Bazaarvoice Introduces SocialConnect™ Suite to Weave Together the Brand Experience and Social Web

Bazaarvoice, the market and technology leader in hosted social commerce applications that drive sales, today announced the SocialConnect™ suite to help brands safely and effectively leverage the power and reach of leading social networks to drive measurable business results. The innovative product suite transforms the way that marketers use popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter with exciting new capabilities for social sharing, social syndication, social applications, and friends. With SocialConnect, marketers can now extend the voices of their customers from their brand sites to social networks and collect consumer-generated reviews and stories directly on Facebook that can be pulled back to their site. This trusted customer-generated content has been proven to boost engagement, drive sales, reduce returns, and boost SEO. Marketers can also bring the social graph directly into their brand sites through Bazaarvoice’s support of the Facebook “Like” button on product or review pages.

“Bazaarvoice helps brands connect with consumers over the social web in ways that create authentic conversations and drive measurable sales,” said Mike Svatek, Chief Product Officer for Bazaarvoice. “We helped to invent social commerce as a market category, and we continue to lead this industry by innovating and staying ahead of the trends. Our Bazaarvoice Labs team has created, tested, and launched several pioneering capabilities in the social space that are now must-have features for our clients, and SocialConnect embodies all the best of their findings.

Bazaarvoice SocialConnect™ Suite

Bazaarvoice continues to integrate with the largest consumer destinations in the world, including an industry-first partnership with Google to bring ratings and reviews into Google Search and Ads. Now SocialConnect provides brands with an industry-first toolbox for integrating social channels like Facebook and Twitter into a broader social marketing strategy that engages customers and drives measurable return on investment. SocialConnect is built on the Bazaarvoice social commerce platform that powers success for more than 850 brands worldwide and seamlessly integrates with the Bazaarvoice social commerce suite, including Ask & Answer, Stories, and Ratings & Reviews.

Key SocialConnect capabilities and corresponding features include:

SocialConnect Sharing enables shoppers to share consumer-generated content from the corporate or brand website to their personal profiles on the social networks.

•Shout It! allows consumers to easily publish any product, story, review, answer, question, product photo, video or user profile on a brand’s site to their personal pages on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, or other social networks. The consumer’s post includes the brand’s logo, an excerpt of the content, comments from the user, and a direct link back to the retailer’s Web site and is immediately visible to all their friends, followers and fans.

•Publish It! allows consumers to easily publish any piece of content they create on a brand’s site directly to their own Facebook page. Brand experiences and information are immediately distributed to all the people in the user’s social graph – in the context of the social relationship.

•Like It! allows consumers to easily find and share user-generated content they like. With one click, consumers can share what they “like” with their Facebook friends. Brands gain another way to draw consumers into the brand experience through friends discovering what other friends “like” and accelerate accumulation of fans.

SocialConnect Syndication capabilities allow marketers to easily leverage the power and reach of Twitter by engaging consumers 24/7 with relevant authentic content created by brand enthusiasts.

•TweetConnect™ empowers marketers to share the voices of their customers on corporate Twitter accounts, tweeting new reviews, answers, and stories that other consumers find informative and helpful. The brand controls what is tweeted when with filters at the category, rating, and product level. Each tweet is directly linked to a brand’s purchase path in order to maximize sales opportunities. TweetConnect also ensures that shoppers’ opinions are findable through Twitter search and real-time search results from Google, delivering unparalleled search value for Bazaarvoice clients.

SocialConnect Applications™ bring consumer-generated content and social commerce functionality to the social networks where people spend the majority of their time.

•SocialConnect Applications allow marketers to integrate consumer-generated content from a brand’s web site directly with their corporate presence on social networks so that customers can interact with this information wherever they consider “home.” Now, using SocialConnect Applications, Bazaarvoice clients, as well as their agencies and partners, can develop custom experiences within Facebook and other social networks, adding user favorites, opinions, and top-rated products directly to their Facebook fan page, for example. SocialConnect Applications also enable marketers to integrate category structure and merchandising while they continually refresh their fan pages with recent consumer-generated content from the brand site. Customers can be linked to the purchase funnel when they are ready to buy.

SocialConnect Applications also allow marketers to add Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews, Ask & Answer, and Stories capabilities to their Facebook fan pages. Consumers can submit content without leaving Facebook, and this content can be shared back to brand sites where it is proven to increase sales, reduce returns, build engagement, and boost search engine visibility.

SocialConnect Friends empowers shoppers to find opinions, knowledge and experiences that their friends have shared without ever leaving the brand site.

•SocialConnect Friends helps consumers find trusted reviews from their friends without ever leaving the brand site. It answers the question: What is the best product based on what my Facebook friends or my Twitter followers like? Users simply sign into Facebook, Twitter, or mySpace at a brand site and reviews from their friends are surfaced to the top of the list of reviews.

“Bazaarvoice Labs is continually experimenting with the next ROI-driving technologies that will define the future of social commerce, and our recent work with Intuit on their ‘Friends Like You’ initiative is a great proof point,” continued Svatek. “Intuit customers were able to easily narrow down reviews on TurboTax.com based on their Facebook friends’ opinions or on a combination of life attributes like ‘I am married’ and ‘I have my own business.’ Bringing the social context of the people who are writing and reading product-related content into the brand experience is a tremendous next step for online word of mouth and an exciting complement to social sharing, syndication, and applications.”