TECHCRUNCH — PowerReviews, a company that provides customer review technology for retailers and e-commerce sites, has raised $6.1 million in funding led by current investors Menlo Ventures and Tenaya Capital. This brings the company’s total funding to over $30 million. The additional funding will be used fuel customer acquisition and for new product development...

EMARKETER — Social media marketers looking for an indication that their efforts are helping the bottom line will be encouraged by findings from Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate that social friends and followers feel more inclined to purchase from the brands they are fans of. More than one-half of Facebook fans said they are more likely to make a purchase for at least a few brands, and 67% of Twitter followers reported the same...

THE MARKETING SPOT — In my recent podcast interview with local search expert Mike Ramsey, he emphasized the importance of customer reviews in the local search results: "Google, as well as gathering business information data, they gather reviews from all across the web...Companies that have reviews, especially those that have large amounts of reviews, it helps rankings." Mike Blumenthal has an excellent piece on his blog about Asking for Reviews, explaining how Texas apartment locating service, UMoveFree, collected and leveraged reviews. It's a great piece with some strong take-aways...

TECHCRUNCH — Last August, we wrote about Lunch.com, a reviews site that’s setting out with the goal to make the world a better place by changing the way people think about each other (as I wrote then, it’s a pretty lofty goal). Today, the company is launching a new feature called Communities that lets users build their own review sites around any niche topic. The new feature can be likened to a ‘Ning for review sites’. As a community founder, you select a topic on whatever you’d like, then invite other users to contribute reviews and other content (you can elect to moderate this as it comes in)...

IMEDIA CONNECTION — Researcher Daniel J. Howard conducted a study to see if small personal interactions make a difference in phone sales. Dallas residents were called and asked if they would let a nonprofit representative come to their homes and sell them cookies, with the proceeds to be used to buy meals for the needy. Only 18 percent agreed. But when the caller started by asking, "How are you feeling this evening?" and waited for a reply, almost double the number of residents -- 32 percent -- agreed to a visit from the cookie seller. Even more astounding? Once someone followed up by paying a visit, nearly everyone (89 percent) made a cookie purchase...