Importance of Product Review Syndication?

[airnwater]

Greetings everyone

I have been tasked to do research on just how important it is to have product reviews syndicated with Google's (star rating found in Google Shopping). I am unable to find any research reports or studies on this nor any quantitative data on it's impact, beneficial or otherwise.

If any of you folks have any first hand experiences, perhaps some before and after figures, that would be great.

Thanks

[WAWKA]

Did you manage to finish your research on this particular subject? if so i would be extremely interested in hearing about your findings.

[KeriMorgret]

I don't have figures or the first-hand experiences, but because there haven't been any others chiming in, I wanted to offer links to recent conference coverage about ratings and reviews. The session did talk about the reviews and stars in Google. If you contacted the speakers, they might be able to give you some more information.

SMX West 2011 session coverage by Lisa Barone:

http://outspokenmedia.com/internet-marketing-conferences/ratings-reviews/

Rhea Drysdale's presentation at that session, including some ranking factors.

http://www.slideshare.net/rdrysdale/smx-west-2011-ratings-reviews-reputation-their-growing-impact-on-search

[DiamondJewelryEmpire]

We actually have seen some positive results from getting new reviews on local results, after updating out google places page. We start getting more impressions and obviously clicks. So I would say there is a some sort of correlation between reviews and local results. However I am not sure if this goes further than that.