I had an opportunity to attend a webinar yesterday with some of the PR group I do a lot of work with. The webinar was hosted by PRNews and titled Building Community & Reputation Online With Social Media Tools.

Sam Decker of Bazaarvoice was one of the presenters and he talked about using User Generated Content, such as user reviews to generate more sales at your site. As a matter of fact, a recent Sherpa study found that 58% of online shoppers prefer sites with reviews.

Who do you trust more when getting information on a potential purchase - a sales rep or marketer? Or do you trust someone else like you, who has already purchased the product you are looking at?

I think that there are two main reasons why word of mouth or user reviews are so powerful.

It’s all about the money

For one, we perceive that it is less likely that the reviewer has a monetary stake in the sale of the product, therefore they are really telling the truth as to how good the product is or is not. The sales rep or marketer will most definitely receive some form of monetary gain from the sale of the product.

It’s all about the experience

Secondly, who is going to be able to better tell us the benefits of a product, how it is used, what works great, and what the product’s downfalls are? The user who purchased, used and reviewed the product. After all, word of mouth advertising has been around for a long time has always been perceived as more “authentic”.

The sales pitch could tell us the product benefits, but we are naturally going to be more drawn to the product if other users can sing its praises or warn us of a sub-standard product.

What about paid reviews?

Does the fact that a reviewer was compensated in some way diminish the value of the review? I think it all depends on the source. If the reviewer does a nice job of giving us the products pros and cons and let’s the reader know that it is a paid review, then no, it doesn’t diminish the value of the review (in my opinion).

What does this mean for your business?

Let your customers do some of your sales work for you! Give them a platform to speak their minds whether through user reviews or comments. Then take that information and implement it in a meaningful way at your site by featuring top rated products or in the case of a blog, use the popularity plug in to help you feature your most popular posts.

The webinar was very interesting and over the next few days I will share more of the insights and statistics I found helpful.

Join the conversation! What do you think of user generated content for generating sales? What are some examples of sites that really implement this strategy well?

As the date for the blogging conference, SOBcon, nears I will be spending a few minutes talking with some of the people who are making it happen, starting with Chris Cree of SuccessCreeations.

What was the inspiration for SOBcon?

Liz Strauss and I had talked some last year about possibly doing a business blogging conference in Savannah. But as we looked at it more closely, my wife and I felt that the project would be bigger than we wanted to take on ourselves right then.

At the same time a couple other people approached Liz suggesting that it would be a great idea to gather some of the crowd that meets at Successful-Blog every Tuesday on Open Comment Night.

Chicago seemed like a great central place to bring people together. And with the idea coming from several different directions at the same time, it made sense to move forward.

We decided to build the conference around the S.O.B. Award that Liz passes out each week. The idea was to come up with a different kind of conference experience. Instead of making our conference about the speakers we chose to make the conference about the attendees.

Using Open Comment Night as an inspiration, we’ve put together a large group of folks who will be leading sessions with the idea that they will be as interactive with the attendees as possible.

Blogging ultimately is about people and interacting with one another. The most successful blogs out there build a sense of community. So we’ve pulled together a truly dynamic group of folks and will have several shorter sessions rather than just a few speakers talking at you for a long time like you might find in

The overarching theme for the whole thing will be helping folks take their blogging to the next level. The way we’ve set it up there will be plenty to take away for everyone, from the novice blogger just getting started to the person who’s been blogging since Technorati was only tracking a few million blogs.

What will you (meaning Chris Cree) be speaking on? What do you want attendees to gain from this?

I’ll be moderating a panel about blogging tools with representatives from MyBlogLog, Evoca, and TheGoodBlogs. These three services are great ways that bloggers can add tremendous value to their own blogs and build community at the same time. We will be taking questions from the audience for each of these folks so it will be a chance for folks to find out what they want to learn about these tools.

I was offered the opportunity to have my own time on the platform. But I figure the conference isn’t about me. And with my background in operations, planning things out, making things happen, and solving problems quickly on the fly I felt I would add more value to the conference by helping out more behind the scenes the day of the conference.

By bringing together some blog tools that folks may or may not have heard of I figure I’m multiplying the value I bring to the conference more than I would by just speaking on my own.

Will the conference only benefit bloggers?

That’s a really good question that I hadn’t considered before. Obviously our intention initially was to bring together bloggers and help them take their blogs to the next level.

But when you think about it successful bloggers are also successful networkers. For someone looking at the possibility of getting started blogging, what better way to get a really solid network out of the gate than to get to know some folks who are already knocking it out of the park?

I mean think about an opportunity hang out and rub elbows with folks like Steve Farber, Mike Wagner, David Armano, Wendy Piersall, Phil Gerbyshak, Liz Strauss, Dr. Rob Wolcott, and Andy Sernovitz. That is just a tiny sampling of the folks who will be in the room at this conference. And not all of them are even speaking!

Is an opportunity to spend some time with these all these folks and more valuable to non-bloggers? There is no doubt in my mind the answer is a resounding yes!

Which speaker are you most looking forward to hearing?

I’m especially looking forward to the panel session from the Iowa contingent, Drew McLellan, Mike Sansone, and Mike Wagner.

I’m an operations guy by training and experience. These three will be talking about marketing. And that’s an area that I am always wanting to learn more about.

Which session do you think will be most valuable?

I guess that depends on where someone is when they get to the conference. If you are hungry to gain more insight on Networking, Marketing, Videoblogging or Podcasting, Design, or Word of Mouth Marketing, there will be a session for you. There will be sessions by Blog Coaches and there will be some blog critiques done right there live.

Ultimately, though I suspect the most valuable session for many folks will be the Live Open Comment Night that we have planned on Friday night right after the concert by Christine Kane.

I think that session will be the most valuable because it will be the most interactive of all the sessions and it will give people an opportunity to begin to get to know one another. It will be a great starting point for people to start adding to their networks.

Have you registered yet? What are you waiting for? It is going to be a great event - an event like no other!

Wendy Piersall of eMomsAtHome and Steve Olson are having a little competition. It involves MyBlogLog and Kiva.org. Wendy is trying to get more people to join Steve’s MyBlogLog community and Steve is drumming up members for Wendy’s community. Oh, and they are doing it all for a good cause - Kiva.org.

So Wendy was leading the contest until she caught wind of the tactics Steve was using to get members for her community and she decided it was time to take off the gloves! In the name of disclosure, Wendy has offered to pay me to blog about their little competition.
So go join Steve’s community so Wendy can win! If you want more information on this whole contest, check out Wendy’s blog and get involved.

And Wendy, you can take the amount you offered for blogging about this and add it to your Kiva donation kitty.