When I first moved to the UK, I lived in Whitechapel in London, very near Brick Lane. If you don't know, Brick Lane is very famous for being full of very good curry houses.
A visitor might well want to know: which is the best one? So they will look at reviews and awards that they might find in the windows of the curry houses.
And this is where they hit the Brick Lane Problem. It turns out that all of them are the best!
One will have an award from one outlet and a top review from another, and the one next to it will the same award from a different outlet, or a different year, or a different category. Which is not surprising, as they are all good curry houses, but it makes the reviews and awards meaningless.
I've seen a rise in the "software review" and associated "awards" for being Best X in Y category being put forward by software vendors, and while they make for pretty badge images for their websites, I think they are similarly meaningless.
First - no one just goes and reviews software. The companies ask their users to do so. Surprise, they ask the happy ones. And any software company that survives long enough will have happy customers - even if the majority of their customers are unhappy. Useless.
Second - the review companies want to sell nice shiny badges to the companies. To do that, they make comically specific categories - different industries, company sizes, geographies, and for every different measure (ease of use, powerful features, blah blah blah). The idea being that basically any software company, once they submit a few reviews, will be the best in one or more specific slices. Review company charges for a fancy report about it, software company puts it on LinkedIn and sends it to their prospects. Also useless.
It also cuts out newer vendors because all the reviews are is a proxy for having lots of customers. A new entrant could have 20 customers who all want to marry the software, but they won't register.
So unfortunately, reviews don't help. What would be useful is if every customer reviewed their software. But that will never happen, so we could all save a lot of time and money by throwing the whole concept out, and just saying how many customers each vendor has.
Which leaves us with what you should be doing anyway - deep dive and hands-on sessions with vendor and implementer, and if you fancy it some customer references (although - similar problem with selecting only happy ones!).