Those little buttons pack a big punch. A single act of social sharing may only take a split second, but make no mistake; it is in reality a complex, simultaneous exchange of two of the most important forms of value that exist today—social currency and social data.

Sharing buttons themselves are important as “the point of transaction” at which social currency, which is inseparable from social data, is exchanged.  When Facebook put its Like button in the hands of website owners, I wrote that “ease of integration and use of Social plugins will reduce the barriers – technical, usability, psychological, etc. – for social interactions across the Web.” New +1 integrations and features, like +1 on product pages, in-button sharing to Google+ Circles and +Snippets, are all promising steps toward further eliminating those barriers, while making the social currency market more ubiquitous by installing these points of transaction in more critical places across the web. This is how the “button war” over clicks and data has made winners out of brands of consumers—through innovations that make what we’ve shared more discoverable and impactful to a wider audience. And yet, as accurate social signals, sharing buttons still fall short of their true potential. Let’s dig in.

Deriving more value from social sharing

When we share something we encounter with the world—an idea, a product, a story—what are we telling the world about ourselves? By sharing something, we are in effect saying any or all of these things, according to The Psychology of Sharing:

• I think this will be valuable to others
• I think this will help me define myself to others, and will help me receive social validation
• I think this will help me strengthen and nourish my relationships
• I think I will receive credit for sharing this (and I like that!)
• I think this content helps me advocate for a cause I believe in, or helps me support a brand I like

(Notice that all of these intents express a positive sentiment toward what we’re sharing; we’ll come back to that.)

Brands typically see the value in social currency through the lens of word of mouth. They want consumers to share their brand with one another, and the more they do so, the more social currency the brand has earned. This lens is still incredibly important, but there’s another lens that adds an important dimension to the value of sharing, and technology is finally allowing brands to see their customers more holistically than ever before. By sharing something that a brand has created or provided, they also tell the brand about themselves through social data. In this way, brands can now tap into an endless wellspring of consumer insights as they build social data equity.

Weaving social sharing into the buyer’s journey

Today’s consumer has escaped the funnel and demands more information at every touchpoint to guide their decisions, and sharing buttons are one important way social information has been woven into the journey of many buyers. It’s there at the beginning, the Zero Moment of Truth. It’s there when the customer returns to let others know about their experiences. This is a good step forward, but it could be better.

What social sharing still lacks: balance

It has come a long way, but we haven’t yet seen sharing’s full potential. Clicking Like or +1 is a positive gesture, but these lack standardized negative counterweights. If we want to share something that we don’t actually support, find valuable, or agree with, we’re left without a clear, intuitive device for expressing this sentiment. We can usually add contextual clues in the text we share along with the link, but this makes something that should be easy that much more complicated. The result is more positive inputs than negative, a biased view of the way we feel about things across the social web.

Compare this to having clear, standard indicators of sentiment, like star ratings or thumbs up, thumbs down. Standard indicators of negative sentiment are a goldmine for brands, because they allow quick insights to be pulled from unambiguous data—no guessing required. In just a few clicks, they can look across their lowest rated products for commonalities, or see which of their YouTube videos aren’t resonating with audiences and optimize on what they find.

Who will win the button war? Consumers and brands

As the giants of search and social race to out-innovate the competition, sharing integrations get better and better. Consumers now have more choice when deciding where, when, and how to exchange social currency. They have more information to guide their decisions, whether that decision is deciding which blog post to read, or which laptop to buy.

As a result, brands now have more power to analyze and adapt to these signals, improving every aspect of their product development and marketing.

The button war means more choice, more data, and more value to consumers and brands. Let’s hope it rages on.

To learn more about how Bazaarvoice can seamlessly implement +1 on product pages, visit our Press Room. 

As brands continue to learn the dos and don’ts of social media marketing, a new study has us thinking about an important event in online brand-customer relationships: “The Social Break-Up.” The new research from ExactTarget (a Bazaarvoice partner) and CoTweet examines the reasons why many social media users have dumped brands on social networks.

Most users surveyed have dumped at least one brand by unsubscribing from an email list (91%) or un-following a company on Twitter (41%) or Facebook (55%). Customers are also getting more picky about which brands they jump into bed with, stating they’ve become more cautious about giving brands their email addresses (77%) and liking brands on Facebook (71%) in the last year.

Social media marketing is a different ballgame than traditional online marketing (even opt-in) because the environment is social, not commercial. Add in the ability of consumers to follow and unfollow at will, and it’s all the more important for brands to have something meaningful and useful to say. Managing relationships with customers on Facebook and Twitter is like flirting – you have to keep the other party interested if you want to keep their eyes (and minds) from wandering. Here are some tips for courting customers on social networks.

• Don’t make getting digits your end goal. If you leave a bar with 20 phone numbers but don’t get any dates, were you successful? Too many brands focus on driving their fan count, but getting a Like or Follow is like getting a number – it’s just the first step toward a relationship.
• Be interesting. Many consumers have abandoned at least one brand on Facebook (38%), email (49%), or Twitter (52%) because of irrelevant or boring marketing messages.
• Let your wingmen talk you up. Let your customers do the selling for you by encouraging them to post pictures and share their feedback on social media.
• Don’t talk too much. 54% of email subscribers say they unsubscribe when emails come too frequently, as do 44% of Facebook fans and 39% of Twitter followers.
• Be a good listener. If your Twitter stream or Facebook page is all posts from your brand about your brand, there’s a problem. Social media is a conversation – listen to what your customers are saying, and respond.
• Don’t be too needy. “We are smothering our very best customers with an invitation avalanche,” wrote Jay Baer in response to the study. “[We’re] asking them to hang out with us in every digital clubhouse we can devise. And the reality is, they just aren’t that into us.”
• Show them you care. Recognize your most active fans and followers to keep them contributing and create aspiration in others. You can also reward customers who interact with your brand on social networks with occasional perks, like discount codes.

The underlying theme in the study is that customers hold the power to end your relationship with them on social media, at any time. You can’t just work to win their Like or Follow – you have to work to keep it. Provide interesting, useful updates that benefit your social media followers to charm your way into their hearts – and their wallets.

New report: CMOs share top insights on the bottom line of social

We surveyed top CMOs to get the real story about how they use social media. 90% of CMOs participate in three or more social media marketing activities. Here's your chance to see what's most important — and most impactful.

While the long-term implications of Facebook’s new platform features – Social plugins and their underpinnings, the Open Graph protocol and Graph API – are up for debate, I have a few thoughts to share from the Bazaarvoice perspective. Over the last week, since f8, we have received questions from current and prospective customers about what these developments mean for their business, social strategy, and relationship with Bazaarvoice.

First, we believe that the boldness of Facebook’s vision is a net positive for our industry. The ease of integration and use of Social plugins will reduce the barriers – technical, usability, psychological, etc. – for social interactions across the Web. Clicking the Like Button for a product on a retailer’s website, like Levis.com, can trigger a series of increasingly valuable social interactions that escalate that consumer’s loyalty to the brand and acquire new shoppers along the way. Our whitepaper on Participation Chains describes this process of value creation through linked social interactions.

The coming ubiquity of the Like Button and other distributed social interactions – enabled by Facebook, Bazaarvoice, and others – is a good thing for brands and consumers because these interactions build relationships that are mutually desired and transparent, a relatively new concept in marketing and advertising! Facebook has enabled these relationships to be created at a scale that will absolutely revolutionize the way companies manage their brands, marketing strategy, and customer relationships. The wake of opportunity created by Facebook’s actions is massive and will fuel even greater marketing and technology innovation in the months ahead.

Second, we believe that Facebook’s strategy is complementary to our own. The forms of user-generated content captured by the Bazaarvoice platform – Ratings & Reviews, Ask & Answer, Stories, and more – help consumers at and leading up to the point of purchase. In concert with the Bazaarvoice platform, a retailer can use Social plugins to acquire new shoppers and help consumers discover products and services of interest, engaging shoppers early in the purchase process. For example, seeing on Facebook that a friend liked a new model digital camera influences you to click through to the camera retailer’s website, where you read customer reviews of the product as well as recently answered shopper questions on the camera’s features and technical specs. Based on these social influences, you buy the product and two weeks later write a product review (powered by Bazaarvoice!) on the retailer’s website. In the process, you elect to publish your review to Facebook for other friends to see. This cycle can continue perpetually, with exponentially increasing value.

Through our work with TurboTax on their “Friendcasting” campaign (which involved integration with Facebook Connect), we have a ground-breaking example of how the social graph can be used to surface the most relevant and trustworthy advice for a key purchase decision. In this scenario, you determine that TurboTax Premier is the best edition of the popular tax preparation software for your financial situation, especially after reading positive reviews from Steve, your neighbor and Facebook friend who happens to be a CPA. This is a reality today, along with Bazaarvoice platform features like ShoutIt! and TweetConnect. In addition, we are powering complete social commerce experiences within Facebook. Check out our deployment of Ratings & Reviews within Facebook for Benefit Cosmetics. With Facebook’s Graph API and Open Graph protocol, we are now able to envision and develop even more innovative uses of the social graph to enhance every stage of the purchase process. In fact, we have a dedicated team, Bazaarvoice Labs, devoted to rapid prototyping and collaborative development of new ideas like these.

The Bazaarvoice platform provides a foundation for our customers to experiment with and optimize their use of Facebook’s new features and whatever may come next. Facebook tipped the first domino (or rather, kicked it), but there are many others yet to fall. Our fully-hosted technology allows us to rapidly deploy new features and third-party plugins such as the Like Button across our entire network of customer websites. Through that network, we have served over 110 billion impressions of user-generated content, playing a leading role in the socialization of the web. The strategic value of this for our clients isn’t simply the business impact or innovation that we deliver – it is our ability to “future proof” their websites and online business strategies. The form and function of Facebook’s platform features are sure to evolve. Google Social Search is in its infancy but will evolve as well. Something completely unexpected will come out of left field. The flexibility and openness of the Bazaarvoice platform will enable our customers to take full advantage of these developments, while leveraging the influence and voices of their most loyal and engaged customers.

Over the last 10 days, we have experienced a truly revolutionary change in the way the web works. However, as we approach the tipping point of the web becoming pervasively social, there will be hiccups. Privacy and security are paramount concerns, and Facebook’s actions have attracted government interest in short order. Brands that abuse these new capabilities will pay for it in lost consumer trust and reputation. As you contemplate the impact of Facebook’s new features on your social strategy, remember to take full advantage of your partnership with Bazaarvoice. We want to share our insights and lessons learned from serving the world’s leading brands and influencing millions of purchase decisions each day. We welcome your input on our strategy and want to collaborate openly with you on yours. On the social web, there’s no such thing as going it alone!

Notice the new Like Button below? Try it out and let us know what you think!

Sameer Samat, Director of Product Management, Google

At our annual Social Commerce Summit in Austin today, we announced a partnership with Google to introduce an industry-first program that lets brands easily share product review content from their Bazaarvoice-enabled websites with Google properties: SyndicateVoice for Search. Sameer Samat, director of product management for Google Product Search, shared the benefits of the program with a sold-out Summit audience during his presentation, “Organizing the World’s Information for Shoppers.”

This partnership is an incredibly important milestone for Bazaarvoice and for the evolution of social commerce. Why?

We know that shoppers trust customer word of mouth, such as online product reviews, more than any other type of marketing (1). At the same time, 61% of all shoppers use search engines (2), and more people use Google Product Search than any shopping portal (3). Furthermore, user-generated content is becoming increasingly dominant in search results, with over 25% of results for searches of the world’s top 20 brands linking to UGC (4).

In partnership with Google, Bazaarvoice customers can now use SyndicateVoice for Search to combine their most trusted and valuable content – authentic reviews written by their customers – with the most popular search engine in the world to attract the most qualified shoppers to their site.

While this is a big win for brands, who face increasing competition for consumer attention and shopper loyalty each day, the real win is for consumers, who can now quickly find the information they need to make the right purchase decisions for their needs. We’re “democratizing commerce” by enabling consumers’ authentic feedback to help shoppers find exactly what they need, shifting more control of the shopping experience to the most important person in the process — the shopper.

For more information, check out Google’s blog post on the partnership, see their Google Product Reviews Program site, or read our official announcement.

(1) Edelman Trust Barometer, 2006-2009
(2) Compete Online Shopper Intelligence study, February 22, 2010
(3) Comparison Shopping Rankings from CPC Strategy, LLC, April 14, 2010
(4) Socialnomics 2009

Today we announced an alliance with Nielsen, the world leader in consumer information and media measurement, that gives brands a 360-degree view of customer conversations, occurring both on-site and off-site, in one place. Nielsen’s My BuzzMetrics is a dashboard for listening to customer conversations on over 100 million blogs, social networks, message boards, and more. Brands that use Bazaarvoice and My Buzzmetrics can now integrate user-generated content collected on their own site into the dashboard reporting and custom analytics provided by Nielsen. The result is an incredibly powerful integrated view of influential customers.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Pete Blackshaw of Nielsen gives his insights on the partnership.

There are different types of authors and motivations for different forms of social media. For example, we know that 90% of people who write reviews are mostly positive, and they write reviews to help other consumers and brands (see the results of our Keller Fay research study here). Those who blog or Tweet about a brand – beyond the brand’s site – may have a very different set of reasons for doing so – think about the views of someone venting on a message board versus a recent purchaser who reviews a product. Both opinions are equally important, and our alliance with Nielsen helps brands analyze the interplay between the two.

For more perspective on the value of this approach, check out Forrester analyst Zach Hofer-Shall’s blog post from earlier today. We like the way Zach thinks about this stuff.

In closing, we are excited about what the future holds for our alliance with Nielsen and for our clients, who have an opportunity to radically transform their businesses through more intelligent and comprehensive customer listening.

Brett

As you can see on the Partners section of our website, we keep the best company in our industry. We recognized the strategic value of building a partner ecosystem very early in the process of founding Bazaarvoice and launching our first product, Ratings & Reviews. However, the many colorful logos of our partners tend to obscure and depersonalize the close personal relationships that make those partnerships work. Over the years, many of our counterparts at partner companies have become personal friends. Conversations may end with talk of action items and target dates, but they begin with talk of family, highlights from recent vacations, and live music (Craig, our friend at Sapient, always has a story to share!).

The very best partnerships are built on trust, transparency, and shared values – all things that are very real at an individual and personal level but somewhat abstract at a corporate level. The individual and personal relationships with our partners are the ones we truly cherish. They make our work fun and rewarding, especially when we can see how our actions, as a business partner, positively impact our friends and colleagues on the other side.

I am very proud of the partner company that Bazaarvoice keeps, but I am more grateful for the individuals that have believed in our vision, championed our cause (inside and out of their own companies), and come to see us as more than just business associates. Thank you for all of your support and encouragement. With your continued partnership and friendship, we look forward to hitting the 1 trillion impressions milestone in just a few short years!

15 Bazaarvoice employees volunteered last Friday at what was the largest Fall Service Day ever, with over 400 volunteers from the Austin high-tech industry in attendance. The event, hosted by the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Central Texas, resulted in 2,500 hours of service at Zilker Park, amounting to $50,000 in free labor.

As part of the Bazaarvoice Foundation, our commitment to serving the community, the Bazaarvoice team constructed a “Rain Garden” in the park’s botanical gardens. The rock installation will allow rain to flow from the surrounding buildings and water the plants in the garden. The team also planted tons of plants that will thrive in the rocky environment.

“Bazaarvoice always sends such a fun group!” said Shobie Partos of the Entrepreneurs Foundation. “The rain garden looks amazing, and the staff at Zilker Park are thrilled.”

While the experts argue over the math, I think that UK (and US) advertisers and consumers should celebrate this milestone. While the US Internet-TV ad spending gap is still sizable, the steady migration of dollars over the coming years will drive Internet industry growth and evolution, yes, but also a more customer-centric experience for consumers faced with hard decisions in an increasingly complex economic and marketing environment. Advertiser spending on social marketing/commerce applications is still significantly smaller than the leading categories of Internet ad spending mentioned above. However, as we have witnessed firsthand over the last 4+ years of building Bazaarvoice (and shared on many occasions on Bazaarblog), the social category offers perhaps the greatest opportunity for advertisers to think bigger than clickthroughs and conversion rates and instead focus on wholesale cultural and operational transformation of their businesses using the voice of the customer as a muse.

This news from the UK is timely, as we just wrapped up our second annual Social Commerce Summit in London, the European complement to our US Social Commerce Summit held in Austin every year. We now serve over 120+ customers across Europe, and the London Summit was a sold out event. In the coming days, we will share highlights from the Summit here on Bazaarblog!