Bazaarvoice Introduces Bazaarvoice Stories™ to Help Companies Increase Customer Engagement

Austin, TX (July 28, 2008) – Bazaarvoice, the worldwide leader in hosted social commerce applications that drive sales, today announced the launch of Bazaarvoice Stories, a new product that allows companies to connect with customers on leading eCommerce and manufacturer sites. With Bazaarvoice Stories, companies can now create a compelling online destination within their own site where customers and visitors share their real-life experiences related to a product, service, or brand, including how and why they purchased and what happened next. As a result, Bazaarvoice Stories helps companies effectively increase brand involvement and interaction and creates new opportunities for marketers to leverage user-generated content (UGC) to attract and influence new visitors to become loyal customers. Bazaarvoice Stories also provides an important new source of UGC that can be used to achieve unprecedented results from multichannel contests, campaigns, and promotions.

“Forrester Research recently predicted that engaging website visitors – not just informing them – is the next critical metric for marketers,” said Brett Hurt, founder and CEO of Bazaarvoice. “We are very excited to introduce Stories, our third major product offering in two years, to help brands achieve this goal by getting to the heart of their brand and product experiences. With Stories, companies can now organically broadcast their brand through authentic content in which contributors have an ownership stake. Stories contributors are socially incentivized to share Stories with their friends through email and social networks such as Facebook, which will ultimately help brands attract more customers like them.”

“For years, many of our customers have shared with us that James Avery designs have marked special occasions and events in their lives,” said John McCullough, director of marketing at James Avery, a 54-year old jeweler which recently introduced Bazaarvoice Stories at http://www.jamesavery.com/stories/. “Bazaarvoice Stories allow us to present a collection of these inspiring narratives organized by the special events in our customers’ lives. Bazaarvoice Stories gives our valued customers an easy venue to share the meaning and connection associated with a special James Avery design they have received or given; these stories are quite powerful and moving. It gets to the core values of our brand and helps create a community of loyal James Avery clients whose enthusiasm and passion is obvious while providing us the opportunity to also connect with new visitors an emotional level.”

Bazaarvoice Stories Features & Benefits

Bazaarvoice Stories, like all Bazaarvoice products and programs, comes with proven benefits that set the standard for world-class social commerce. Bazaarvoice Stories offers several key advantages for marketers who want to easily build brand engagement, increase traffic, and leverage UGC across the organization:

•Fast Implementation: Companies can be live on Bazaarvoice Stories within 30 days. The hosted implementation and full API suite provide a range of high-impact functionality including: photo and video upload, client-specific user tags, user attribute questions for segmenting, and reader helpfulness voting to identify and promote the best stories.

•Customizable Deployment: Built on the industry leading Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Platform, Bazaarvoice Stories is a fully customizable white label solution that integrates seamlessly within an existing website. Styling and input options are based on site design and preference and can be easily restyled for holiday or themed promotions.

•Shout It!: With a single click, contributors and visitors can easily share stories through their favorite social network or bookmarking site, such as Digg, del.i.cious, or Facebook.

•Search-Optimized Landing Pages: 20-point search-optimized landing pages allow companies to fully leverage the keyword-rich UGC to increase natural search rankings and maximize traffic generation.

•Two-Tier Content Moderation: All content is human-moderated for appropriateness and relevancy, plus tagged for rich analytics.

•World-Class Client Services: Bazaarvoice Stories clients receive personalized account support, as well as promotional techniques and best practices to maximize ROI.

•Advanced Analytics: Sophisticated tools help mine and analyze all content in order to gain actionable intelligence and business insights.

•Partner Integrations: Bazaarvoice Radius partner program enables ease of integration via APIs and feeds to email, search, navigation, and personalization partners.

Bazaarvoice Stories: Agency Advantages

For interactive agencies, Bazaarvoice Stories offers a turnkey platform that can be used to drive any UGC campaign. The Bazaarvoice Stories platform can be used to support a variety of UGC campaigns, including contests, holiday themes, or special promotions. Bazaarvoice Stories provides a way for any advertiser to effectively tap into customers’ own life experiences and events that are peripheral but relevant to a brand, making it perfect for a brand-centric microsite.

Bazaarvoice Stories provides a great platform for agencies who are being asked to deliver user-generated campaigns,” said Sam Decker, chief marketing officer at Bazaarvoice. “Agencies now have a plug-and-play social media application that can serve as the core of contests, microsites, and promotions – and as a source of UGC to use in email, print, and TV campaigns. Bazaarvoice Stories is also proving to deliver new traffic at a ridiculously low CPA through improved organic search results and word of mouth as writers and readers share their own stories with friends and families on email, Facebook and offline.”

Bazaarvoice Stories is immediately available to marketers, advertisers and agencies worldwide. For more information, please visit www.bazaarvoice.com/products/interaction-suite/stories.