Aaron Strout:     

Hi, my name is Aaron Strout. Welcome to the We Show.

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Aaron Strout:    

Thank you for joining us on the We Show today. My name is Aaron Strout, and I’m the VP of marketing for Mzinga, a leading provider of workplace and customer community solutions.  This podcast is one in a series and can be found on the WeAreSmarter.org site, Mzinga.com, and iTunes under "We Are Smarter."

Richard Anson:          
Hi there, Aaron. Thanks very much.

Aaron Strout: 
Richard, let’s get started. Tell us a little bit about your background, how you went from being a senior strategy consultant at KPMG. Fast-forward a few years until you founded the company. Give us a little bit of background. Give us a little bit of background on yourself.

Richard Anson:          
Sure: I guess if I start in the very beginning, I started my career in venture capital in the early ‘90s, and I was then in engineering for about five or six years, did a PhD, and then took myself off to business school for a year, really at the height of sort of 1999 or 2000, the last of the major Web boom. I then spent four years in the technology space consulting to web and technology companies and telecom companies. Meanwhile, a good friend of mine founded a very successful online hotel booking business, where they were an early renovator in the review space, and saw a huge uplift in hotel booking rates with customer reviews. I’d spent some time with the business and really saw the power of reviews, both in helping people decide what to buy, but also helping retailers effectively sell more products because they’re getting a better fit with customer needs. In early 2005, I founded Reevoo, with that express aim, really, to help people to decide what to buy, and help retailers sell more products.

We also recognize that the trust was becoming really, really important in the online space. It’s something that’s very difficult to gain, and then once you’ve got it, very difficult to maintain. We also developed Reevoo into a brand that really stands for impartial, trusted, and genuine reviews. All the reviews that you would see associated with the Reevoo brand have always come from somebody that has actually bought the product. It means there’s no spin, there’s no spam, there’s no people trying to game a site to sell more products or the author of books, or indeed manufacturer that’s trying to overly promote their product.

Aaron Strout: 
A perfect segue into our next question, Richard. A lot of community companies mentioned in the book – we build community for other companies ourselves. You really touched on something that people are struggling with. I watch on my Twitter, on Facebook, people are having a lot of problems. You want to be open as a community. You want to be able to sort of reach out to the crowd, and allow them to help you offer these things. I think you have a great secret sauce in the sense that you, unlike Amazon and some of these other sites – and that’s not to knock Amazon – but you found a way to sort of keep some of the spam out and really to make sure that the reviews are authentic. There’s a real power to that. Without giving away your company’s secrets, any advice to companies that are really trying to do the same thing? I mean how did you go about it? It must be a fairly rigorous process to make sure that you’re able to just take the good and the honest, and get rid of the spam and the not-honest?

Richard Anson:          
Sure. We’re quite open about how we work, and indeed it’s important that we are for the impartialness to stand true. Effectively in the UK, we work I guess with most major online retailers. We work with Vodafone – so I guess that’s an international brand – Orange, Carphone Warehouse and major electrical retailers like Dixons and Currys. What we do is after somebody’s bought a product, we e-mail them and we ask them what they think of that product. We use effectively a code-branded e-mail so that people are recognizing that it’s effectively an impartial body, if you like, handling the reviews.

And after somebody has submitted a review, we moderate it, but only in the lighter sense of the word. Our aim is to publish all reviews around a product, good or bad. We absolutely do not edit any of the reviews. We will only not publish a review if it mentions defamatory comments or swear words, or if it mentions service. Our reviews are focused around products. If it mentions service, they’re forwarded directly to the retailer’s account center and not published.

Then what we do, we take it a stage further, so that a review that’s passed through moderation, we then aggregate the reviews we collect around a product. For a review that we’ve collected from somebody who’s bought from Retailer A, say around a digital camera – if the same person has bought that digital camera from another retailer, we aggregate all the customer reviews around that single digital camera. Then we serve those reviews up in real time across the Web onto our retail department sites. At the same time, we publish all the reviews we collect on Reevoo.com, so there’s a truly independent source where people can cross-check. That way, we effectively developed a sort of loop where we know that the reviews are authentic. By aggregating them, you’re creating this impartial basket around a product.

Aaron Strout: 
What I think you’re pointing to, which is probably both a good and a bad message, is it takes work to do this. I think that a lot of people – certainly starting a community is not that difficult, and getting things like consumer reviews is not difficult. But I think doing a good job at it does take some elbow grease, and it’s one of the things that we really espouse, both through the We Are Smarter platform and as a company ourselves, that it takes manual intervention; you have to have set processes in place. You really have to pay attention and keep your eye on the ball. It sounds like you guys are doing a good job with that, so thank you for sharing that process.

I guess, moving into our final question, you’ve been in this space for – I’ll say you’re a grandfather now, since you’ve been in there since ’05 and this space is really just starting to take off now. Best practices that you would share with a new company or an existing company that’s trying to sort of get a foothold into building a customer community, things that you’ve learned along the way or things that you would sort of have them look out for as they move forward?

Richard Anson:          
I guess things that we’ve sort of learned along the way – I think in our case, because of the commitment to this trust and impartiality and quality, there is a huge amount of elbow grease. As well as having the technology – and we have an outstanding technology team here; indeed we just won best use of technology in the UK 2007 Startup Awards, so it’s something I’m very proud of – as well as having that technology, we have spent a huge amount of time building a high-quality operations team that can then manage and scale the processes. We ask different questions across 191 different product categories, so that you’re constantly tailoring it to drive the quality of the reviews so that it’s of maximum value to the end user who, ultimately, is the shopper.

At the same time, as sort of putting those processes in place, there’s also a need to set some framework and some rules around what you stand for. It’s something we did quite early on, and they get challenged all the time by people; they may be retail customers or they may be shoppers. Being prepared to be fairly open and transparent about what you do and what you stand for, despite taking the odd knock here and there, I think those are very important things.

Aaron Strout: 
Well, thank you for sharing that. I think those are themes that continually come up, and it’s easy to say and harder to do. Again, it sounds like – without being overly complimentary – you guys really do do a nice job with that. Congratulations, by the way, for the award that you won.

Richard Anson:          
Thank you very much.

Aaron Strout: 
I think what we’re hearing here is that you guys have done a wonderful job. You provide a great service with your reviews, really a nice consumer benefit. We did a podcast with Angie Hicks of Angie’s List, and she provides a similar service in the US, really more wrapped around services – so, around your house and things like that.

Richard Anson:          
Right. Yeah.

Aaron Strout: 
The couple of themes that we’re hearing are it’s honesty, it takes work. You really have to have not just good technology, but a good process around these kind of things, and really making sure that you’re really keeping your eye on the ball. It’s not always easy to do the thing that’s honest because it can be difficult for business decisions –

Richard Anson:          
Absolutely –

Aaron Strout: 
Congratulations for you guys staying true to your word. Richard, thank you for your time today. I’m trying to be respectful of your time and the audience’s. Thank you for all the listeners for joining in. So, Richard, thank you for taking the time today.

Richard Anson:          
Thanks very much, Aaron. I’ve really enjoyed it.

Thanks so much for joining us. We look forward to seeing you next week.