I'm a little late on this since some of the big tech news sites like TechCrunch and CIO.com covered this back in February, but over the weekend I finally got around to checking out a site called G2Crowd, and the simplest way to describe it is as a 'Yelp for Enterprise Software.'
By now we are all familiar and possibly reliant on the crowdsourced reviews and ratings paradigm popularized by sites like Yelp for restaurants and bars, TripAdvisor for travel destinations, and certainly Amazon.com for books, music, heck just about everything. There continues to be tremendous popularity and value for sites to gather, interpret, and categorized real live customer experiences with products and services for just about anything that can be purchased. But while consumers and users love these sites, as they generally provide neutral, unbiased, and sometimes massive amounts of information about the quality and value of a product/service, many suppliers have come to fear and loathe these sites, as one or two poor reviews can sometimes cause serious damage to a business' reputation and sales.
But for whatever reason despite there existing a 'Yelp' equivalent for seemingly just about everything, there really isn't a large, successful manifestation of the crowdsourced review and ratings site for Enterprise Software. That is the gap that G@Crowd is trying to fill, providing a platform and frameworks for enterprise customers and users of technologies like CRM, ERP, Accounting, and yes HR Technology as well, to enter product reviews and ratings just as people do for the local BBQ joint on Yelp.
The process to create a software product review on G2Crowd is familiar to anyone who has used Yelp or TripAdvisor, but with one important difference - G2Crowd requires the reviewer to log in with their LinkedIn credentials, which serves a few important ends. One, (with limited exceptions), reviewers identities are not anonymous; two, G2Crowd 'knows' based on the LinkedIn profile, at what company and in what role the reviewer was working in at the time of the review; and three, G2Works can police phony reviews left by people working for or against any of the software companies themselves.
The idea is simple really, a set of unbiased ratings and reviews of enterprise software solutions like Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, etc., that can be aggregated, (over time, and if enough scale is achieved), produce a valuable and previously unavailable resource for organizations that are evaluating software for themselves. In addition to the individual product reviews, G2Crowd has started to create, based on the review data, their own version of the 'analyst grid', positioning competing firms in a given market segment in comparison to each other, the most famous of which is the Gartner Magic Quadrant. But rather than a Magic Quadrant that represents, in the end, the opinions of one or a few analysts, the G2Crowd grid would reflect the collective experience and opinion of potentially thousands of users. In theory not necessarily a 'better' way to compare vendors, but certainly a different one, and one that if G2Crowd can continue to keep the reviews clean, would potentially be more important, (and accessible), than what the traditional analyst firms create.
Will G2Crowd catch on with enough users and customers to generate the kind of scale it needs to be a truly valuable resource to the enterprise software buyer?
Hard to say. It is a new site, and there seems to be some decent traction and volume on the CRM market. If you spend some time checking out the HR software reviews you will see they are a little thin.
But how about this? How about if everyone who reads this blog and is a current user of one of the big HR software solutions heads over to G2Crowd this week and drops a product review?
That might be a way to get this kind of endeavor a little more attention for the HR market, and perhaps also show how all of you as users of these solutions really do have the power to influence the market.
What do you think - would a site like G2Crowd be helpful to you and your organization?