In the late 1990s, I worked with a stellar team of PR people supporting HP's NetServer division. One of my tasks was to make sure that we built a plan to make HP the #1 ranked server family amongst its competitors including IBM, Compaq and Dell. From the time we started to the time we ended, HP rose from a qualitiative perspective to the best reviewed product line in the space. To discuss how we did that would be a different blog - but it involved a lot of work, relationship management with product reviewers and sometimes making difficult decisions about when NOT to be in a competitive product review.
Fast forward to today, where two of my former colleagues, Lynn Fox and Jon Zilber work at Palm. As you may have heard leading up to CES in early January, Palm needed a home run with the launch of the Pre.
They got it.
Palm's stock was up 35% on January 9 right after all of the CES buzz hit and as of this blog posting a week later has almost doubled again.
The Palm Pre got many best of show awards and an obscene amount of positive media coverage at CES that is the hallmark of Lynn and Jon's careers, but the most interesting award to me as an old product review guy was the CNET People's Voice award, decided by over 10,000 CNET readers.
Great PR people still play a vital role in product reviews and awards. But now more than ever I hear clients talk about reader choice awards/consumer opinions. Amazon.com offers aggregate consumer ratings on a wide range of products, including software. Many publications have reader's choice awards. ePinions and Yelp offer reviews for consumers, by consumers.
In this environment, among the most important people in your product reviews initiatives are not your PR team but your product development teams. Social media plays a key role in helping product designers know what consumers are talking about and what they want. Monitoring blogs, Twitter feeds and other forums can help designers understand their target user pain points. The problem is how to sift through all of this information - but there are a growing number of ways to do this.
Having an active ear to the ground doesn't replace great vision - but it sure helps.
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