviews are to businesses.

Yes you can! Renowned SEO expert Richard Hearne of Red Cardinal did exactly that this afternoon with the LouderVoice EasyReview system.

Think you can beat him?