Trendwatching.com has released its list of 10 Crucial Consumer Trends of 2010.

At Number 3 is Real-Time Reviews

Sometimes we’re just a tiny bit ahead of the trends here in LouderVoice HQ:

That’s why @review is LouderVoice!

We’ve been working with the Luckebox team for the past few months and they have impressed the socks off us with their plans. As of today, they have now fully launched.

What do they do? Gift boxes, lots of them, all full of awesomeness. Not rubbish cheese or stale puddings but stuff you actually want!

Each box contains a particular mix of things at a massive discount over retail prices. They include:

Yesterday I attended the excellent Hotel Website Marketing event in Dublin organised by Proactiv Marketing. It was a real highlight of 2009 for me with fantastic speaker after fantastic speaker. I walked away with a ton of to-dos for LouderVoice.

I spoke on the benefit of on-site customer reviews for hotels. The core message was that you can grow on-site sales, reduce online ad spend and improve your customer service by adding reviews to your site.

LouderVoice was the first reviews company to realise the importance of Twitter. That’s why we’re the people behind @review which we launched in June 2007.

Since then we’ve played and tweaked mini-reviews based on user feedback.

Following more research we realised that many people were doing mini-reviews using the simple method of just adding #review on to the end of the tweet. This was also the preferred approach in our recent poll.

The LouderVoice customer reviews service is getting a lot of attention from businesses who are looking for ways to retain customers and grow sales in these difficult times.

So the latest research from Avail Intellingence comes as no surprise to us. InternetRetailing reports that the research shows over a third (36%) of respondents rated peer opinions such as recommendations, reviews and customer generated wish lists as the most useful aspect of an Internet-shopping site.

Scott Adams nails it beautifully as always.

As you probably know, LouderVoice was the first company to identify Twitter as an important source of reviews. We launched LouderTweets structured reviews all the way back in June 2007. We are also the people behind the @review user.

Whilst many people have used the structured reviews since then, many others have found the structure difficult to remember or just plain awkward.

We turned on free-form reviews on SMS last year and most people are much happier with that. They simply send an SMS to us beginning with “RE” (or one of our partners’ keywords) and the remainder of the review is in whatever style they like.

We’ve had a fantastic year in LouderVoice and it looks like 2009 is going to be even better with a raft of new releases in the next few months. Looking back over last year we achieved the following:

• In January we launched Flag Tag reviewing which enabled any blogger to have their blog reviews collected by LouderVoice with two simple tags on a post.
• We also added Twitter/SMS/Jaiku hashtag support
• In February we sponsored the Best Blog Post in the Irish Blog Awards
• In March we did our first major revamp with LouderVoice V2 adding on-site reviews and a ton of other features.
• We also launched V2 of our WordPress Plugin. (Updated Plugin for WP 2.7 coming very soon!)
• We spent from April to October busy fixing bugs and building our B2B offering
• In July we started using Get Satisfaction for Customer support. Don’t hesitate to add bug reports or feature requests there.
• In September we launched Simple SMS reviews requiring just a single keyword
• We were also Shortlisted in the Irish Web Awards
• In October we launched LouderVoice for Business to great attention
• We were also shortlisted in the Irish Software Association Awards
• And we kicked off our BES 2008 Offering for Irish Investors
• In November, our first B2B client, Klipsch, went live
• In December we successfully closed a BES investment round which will ensure our continued success through 2009

We should have posted this before Christmas but the final winner in the Three competition was Gabriel Kelly from Carrigaline in Cork for her review of the Philips DCP951/05.

 

   

 

One of the prize phones from Three and Custom-1 headphones from Klipsch are already on their way to her.

Well done to all the winners and thanks again to George Hook for making this all happen.

We’ll be kicking off some new competitions shortly. Keep an eye out here, on Twitter or on the site itself for details.

The third winner in the Three competition on The Right Hook has been announced on George’s radio show. It is SarahMc from Waterford who wrote a review of a very interesting device called the Scansound Unilateral Stereo Headphone. This sends both stereo channels into one earpiece for people who are deaf in one ear. Fantastic device and really informative review from Sarah!

 

   

 

One of the prize phones from Three and Custom-1 headphones from Klipsch will shortly be on their way to her.

The second winner in the Three competition on The Right Hook has been announced on George’s radio show. It is Castle Tunes from Dublin who wrote a very detailed review of the Squeezebox Boom.

 

   

 

One of the prize phones from Three and Custom-1 headphones from Klipsch will shortly be on their way to Dublin.

There are another two weeks left in the competition. So get writing gadget reviews on the site or via SMS. The winner will be announced each Monday on the show which you can also listen to on the Newstalk web-site.

Conor is on The Right Hook radio show this evening on Newstalk with Joe Drumgoole from PutPlace. He’ll be talking about the LouderVoice service in general and kicking off an SMS reviews push in conjunction with the show. You can listen live on the web here.

As part of this, we are launching our Simple SMS Review service. There’ll be more detail in the next post but the key point is that unlike the existing service, no structure is required on your reviews. We also provide custom keywords for our business clients and partners.