The first thing I do when I land on a site I haven’t used before is to check their reviews. Good or bad, I want to see that it is a company which values feedback and is actively providing services or products.

We were really excited recently to sign-up Floradoor in Cairo as our first African client. This high-end florist delivers flowers locally for a global customer base and it has been a joy to read their reviews.

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.

Many of our clients on PHP platforms like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal have long benefited from our SEO Add-On.

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.

We are more than a little pleased to announce this.

American + Ireland Social Media Leaders Join Forces

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: San Jose, CA; Austin, TX; and Cork, Ireland: July 3, 2012 – Three Social Media leaders have come together to offer a compelling solution for restaurants and foodservice companies, beginning in the US. FohBoh.com of San Jose, CA, LouderVoice Reviews of Cork, Ireland, and Restaurant Domain of Austin, TX, can now provide a complete online Social solution to the food industry.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My talk on customer reviews at the IIA’s “8 More Ways to Sell Even More Stuff” event seemed to go down very well.

Judge for yourself. Hopefully you’ll find it useful.

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.

It’s that time of the year again! LouderVoice has been at Le Web every year since 2006. Back then, it was just some ideas and a very basic Alpha, this time we are part of the Irish Pavilion.

Enterprise Ireland has put together a unique Demozone at Le Web. 11 hot Irish start-ups including LouderVoice will be there. A single place where we can meet, have a coffee and show you what we do. This is the first time a country has exhibited at Le Web and we are honoured to be part of it.

Lots of very interesting headline stats about e-commerce over on the Econsultancy site. It appears that the prediction of the first online Christmas (50p in the £) by 2015 is well on its way to coming true.

IMRG predicts that £6.4bn will be spent online in December 2010, up from £5.5bn last year. Total online spending for 2010 is predicted to reach £57,8bn, compared with £49.8bn in 2009.

Who doesn’t love being nominated for an award, particularly when it’s in the innovation category? We’re in the final 5 of the Irish Web Awards Most Innovative Website and we’re smugger than the smuggest company in Smugtown.

The awards are on this Saturday in the Mansion House. Go now to the list of finalists in all categories and don’t just read the list, click through on all the ones you don’t know.

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.

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 have just launched a new partner program paying out substantial commission and bonus payments to web professionals, developers and marketers that refer customers.

LouderVoice is Ireland’s largest and longest standing provider of Review & Rate (R&R) solutions to e-businesses. These solutions give customers the ability to post reviews of a products or services on the website they bought from. R&R tools are seen by market analysts as one of the most important tools for any website serious about online business*.

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.

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.

We were terribly disappointed last Thursday that massive flooding in West Cork prevented us from attending the 2009 Golden Spiders Awards. The awards are the most high profile in Ireland and a win can have serious business benefits locally.

So imagine our shock to hear that we won the e-business category! We were up against some incredibly impressive competition. Getting this recognition from our industry peers on the judging panel really is satisfying.

Today marks the launch of technology news and reviews site teic.ie, which has to be one of the best site names we’ve seen! It’s written by Adam Maguire who is one of the finest technology and business journalists in the country. Adam’s reviews are in-depth and extremely knowledgeable. The use of a blog format means he should quickly see a community forming around the site and there is no reason we won’t have a European Gizmodo or Engadget on our hands.

We’ve spent the past few months in LouderVoice creating Version 2 of our review widget and have been quietly rolling it out on sites since early August. In our humble opinion, it is the best widget-based reviews solution on the market globally. Not only can it be implemented on most sites in under 10 minutes, it is also fully Facebook and Twitter enabled and can be easily styled to blend seamlessly into your site

If you have any interest in Cloud Computing then you should be attending next week’s Cloud Computing Summit in Croke Park in Dublin.

The line-up of speakers is fantastic and the topics very relevant to businesses of any size. LouderVoice CEO, Conor, will be on a user panel speaking about our experiences of moving all the LouderVoice services to Amazon AWS. That includes S3, EC2, EBS, EIP, Cloudfront and only excludes ELB since it hasn’t launched in Europe yet.

It’s always a pleasure to meet like-minded people who understand the power of online reviews for businesses. Pat O’Neill of HotelConsult is one of those people and we’re thrilled to be working with him in the hotel space.

In these difficult times for hotels, any advantage that they can gain is worthwhile. On-site reviews are a proven way of growing sales and on-site sales for hotels means they improve their margin.

We’ve always been impressed with the Citylocal franchise which was built by Nazir Daud in the UK. Paul Brugger launched the Cork site last year and it has been growing at an amazing rate. CityLocal Cork is a Business Directory and community website that provides local information on Businesses, News, Events, Free Ads, Property and Cinema listings.

Visitors to Citylocal often leave reviews of the businesses they find there. We are now aggregating those reviews into our system, adding to the already powerful SEO mojo of Citylocal. By doing this, Citylocal’s customers will now see their reviews appearing on loudervoice.com, on Google Android mobile phones and shared by users to Facebook and a multitude of other social networking sites. In every case, the reviews point back to their Citylocal presence.

We’ve seen it growing year by year but the latest Nielsen research really drives it home. There is a great piece about it over on Computerworld.

Consumer reviews and personal recommendations are as important as trusted brand reviews for Internet consumers.

The Nielsen survey, the largest of its kind, shows that 90 percent of Internet consumers worldwide trust recommendations from people they know, while 70 percent trust consumer opinions posted online.

We had a fantastic time at the second Irish Facebook Garage in Dublin on Thursday. A packed room of approx 150 people with a wide range of backgrounds heard 5 speakers cover a variety of topics over the space of 2.5 hours.

There will be full coverage including video and all the PPTs available over on Web2Ireland at some point next week. In the meantime, here are some screenshots of Conor’s live demo of the LouderVoice reviews widget + Facebook Connect in action. This widget will be formally launched in the next week or so.

Krishna De of Biz Growth Live did an extended interview with CEO Conor all about ratings and reviews. If you want to hear a lot of valuable information about why reviews make sense for your business, have a listen.

Thanks Krishna!

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.

Yesterday evening we uploaded the first public beta of our Google Android mobile application to the Android Market.

This is the first Irish Android application and one of the very first reviewing applications on the platform.

You’ll have to patiently wait for the launches of the HTC Magic and Samsung I7500 before  most Irish people can try it out. Anyone living in countries where Android is already live can install it now.

We’re pleased as punch to announce that our brand new customer reviews widget has just gone live on the Bubble Brothers wine site. Julian, their Wine 2.0 guru, has always been at the forefront of social media adoption and the addition of our widget complements all of their other online activities beautifully.

The key thing about the widget is the ease of implementation. One line of code was added to the Bubble Brothers product page template (they use Ecommerce Templates for their site), a few minor logo tweaks later and they were up and running. No development on their side and just some quick colour/size adjustments by us. That’s all it takes to review-enable an entire site!

It’s always a delight to work with like-minded companies so we were doubly pleased when Puddleducks.ie contacted us recently about using the LouderVoice customer reviews system on their site.

Puddleducks is a rapidly growing online retailer of outdoor clothing for both children’s and adults. In fact,  we first encountered them as personal customers of their fantastic products. Their range includes Swedish designed dungarees, jackets and trousers for children, as well as waterproof clothing and work wear for adults.

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.

How about adding $2.7B to you bottom line?

Via Econsultancy:

… calculates that, since displaying the most helpful reviews has increased sales in the media products category by 20%, overall this feature was worth $2.7bn to Amazon

Contact business@loudervoice.com if you’d like to hear how reviews can help your business!

We have two bits of news about our LouderVoice plug-in. The first is that it is now WordPress 2.7 compatible and the second is that we have moved the hosting over to WordPress.org. This means that from now on, when we update it, you’ll see a notification in your WordPress Admin Panel.

Apart from the 2.7 compatibility change, the only other major feature is that you can opt to have all the contextual information about the review, including the stars, at the end of the text. Full instructions in the readme.

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

The first winner in the Three competition on The Right Hook has been announced on George’s radio show. It is Snowgirl from Thurles who wrote [The first winner in the Three competition on The Right Hook has been announced on George’s radio show. It is Snowgirl from Thurles who wrote]2 of the Sony Ericsson C905 phone. Our favourite line in the review was: “a camera that can call people”.

 

   

 

  

Three Ireland Reviewing Competition

Three Ireland in conjunction with Newstalk Radio, Klipsch and LouderVoice have just launched a reviewing competition for listeners in Ireland of George Hook on the Right Hook Radio Show.

Each week for the next four weeks, the best reviewer can win a Three Ireland handset plus Klipsch Custom-1 headphones. You can send reviews by SMS or write them directly here on the site

The Prizes

Click on the thumbnails for full information on each prize.

If you like what we are doing on LouderVoice, why not vote for us in the Mashable Open Web Awards? You can do it below.

Don’t forget to vote for all your favourite Irish WebApps, many of which can be found over at Web2Ireland.org.

We are incredibly happy to announce that Klipsch has just launched its UK specific site. Not only are they selling amazing audio equipment but the reviews there are powered by LouderVoice.

When you are investing £1000 in a sub-woofer, you want to be sure you are picking the right one. Reviews by other customers can help you make that decision. The Klipsch guys understand that those reviews are a win-win for everyone.

Some nice mentions of LouderVoice yesterday:

Irish Times article by John Collins

BES article by Caroline Madden

Silicon Republic article by John Kennedy

Web2Ireland article by Fergus Burns

For Irish taxpayers, we have just kicked off our BES 2008 offering which is built around the LouderVoice B2B Services. The Business Expansion Scheme provides a way to invest in approved businesses and receive tax-relief on that investment.

If you are interested in hearing more about this investment opportunity or discussing direct equity investment, please contact Conor O’Neill on conor AT loudervoice DOT com or +353-87-9790297.

In summary:

• B2C www.loudervoice.com launched May 2007
• B2B business.loudervoice.com launched October 2008
• Irish Web Awards 2008 Best New Web Service Nominee
• Irish Software Association New Company Award 2008 Nominee
• Participant in the Genesis Enterprise Programme 2008
• Enterprise Ireland Grant Funding as High Potential Start-Up in 2007
• Existing BES Investment in 2007
• New investor funds to be used to grow and market the service Europe-wide
• Revenue Approved Scheme
• Tax Relief available for 2008
• Defined exit mechanism

Over the past few months we have been trialling our business services with several clients. Some of those are already live, others will go live over the next quarter. We now have a very nice brochure site to go with these services and a very powerful content moderation back-end for our clients.

The LouderVoice for Business site gives the high level overview of our services which are currently in three areas:

• White-label review service based on a secure XML API
• SMS reviews and customer feedback
• Custom review widgets

We kicked off SMS reviewing last year using the same structured message format which we devised for Twitter and Jaiku. Whilst it suits a lot of our users, particularly those who want their reviews to appear instantly, many others felt that the structure was overly complex.

Based on this user feedback, we are now launching Simple SMS Reviews. The idea here is that you send your review to the same number as before (+353-87-9409325 or +44-778-6205133), you begin your SMS with the keyword “Re” and then the remainder of the SMS is your review in whatever style you like.

The results are in and the winner of the gorgeous Spicendipity BBQ Hamper is Katie Murphy from Cork. Congratulations Katie, the hamper is on its way from Tullamore right now. Her review of TOC matched our own experiences perfectly.

The Taste of Cork Food Festival is coming this weekend in the deep south of Ireland. There will by myriad stands offering food and beverages to sample including lots of famous Munster Artisan producers.

We’re partnering with several of the exhibitors including Ummera and Bubble Brothers to encourage those who attend to review both the event and the individual stands. Reviews can be submitted by any of the usual methods but SMS seems the most appropriate. Keep an eye out for our flyers on the stands.

Profilactic has been doing Lifestreaming longer than most.

It’s a site where you pull in your profiles from all your social sites like Twitter/Jaiku/Pownce/Bebo/MySpace etc so that your aggregated activity online is visible from one place. It currently supports 186 different social sites and we’re thrilled that they have just added LouderVoice.

Once you’ve signed up for an account, you just have to provide your LouderVoice username for them to pull in the titles of your reviews into your Profilactic lifestream.

Many thanks to Loud Reviewer Frank Prendergast for spotting a bug in our WordPress plug-in. This bug prevented users from setting review posts to publish in the future. The bug has now been fixed and the updated plug-in is available here.

You’ve probably noticed how quiet we’ve been on the blog. Not only have we been fixing a lot of small bugs on the site that crept in with the Version2 launch but we’re been working hard on building our API. This will enable other sites to embed our reviewing functionality on their pages. We’ll be going live very shortly with the first partner on this. This XML API is accessible directly, using a PHP library or using a JS library (with more coming soon).  If this is something you’d like to hear more about, please contact conor AT loudervoice DOT com. We’re putting together some information pages on it at the moment too.

We closed the first phase of the reviews competition a few weeks ago but we were so blown away by the review by Alx Cahiz of the stunning Dervish Longboard that we had to give him a prize.

This wasn’t just review of the week, I think it was review of the month! Looking forward to seeing what else he comes up with. It should also be said that TeamGearedUp is one of the best blogs out there about outdoor sports and activities.

We quietly launched V2 of our LouderVoice on the night before the Irish Blog Awards and have been tweaking for a few weeks. There is a lot more to come but we thought it’d be good to let you know what has changed now since we have a few more announcements coming in the next few days.

The main aim with V2 was to make the activity on the site much more visible to the users and provide more opportunities to interact with others on the site. The most obvious change (apart from the very sexy re-design by Doepud) in that area is that all of the latest/best reviews are visible on every page you visit. We have also added the ability to follow other reviewers so that all of their activity is visible on your logged-in home page on the site.

Bernie Goldbach, well known blogger/journalist/lecturer/consultant got some teenagers to recommend chippers in Tipperary by SMS. We now have 7 of the top Chips in Tipp on LouderVoice. What’s your favourite?

We’ve been working round the clock to get the next version of LouderVoice out the door. We are within a hair’s breadth now! What can you expect to see?

• A big redesign with a much busier home page to enable you to explore the site more easily
• Reviews and comments in-site so you no longer need a blog to write full reviews
• Review images
• Instant sign-up
• Instant sign-up via SMS
• Community features enabling you to follow other users and see their activity on the site
• Avatar images
• Review Drafts
• A new voting system
• Major improvements to tag navigation
• Basic support for Google Maps
• A faster search back-end
• And a ton of other under the hood improvements

Keep an eye out, we know you’re going to like it.

We hope you have your bottle of Italian Red ready. The challenge is to write a review of it in just seven words! All the details on how to send your review to LouderVoice are here. Leave a comment if you have any questions.

The fourth week of the competition (and final week of this phase) is over and we can now announce the winner of a Hairy Baby t-shirt.

Congratulations to Ciarán Rooney, an Irish guy living in London, who wins with his complimentary review of AerLingus.com phone customer support. The review, which he wrote on Jaiku, currently tops Google for “Aer Lingus Support”.

Keep an eye out for the next competition phase which we should be announcing shortly.

Pat Phelan from Cubic Telecom came up with the great idea of getting attendees to review what catches their eye at 3GSM in Barcelona from Feb 11th to 14th. So if you are going, we’d love to get your insights via any of the review methods we support. Just follow these easy steps:

• Sign-up to LouderVoice if you haven’t already
• In “My Settings” add as many of these sources as you like:
  • Mobile phone number for SMS reviews
  • Twitter/Jaiku/Pownce accounts for microblog mini-reviews
  • Blog RSS feed for Flag Tag Reviews
• Then you send reviews as follows:

On your mobile/cell (Review Rating1-5 ItemName: Opinion. #3gsm):

The third week of the competition is over and we can now announce the winner of a Hairy Baby t-shirt.

Laurence Veale from Dublin in Ireland wins with his sharp Twitter review of the western “3.10 to Yuma”. As with all the winners, it looks like Lar’s Google juice is strong.

The approach we have taken with reviews on blogs until now has been built around a standard called hreview. Many bloggers are a fan of this portable format and we continue to support it strongly. But we have received many requests for something more lightweight which still enables people to get their reviews into LouderVoice but takes much less effort.

After trying a variety of approaches we have settled on something we are calling Flag Tags (thanks to Frank Prendergast for coining this). The idea is simple. If you are writing a blog post that is a review, you need to ensure three very basic things:

The second week of the competition is over and we can now announce the winner of a Hairy Baby t-shirt.

Mark Twomey from Cork in Ireland wins with his hilarious review of the Gillette Fusion Power razor. As with last week’s winner, Mark is vying for top spot on google.ie. Well done Mark. His review of Sweeney Todd is pure genius too!

As before, get your reviews in by any of the methods we support and you win a funky t-shirt with a logo like this: