Online Product Reviews and ExpoTV.com

Late last month Walmart.com launched product reviews on its website. According to Cathy Halligan, Walmart CMO, almost 75% of Wal-Mart’s 130 million customers are online (surprise?) and Wal-Mart was losing an opportunity to engage the consumer by not providing product reviews. To encourage feedback, Wal-Mart will email the customer an invitation to post a review after they make a purchase. The trend with online product reviews seems to now be irreversible. Take it one step further - enter ExpoTV.com

ExpoTV figured out a way to take advantage of two of the Internet’s bigger trends: consumer-generated product reviews and video. ExpoTV.com, (Expo Communications) is a site that creates a forum for consumers to upload video reviews of their favorite products and today boasts more than 55,000 video product reviews. Instead of just reading peer reviews of products visitors of the site can watch as fellow consumers go on about the good, the bad, and the ugly of a product.

The site offers many of the current tools of a social based internet user by providing reviews and ratings of the video, you can tag the video, embed the video, a profile of the video creator, you can subscribe to the creator, send him an email and add him to your friends. The above image is the "GoGetItMan" reviewing a pair of retro Air Jordans. A quick search found reviews for Kraft, Nestle, Apple, Dell, Aquafresh toothpaste, HP Printers and bike tires. You can also search by category.

Enter Blinkx. While we are on the subject of new internet video sites - for those looking for another venue to watch news or video check it out. With a much more professional look and current news video - I'm sold. You can watch todays news or search for news about a topic or from a particular geography - and if you are missing your favorite TV shows during the dry TV months of summer - yes, blinkx has them. The group started in 2004 and IPO'd in May of this year on the London Stock Exchange all the while indexing over 14 million hours of video. The site has some really cool widgets ( I added one to this site...see the little TV?).

I wonder what the powers that be have in mind for online video-sharing. Will YouTube diminish as a sort of catch-all? Thoughts?