Social media: bringing it all together
Crowdsourcing enterprise software reviews
Many companies that are facing decisions about enterprise software consult with analysts, conduct rigorous in-house research and seek out opinions from trusted colleagues. It is likely that they also scour the Internet for reviews to augment that information. Like much Internet content, however, those reviews may be unverifiable and difficult to compare across products.
G2 Crowd has taken on the challenge of collecting information from validated users of a wide variety of software products and putting them on one site. The company uses its own surveys, which typically include 50 to 60 questions ranging from technical performance to customer service. The site contains reviews for products in about 20 major categories such as customer relationship management (CRM), marketing, content management and collaboration, and several hundred sub-categories within them.
“Our primary focus is to provide a service that allows buyers to make a better decision based on the experience of other users,” says Tim Handorf, president and co-founder of G2 Crowd. “From the reviews, we create a proprietary grid that places the products based on market presence and customer satisfaction. Our leader category includes products that rank high on both.” To gain a place on the grid, a product must show market presence according to 50 different indicators, and must have at least 10 reviews.
Reviewers log in via LinkedIn, which prevents anonymous participation. G2 Crowd screens the questionnaires and analyzes the data. “We make sure the reviewers and the vendors are legitimate,” Handorf says. “The quality and the trustworthiness of our reviews is high, and vendors have started referring potential buyers to our site.”
After a user selects a product category, a page with a listing is presented, on which users can select their company’s size and industry sector to filter the choices. For example, the big data page shows about a dozen products, but when users click a checkbox indicating their company size is 500 or fewer employees, just one product remains. When reading reviews about a particular product, users can also choose to read those from companies of particular sizes.
Access to reviews is free. “People accustomed to reading reviews on Yelp do not want to pay for reviews,” Handorf says, “so that is not part of our pricing model.” G2 Crowd sells its reports to buyers, and vendors can relicense them for use. Vendors receive a dashboard showing a summary of the evaluations, and can purchase a premium page with additional features.