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We don’t usually link to our competitors’ marketing collateral; they don’t usually link to ours.  But when we saw PowerReviews’ latest case study of their “Social Answers” product running on Skechers.com, we thought it would be interesting to check out just how “Social” it really is.  We figured: if this is the site they are featuring in their newest case study, it has got to be their newest product and a best-practice implementation.

So we did a simple test.  We asked a normal shopper question on each of 8 products on Skechers.com through the PowerReviews tool and we asked the identical question about the identical product on Shoes.com, which also sells Skechers shoes and uses TurnTo for Social Q&A.  Like usual, we kept track of when answers were posted, and if the answers were emailed before they were posted we counted the earlier email time.  Half the questions were asked on both sites at around 9:00am eastern, and half were asked at around 1:00pm.

The bottom line: TurnTo generated >3X more answers total, >90% were truly “Social” (from actual past customers), most arrived in 1/3 the time, with 1/4 the staff workload vs PowerReviews.

• Just one hour after the questions were submitted, the 8 questions asked through the TurnTo system had generated 7 social answers.  There were no answers to the questions asked through the PowerReviews system.
• At 8 hours, the TurnTo system had delivered 16 social answers and 2 staff answers.  Still none through PowerReviews.
• At 24 hours, TurnTo was up to 20 social and 2 staff answers.  PowerReviews delivered 8 staff answers – one to each question – but no social answers.  In fact, even after 2 weeks, PowerReviews never produced a social answer.
• At 24 hours, 7 of the 8 questions asked through TurnTo had received at least 2 answers total, including at least one social answer.  One of the TurnTo questions was unanswered.  The 8 questions asked through PowerReviews received one staff answer each.

Skechers says they’ve seen a 30% increase in sales when Q&A is installed on their product pages.  We believe it, and we congratulate them!  Social Q&A is a powerful way to increase conversion and to create the sort of user-generated content that search engines increasingly favor.

But we also wonder: imagine how much better their results would have been if their Social Q&A system delivered 3X more answers with most answers coming from actual past customers in under 8 hours (many in under 1 hour), the way TurnTo’s does?

Appendix: here are the specific questions asked on each shoe type.

For the last few months, Shoes.com has been evaluating TurnTo Social Q&A vs. a competing Q&A tool by running them side-by-side on their product detail pages. We took the opportunity to run a comparison of the social answer rates the two systems deliver.

We asked typical shopper questions through both the TurnTo and competing systems about 6 different products; for each product, we asked the identical question through both systems. And we kept track of exactly when the answers came in. As with past tests we’ve run, we monitored both the time when we received an answer email and the time the answer appeared on the Shoes.com website, and we credited the earlier time if there was any difference. Since the TurnTo system had just been installed, Shoes.com had not yet begun providing staff answers for the TurnTo questions, but we kept track of the staff answers from the competing system anyway. You can see all the questions we asked at the bottom of this post.

Overall, the TurnTo system generated 27 social answers in the first 24 hours. The competing system generated no social answers in that period and only 4 social answers total after 4 weeks. In total, the TurnTo system generated over 7x the amount of social answers as the competing system.

The next charts show the answers received question-by-question at both the 24 hour mark and at 4 weeks.  After just 24 hours, 100% of the questions asked through the TurnTo system received at least 1 social answer.   On the other hand, 2 of the questions asked through the competing system never received any social answers, even after 4 weeks.

TurnTo Social Q&A once again generated dramatically more and faster interaction between shoppers and past customers.  If you are interested in upgrading to results like these, give us a call.

These are the questions we asked about each product: