My good blogger friend Olivia Brown is an avid reader and Amazon reviewer who was selected to participate in the Amazon Vine™ program. Since this is a large scale experiment in word of mouth marketing, I asked Olivia to share her experience and impressions so far.

Without further ado, here is Olivia’s guest post.
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The Amazon Vine Program is an exciting new program for Amazon reviewers. This is what Amazon has to say about their program:

“Amazon Vine™ is a program that enables a select group of Amazon customers to post opinions about new and pre-release items to help their fellow customers make educated purchase decisions. Customers are invited to become Amazon Vine™ Voices based on the trust they have earned in the Amazon community for writing accurate and insightful reviews. Amazon provides Amazon Vine™ members with free copies of products that have been submitted to the program by vendors. Amazon does not influence the opinions of Amazon Vine™ members, nor do we modify or edit their reviews.”

Basically, Vine is a way for authors and vendors to market their projects in anticipation of their release to the public by soliciting advance reviews from independent Amazon reviewers, which Amazon calls “Voices”. In return, as a “Voice”, I get free products and as an early adopter, get the thrill of experiencing and reviewing products ahead of the general public, which for me is a lot of fun.

I’m not exactly sure what criteria Amazon used to select which reviewers received invitations. I am currently in the Top 1000 Reviewers (#721) and have almost 1500 reviews (written over a ten year period). I also buy a lot of products from Amazon. It seems to me that Amazon used some combination of reviewer ranking, number of helpful votes, and even (some have suggested) volume of Amazon purchasing in order to determine who to invite.

This is the second month of Vine. The first month, I was slow to respond to the initial newsletter announcing the free products, and Vine was out of everything by the time I was ready to make my selection. This is a key problem with Vine, one which Amazon is trying to correct—products are depleted within a few minutes of the newsletter being sent out—and you don’t know on what day or at what time it will be sent, making participation challenging. Amazon replenished their stock, and later in the month I was able to order, receive, and review a book. It was okay, but nothing special. Someone trying to get a book marketed.

As far as I can tell, products that are offered are not ones that are marketed extensively elsewhere—they seem to be lesser known and less popular products. These are not necessarily bad products or useless products, just…well, for example, this month (month two) they offered three novels, three non-fiction books, some speakers for an iPod, a hand moisturizing glove, some massage cushions, some laundry detergent, a glass cleaner, a video game, and a juvenile novel. The most desirable item to me—the speakers—were of course sold out. So were the laundry soap and the glass cleaner. The other items were of low interest to me, and apparently to others, as they are still in stock. So I could order them if I wanted to, but I don’t have the time or inclination to read or use things that don’t interest me just to get them for free.

The best part of my participation with Amazon so far is that earlier in the month they sent me a Flip Ultra Camcorder to encourage me to do video reviews. I’m not sure if this was related to Vine, or because of my reviewer status. I love this little gadget, and have started not only video reviewing, but video blogging. Love it—and it was free to me!

Vine is an experimental program, and I expect Amazon to continue to refine it. Right now it seems like a win-win set-up—as an easy way to create a buzz about little-known products for authors and vendors and free products for customer reviewers. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about this later.
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Thanks, Olivia!