'Net Features : bazaarvoice

Measure & Monitor Customer Reviews

Amberly Dressler — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 17:00:00 GMT

Study after study proves to Web workers the importance of customer ratings and reviews in terms of directly impacting sales. And companies are looking for an easy way to manage and integrate this high-value content into their social program.

That’s the idea behind a new partnership that integrates Bazaarvoice technology into the Spredfast SMMS platform.

“With our Bazaarvoice integration, we’re giving our customers the ability to not only monitor and leverage this content in their social programs, but also to target the content based on a consumer’s social connections, interests and location to further boost engagement,” said Rod Favaron, CEO of Spredfast.

According to Spredfast, the new functionality this integration brings includes:

• Real-Time Monitoring of Ratings and Reviews: pull ratings and reviews directly into the Spredfast Social Inbox to get a more holistic view of conversations, and build custom search streams to focus on specific products, ratings and review feedback.

• Streamlined Ratings and Reviews Management: take actions on a review by routing it to the correct team and identify positive ratings and reviews to use as social content.

• Social Amplification: easily leverage positive reviews in social content, campaigns and ads. Spredfast prepopulates amplified posts with key components of the review, including product, location, rating and a link to the product page, and customers can then customize and target the messages to increase the likelihood of engagement.

• Measurement: tag review content when it is published to social networks to measure the content’s effectiveness.

“The tighter integration between Spredfast and Bazaarvoice helps increase the opportunity for organizations to quickly and easily engage their communities with authentic ratings and reviews content that can build both brand awareness and affinity,” said Jim Petty, vice president, technology partnerships at Bazaarvoice.

The Twitter Influence in Focus

Allison Howen — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 16:30:00 GMT

It is no secret that Twitter influences brand-related conversations on the Web, but a new Bazaarvoice study is shedding light on how this chatter can be used to help marketers drive their business.

The Conversation Index Volume 5 takes a look at how consumers use Twitter to talk about brands as well as analyzes social's connections to both routine and major events. The report is based on an analysis of 26 million tweets, each of which mentioned at least one of 13 brands from the BrandZ Global 100 Brands list, including Adidas, Clinique, Colgate, Gillette, Hugo Boss, Nike, Pampers, Pepsi, Ralph Lauren, Samsung, Intel, Tesco and Sony. Then, this data was compared with more than 8,000 TV and radio mentions, 17 months of stock price data, more than a year-and-a-half of Google search data and 270,000 pieces of consumer-generated content from online reviews.

The study’s findings show that tweet patterns tend to correlate with stock performance. In fact, a high Twitter volume tends to accompany a high closing price, which implies that the same triggers that make stocks move upward also lead to increased social chatter. Additional insights found that product reviews tend to mention prices more often when consumer confidence is low, which makes it no surprise that price mentions also tend to fall as the Dow Industrial Average rises.

The report also found that Twitter is used differently than other channels because users tend to reveal personal interactions with brands. For example, the report compared search terms that include “Adidas” to mentions of “Adidas” on Twitter, and found that top Adidas search terms tend to be at the level of product lines and categories rather than specific items, while people on Twitter were more likely to mention what “new” products they’re wearing, and use words such as “my” and “I.” Some of the other top Twitter terms associated with Adidas referenced specific campaigns, including the hashtag #branch309adidasday. This information is important because by analyzing text within tweets, businesses can identify brand advocates as well as monitor consumer responses to news, events and campaigns.

However, one of the most interesting data points from the study found that the proportion of brand-oriented Tweets that include a link is decreasing – from 68 percent in 2010 and 55 percent in 2011 to 51 percent in the first half of 2012. This indicates that consumers are progressively talking about brands instead of just pointing to items that they bought or want to buy with a link.

While content about brands on Twitter is becoming more conversational, the Bazaarvoice report shows that less of the conversation is actually about the brand. In fact, the study found that original tweets about brands are declining, while retweeted brand mentions are on the rise. In fact, the proportion of original tweets with brand mentions has fallen from 85 percent in 2010 to 82 percent in 2011 and 78 percent to this point in 2012. In order to maintain and improve brand-oriented Twitter conversations, businesses should analyze their social data to discover which tweets are generating positive conversations, so that they can emulate these tweets and optimize future content.

“Social data offers a critical new stream of insights for brands and the industry. The social ecosystem is broad; conversations happen on brand sites and on social channels, across an ever-increasing set of devices," said Erin Nelson, CMO of Bazaarvoice. "As social content and data expands, so does the scope of our knowledge about how it both influences and mirrors activity across the digital and physical worlds. Sharing these insights with our clients and the industry is the driving force behind The Conversation Index."

Customer Intelligence at Bazaarvoice

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 19:00:00 GMT

Social commerce solution Bazaarvoice just released a customer intelligence tool, an offering which aims to reveal insights from customer conversations (and customer sentiment) to drive decision making across the enterprise including for including sales, marketing, customer service, merchandising and product teams.

"To succeed, companies must get to ground truth about how products are perceived by different customer segments. Now they finally can," said Brett Hurt, Founder and CEO of Bazaarvoice. "For the first time in history, word of mouth is a structured, digitally archived medium that can be sliced, diced, integrated, and analyzed to deliver actionable insights that were never possible before. This is a tremendous opportunity, and it will change the way marketing and merchandising is done forever.”

The solution enables users to identify top promoters and detractors through "advocacy" and "influencer" ratings, and integrates with internal business data and CRM systems.

"Bazaarvoice Customer Intelligence allows 3M to proactively surface the customer motivations that drive our online community engagements, product by product, segment by segment," said Raj Rao, Global Director of Digital Marketing & eCommerce at 3M. "It is a tremendous asset across multiple brands and market channels, and we are learning new ways to connect with our customers."

New Patent Drives Results for PowerReviews

Linc Wonham — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 19:00:00 GMT

Social commerce solutions provider PowerReviews has received a new patent relating to the method in which it delivers user-generated product reviews to more than 4,700 websites globally. This is the second patent PowerReviews has received for social commerce innovation since 2009.

PowerReviews’ Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery methods make it possible to display user-generated content on brands’ product pages in a format that is easily crawled by search engine spiders, making it a leader in the space along with Bazaarvoice and others.

“The SEO value of user-generated content is essential to our business,” says Kimberly Ruthenbeck, Director of Web Customer Experience at home furnishings retailer Room & Board. “PowerReviews’ technology allows us to drive more traffic directly to our product pages and increase sales.”

In November 2009, PowerReviews received its first patent relating to its Review Snapshot, a technology that helps provide consumers with a structured review summary. In a study of over 400 Internet shoppers, PowerReviews’ structured reviews were preferred 2-to-1 over traditional reviews for making more informed purchase decisions.

“Because of our multi-tenant SaaS model—which ensures all customers are on a single code base—we can consistently deliver innovations that produce results for our customers,” says Nadim Hossain, Vice President of Marketing for PowerReviews. “We’re pleased to be recognized by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for our technology, validating our commitment to social commerce innovation.”

AT&T, Bazaarvoice Offer Ratings and Reviews on Facebook

Administrator — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 09:35:00 GMT

AT&T has joined forces with Bazaarvoice to enable its customers to read, share and submit product reviews directly on the company's Facebook fan page. AT&T, which has offered product ratings and reviews on its own site since 2008, is the first in the telecommunications industry to bring customer ratings and reviews onto Facebook to help consumers with their purchase decisions and connect more closely with its brand through their peers.

The Bazaarvoice ratings and reviews system allows AT&T customers to share their feedback on devices and accessories. Featured within a ratings tab on AT&T’s Facebook brand page, visitors can review a wide variety of different products by using a five-star scale to measure overall satisfaction.

Users can also view recent reviews that were posted directly onto Facebook or the brand site, and they can browse reviews of featured, top or popular products. Additionally, visitors can take advantage of the “buy it now” functionality, which links directly to the specific product page on att.com to complete their purchase and drive the Facebook-to-website conversion cycle.

Bazaarvoice’s social commerce solutions have served more than 165 billion pieces of customer-generated content on more than 1,000 brand websites such as Best Buy, Costco, Dell and Macy’s. The company connects organizations with influencers through a network that reaches hundreds of millions of consumers around the globe.

BazaarVoice Big with Big Brands

E-Commerce Express : feature — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 21:00:00 GMT

Social commerce solution BazaarVoice announced today that more than 1,000 brands (including Best Buy, Costco, Dell, Macy's, P&G, Panasonic, QVC, and others) now use its services. “Over the past five years, the social web has shifted power...(read more)

Online Shoppers Consuming Reviews in Record Numbers

E-Commerce Express : feature — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 09:00:00 GMT

New data from social commerce solutions provider Bazaarvoice underscores the dramatic change taking place in the shopping behaviors of online consumers. Bazaarvoice is one of the leading providers of user-generated ratings and reviews, sharing the competitive...(read more)

Reviews Getting Five-star Treatment from Luxury Retailers

Linc Wonham — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 20:30:00 GMT

For all of the discussion about product ratings and reviews in the past year, their widespread adoption by the world’s most upscale retailers has not gained much mention – until now.

Just in time for the holiday rush, Saks Fifth Avenue is rolling out its new ratings and reviews system powered by Bazaarvoice on Saks.com. While the larger shift toward ratings and reviews throughout the e-commerce industry has been discussed here often, Saks’ move is indicative of a more recent trend among some of the world’s most established retailers of luxury items.

Later this month Saks will unveil its five-star reviews platform, similar to the Bazaarvoice-powered system that was implemented by Nordstrom at this time last year. More recently, Bloomingdales and Nieman Marcus have installed their own online reviews platforms in which customers can share their opinions about products ranging in price from a few dollars for cosmetics to several thousand dollars for designer shoes, dresses and handbags.

It is an interesting and perhaps significant new relationship between upscale retail and the increasingly effective online selling mechanism of user-generated reviews. With Internet sales improving at a faster rate than their in-store counterparts, ratings and reviews platforms are a way for retailers to generate more e-commerce revenues for the holidays and beyond.

But the marriage between customer product reviews and luxury retailers may take some getting used to for some. Already, fashion designers and certain brand’s executives have expressed the need for some changes in their own attitudes if their products and creations are to be open for online appraisal and not just reviewed more intimately by an elite group of journalists and consumers.

The fact that Saks, Nordstrom, Bloomingdales and Nieman Marcus have gone in this direction reflects their assertion that e-commerce is vital to the success of their businesses and that of the brands they carry, and that ratings and reviews are vital to their success in e-commerce. The next step is determining if the two are, in fact, the right fit.

Bazaarvoice is one of the leading providers of product ratings and reviews, and – on the other end of the retail spectrum – has also just announced Walgreen’s as the newest high-profile partner to implement its successful platform. Other leaders in the space include PowerReviews, RatePoint and RateVoice, all of which will be examined in the upcoming December issue of Website Magazine.

Analytics and Social Content Interaction

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 02:00:00 GMT

58% of Americans are now reporting that they perform online research concerning the products and services that they are considering purchasing according to Pew Internet. But to what effect? What should you do if you are interested in knowing the influence of user-genered content on your conversion goals?

BazaarVoice this week announced an integration with Google Analytics which will give users the ability the monitor the influence of social content directly in Google Analytics.

Why is this important? According to data collected from 35 million visits, BazaarVoice reports that customers who interacted with their solutions had more than a 50% higher conversion rate and over a 70% increase in revenue per visit. Now you can get proof of that claim.

With the integration, according to Bazaarvoice Product Manager Andy Wolfe, "clients can now see, in Google Analytics, the metrics on things like the number of visitors paginating through reviews, or sharing user-generated content with social networks, or clicking on related products found in reviews. Advanced Segments can then be used to compare the behavior of visits that interact with Bazaarvoice generated content vs. those that don't.”

Ratings and Reviews a Big Hit for ShopNBC

Linc Wonham — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 22:30:00 GMT

Yesterday we learned that PowerReviews had joined Google’s Product Reviews Program to provide user-generated ratings and reviews for e-commerce merchants. Today we hear from Google’s other partner in the program, Bazaarvoice, announcing that its ratings and reviews social commerce platform has been a huge success for ShopNBC across multiple sales channels.

The not-so-subtle message for online retailers is that it’s time to get on the R&R gravy train if you haven’t already done so.

ShopNBC connects with over 1 million shoppers across the Internet, on television and through social and mobile platforms as an authority in beauty, jewelry, home, electronics, health, fitness, watches and fashion. The company is leveraging Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews through its multiple sales channels by having Customer Choice items appear both online and on TV. By featuring customer testimonials across its multi-media shopping platforms, ShopNBC is greatly improving its sales performance and the quality of the shopping experience for its customers. It is also leveraging customer reviews to assist in its merchandise planning and customer service initiatives.

Bazaarvoice and PowerReviews are two of the leaders in the ratings and reviews space, but they are by no means the only solutions for e-commerce merchants looking to update their social commerce profiles. The clear message we're getting every day is that the time to act is now.

PowerReviews Added to Google's Product Reviews Program

Linc Wonham — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 19:00:00 GMT

The importance for e-commerce merchants to utilize user-generated product reviews just increased even more as Google has added PowerReviews to its industry-leading partners in the category. PowerReviews’ ratings and review content will now be available to online shoppers in Google search results, Google Product Search and Google advertising programs, joining Bazaarvoice, which Google teamed up with three months ago when it announced the Google Product Reviews program.

Google Product Reviews allows retailers to engage online shoppers by featuring participating merchants' logos and linking back to the merchants' product pages. Subject to prior approval by Google, Google Product Reviews is immediately available to the more than 1,000 retailers and brands supported by PowerReviews on more than 3,500 websites. Bazaarvoice, meanwhile, has served more than 125 billion pieces of customer-generated ratings and review content on more than 850 brand websites.

Time to Get Positive About Reviews

Linc Wonham — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 20:26:00 GMT

One of the most popular posts to our blog last week reported on Google’s plans to display product ratings and reviews in its search results and through its advertising programs. The new program is rolling out as a partnership with industry leader Bazaarvoice, which will provide Google with the user-generated ratings and reviews the company gathers on behalf of its clients.

Google said in last week’s announcement that the program would likely be adding other vendors in addition to Bazaarvoice, and that a model for merchants to submit their own reviews was also a strong possibility. The gist for e-commerce professionals is that ratings and reviews have become an increasingly important part of the online selling environment, and this latest news from Google represents an opportunity that should not be missed.

To ensure that your business gets the visibility it deserves, we recommend that you closely follow the latest trends in user ratings and reviews. As Google’s newest partner, Bazaarvoice is an excellent place to start, and today’s newsletter looks at some of the other players who could figure into the mix.

PowerReviews, like Bazaarvoice, offers a full set of ratings and review solutions for its e-commerce clients. The company’s “tag-based” system is designed to direct consumers toward reviews written by users with similar lifestyles and experience levels with a particular product or service. This Affinity Reviews system is based on years of psychographic consumer segmentation to match reviewers and consumer lifestyles for numerous product categories. PowerReviews asserts that this research and technology has resulted in statistically higher conversion rates for clients who use their services, as they provide “more engaging, more personalized reviews” than what’s available today. There is also a platform specifically designed and priced for smaller e-commerce retailers, called PowerReviews Express.

While Bazaarvoice and PowerReviews provide ratings and reviews solutions for e-commerce professionals, there is a plethora of consumer-targeted review sites worth keeping an eye on. Epinions is just one destination for consumers to find reviews of specific products before making a purchase. If shoppers are satisfied with the reviews they find on Epinions, they can click on a “latest prices” button that will list the online retailers carrying the product.

RateItAll is a social destination for consumers to share their opinions of items and services found online. More than just products, this site has user-generated ratings and reviews about restaurants, people, places, movies, music, etc. Growing fast, RateItAll had nearly 15 million visitors in 2009, and it has about five million reviews currently in its database.

Sazze is smaller than RateItAll in terms of number of reviews available, but it’s growing and claims to operate on the philosophy that “quality is better than quantity” anyway. Sazze is another social destination for users to voice their likes and dislikes about products they’ve purchased online, and users gain higher status by having their reviews rated favorably by other users. Quality is based on the number of “helpful” votes that a certain user receives.

Wize.com is a site that gathers ratings and reviews from other sources and consolidates them for easier navigation by consumers. Wize gathers user reviews of certain products from retail outlets like Amazon, Walmart and Circuit City, then analyzes the reviews and gives consumers their determination of a product’s pros, cons, best uses, and features that matter the most.

Crowdstorm is a U.K. review site with the similar goal of streamlining the process for shoppers, particularly when they come across conflicting reviews. Crowdstorm attempts to aggregate content from experts and blend it with advice in a question/answer forum. The company’s vision is to provide a single point of contact in helping consumers research products.

New Google Product Reviews Program

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 14:00:00 GMT

Google announced the release of a new program that is going to give users reviews and ratings more prominence. If you have not taken the whole user-generated content trend seriously the past few years, your attention will most definitely need to accelerate.

Google will begin featuring full-length product reviews and user ratings from participating retailers and manufacturers when Google deems that the information will be helpful to users with their shopping. These reviews will be included in Google search results and its advertising programs.

On Google Product Search for example, Google will feature logos of participating companies along with representative reviews from their site. As you might imagine, this brings a great deal more brand exposure and at an important part of the conversion process.

The question of course is how you as a merchant get involved. Google is kicking off the program by working with user review leader BazaarVoice but additional vendors may be added in the future as well as a self-submission model.

Existing clients of BazaarVoice interested in participating must simply submit their views to Google, making sure they have specified the appropriate canonical URLs for products in their Web stores.