This interview was conducted with Marty Carroll of pownum.

Q. What does your company do?

Pownum lets the public rate and review all types of organizations – think AT&T, Dell, Greenpeace, United Airlines, etc – at pownum.com and on the phone with an iPhone app. There’s a lot of talk about transparency but pownum will make it a reality. The idea is that it introduces a new level of openness between organizations and consumers, makes plain which organizations are really customer centric and helps other consumers make more informed brand choices. pownum is short for ‘power in numbers’.

Each organisation has the ability to respond to the opinion expressed using something called the Right of Reply and we ask them to pay a fee for this. We are donating half of each Right of Reply fee to charity and hope to donate more than $10m to charity over 5 years. The people decide which charities are donated to by nominating them on pownum and by voting for the charities that get the proportion of the donations. You can see this now at http://www.pownum.com/charity/.

So with pownum everyone wins: people have their say, organizations act and charities benefit.

Q. Who are your competitors?

We have different types of competitors. Get Satisfaction, UserVoice and Vanno are companies we like that are addressing the problem in a different way to us. Companies are also spending big on social media monitoring tools to help with internal decision making but what we’re offering is an open and independent platform that provides insights to the companies themselves but also a very valuable service to consumers. Our biggest challenge though is simply existing human behaviour. Up to now people have not had a quick and easy way to express their opinions of organizations. With pownum they can do so within seconds so we’re looking to change people’s mindset so that they can now feel empowered.

Q. What marketing tactic has given you the highest ROI? What percentage ROI do you get back on this?

We are pre-revenue so can’t answer this question specifically. We went live in May and knew from the start that getting the volume of ratings was critical. We built pownum from the ground up for sharing ratings automatically on Twitter and Facebook. So with every new person who signs up we acquire others through network effects. The charity aspect to our proposition has helped to facilitate positive word of mouth. The charities themselves are keen to mobilize their followers to vote for them. We designed the voting so that people who rate more on pownum carry more weight in their voting using a gaming inspired ranking system. This is working really well for us.

Q. How are you marketing your company?

Our focus right now is the UK with a view to building awareness in the much bigger US market over time. It sounds crazy but we are attempting to build the brand without any traditional advertising at all. We have engaged in guerilla marketing to date – reverse graffiti on pavements with provocative calls to action and a tour of the major UK cities in a frightening-looking branded truck asking people to tell us which is the best company in the land. We’re about to invest in Facebook advertising to drive consumer volumes and highly targeted LinkedIn advertising to get the attention of corporates. Therefore, all of our spend to date has been on PR but will increasingly be through social media advertising, particularly as we aim to build a US presence.