CVS Caremark provides more prescriptions than any other pharmacy, and their campaigns revolve around unsung heroes – the caregivers that visit their stores and are everyday, unsung heroes. Early this year, they kicked off their “For All the Ways You Care” campaign, encouraging stories about these caregivers and the incredible challenges and triumphs they face each day. While the stories don’t specifically mention or tie to CVS Caremark pharmacies, they build a brand association with CVS and caregivers. The remarkable stories found on this site are divided into segments including everything from adoption to disaster relief. While winners were chosen in May 2009, heralded with a national media blitz, the site still attracts new stories, even allowing writers to create their own scrapbook around each story. This brand association campaign helps turn a faceless pharmacy into a hub for caregivers, who often go unnoticed.

Bazaarvoice clients who have implemented successful brand association campaigns include beauty brand philosophy’s “Your Mom’s Philosophy” and Chefs Catalog tie-in with the latest wave of Julia Child popularity.

La-Z-Boy created a compelling brand-centered campaign with their “How has La-Z-Boy brought comfort your life?” campaign. This reward-based campaign brought in more than 2,700 stories and 38,500 registered visitors over a three-month period. La-Z-Boy shared these and other brand-related stories with its in-store salespeople, to help them understand why people choose La-Z-Boy.

Online swimsuit retailer Cyberswim created its “Miracle Moments” stories campaign about the Miraclesuit product, designed to enhance voluptuous figures. Cyberswim claims the world’s largest selection, and let its customers do the talking on behalf of the suit. Cyberswim added Stories to its already successful Ratings & Reviews and Ask & Answer solutions, giving women a ton of real-world information from other women like them, including one story that begins, “I am 47 years old. I bought my first Miraclesuit when I was 39, and it is the only suit I will ever buy.”

In every case, these retailers draw new searchers and a variety of types of shoppers to their sites, differentiating them from other brands. At the same time, customer-contributed stories create fresh, highly relevant content to drive natural search, help build brand loyalty, build a sense of community, and help inform brands about their customers – all of which ultimately leads to higher sales.

If your brand site already employs Ratings & Reviews, you’re building the UGC customers need to make purchase decisions. But with a 7.7% projected drop in back-to-school spending, the holiday shopping season will be more crucial than ever for online retailers. Many are looking for ways to bring more customers to their sites.

Bring in more searchers, capture more referrals

SearchVoice leverages review content to drive organic search traffic to ecommerce sites. Review content is collected on a single microsite, allowing search engines to crawl the content for the specific keywords and phrases customers use, thus making the content much more findable – our studies show an average 142% increase in search traffic for reviews with microsites.

Six months after launching their reviews microsite, one Bazaarvoice client had six times the number of visits to their reviews page.  Another Bazaarvoice client had 15 times as many referrals after six months, and after a full year, their monthly referrals were 92 times higher than before launching their microsite. Who was catching these customers before?

Increase and steady your search visits throughout the year

In addition to increasing your referrals, microsites help to steady referrals throughout the year. Companies without microsites will see more fluctuation in referrals before and after the holiday season.

One Bazaarvoice client launched their reviews microsite in November 2008. Their monthly referrals from the reviews page to the product page nearly tripled in the first month. Their referrals increased for the holiday season month-over-month from the previous year, and didn’t fall after the holiday season had ended.

With a truly make-or-break holiday season just around the corner, launching a reviews microsite will bring more customers to your product pages in time for the season. It usually takes only one or two months after implementation for the number of referrals to double or triple.

To discuss adding the SearchVoice microsite to your deployment, contact your Bazaarvoice Community Manager.

Is your website “stocked” with plenty of information for the holidays?

Sure, you can plan now to buy massive quantities of merchandise for the holiday shopping season, but have you thought about how to beef up your site with the right answers for holiday shoppers? You can add in-store sales associates as the holidays get closer, but they can’t have all the answers, at any time, for every customer.

And while you may have a stellar customer support line, you want those folks helping customers place orders – not answering product questions. With Ask & Answer, customers ask their question once, then you and/or the community answers it. The answers remain directly in the purchase path, where others can use this information to make purchasing decisions quickly. Customer service actually improves while the overall cost dramatically decreases. Retailer Canadian Tire decreased its support costs by up to 81% with Ask & Answer.

Manufacturers should get involved, too

According to research from Channel Intelligence and Forrester, 58% of online researchers start at the manufacturer’s site – more than any other source. And research across our client base has shown that questions about products answered by manufacturers are more helpful than any other type of answers, so it’s important for manufacturers to be proactive in answering customers’ questions. Bazaarvoice enables manufacturers to answer questions both on their own sites and on top retailer sites.

Add more answers in time for the holidays

We can help you get Ask & Answer up and running on your site quickly, and your Community Manager can help you maximize consumer, manufacturer, and your own staff’s involvement to increase sales (up to 22% for one retailer), reduce returns (a 23% decrease for JCWhitney), and give your customers a great shopping experience this holiday season.

The holiday shopping season could be make-or-break this year, and it’s coming up fast. User-generated content like customer reviews and community Q&A can help make your brand the preferred source for holiday research and shopping. Stay tuned to this blog for ideas about how to get customers engaged, and read our other holiday-ready blog: “It’s 100 degrees. Are you ready for Christmas?”

Holiday shoppers read reviews.

Last year, 80% of holiday shoppers read reviews while deciding what to buy. It’s important to build review volume now, so shoppers find all the information they need on your site come shopping season. In November through January, reviews served surges over 140% for the year – 3.6 billion reviews were viewed in December 2008 alone!

Now’s the time to increase reviews on your site.

The more reviews you have, the more they drive visitors to your site (read how SearchVoice increases traffic 142%, on average) and the more they help shoppers make decisions. Take the time now to capture reviews from all your shoppers this year. For example, Argos sent a post-holiday email to all shoppers and gained 70,000 reviews in a day! Stay tuned to this blog for many more ideas about how to drive review volume.

Manufacturers should get involved, too.

Shoppers research products on manufacturer sites, so it’s important to have reviews there. At the same time, it’s important to share the reviews collected on manufacturer sites with top retail sites – where shoppers will actually buy. BrandVoice lets manufacturers seamlessly share reviews with retailers who use Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews. In fact, 76% of all revenues from the top 25 Consumer Electronics Retailers flow through the Bazaarvoice exclusive retail network.

Don’t have reviews on your site?

There’s no doubt; this year’s holiday season will be critically important to all brands. If you’re considering reviews, it actually hurts your business to wait – if you implement in the next two months, you could gain a 6.8% increase in net sales. Our SaaS model lets you implement Ratings & Reviews – and Stories and Ask & Answer – in weeks, not months. We know your technical team is busy, so we do most of the heavy lifting.

Contact your Community Manager today to drive review volume for the coming months.

Art by fellow Texan, Hugh MacLeod.

Re-read this classic post about the Consumer/Marketer Control Framework, and this one: How Advertising Will Evolve Using Word of Mouth.

As many of you know, Bazaarvoice literally translated means the voice of the marketplace. A key principle in managing your brand voice is keeping it authentic and real. If you are going to get involved with Twitter, don’t be afraid to let your corporate personality shine through. Don’t hide behind your brand. Doing so erodes the trust and authenticity of your content. Give your employees a voice and a face to bring your corporate culture to the market.

While Twitter is a great platform for enabling the conversation, it focuses on the individual. This is fine for consumers, but it simply doesn’t work for companies. Without a way to aggregate the voices of your company into a single view, it's hard for your customers to engage. For example, Forrester has over 100 analysts on Twitter, but there is no easy way to understand their collective voice.

Zappos has taken the lead in demonstrating how brands should engage in the Twittersphere. In addition to participating early on, they have invited their employees to engage the market through their own voice. This collective voice is Zappos. Not only are they giving the market an easy way to consume the content Zappos is publishing, they are also making it easy for users to hear what the market is saying about Zappos.

To help companies realize their full Twitter potential, Bazaarvoice Labs recently released TwitterVoice — the first open source platform to showcase the voice of your company across Twitter. TwitterVoice allows your customers to follow your entire brand in real time through the voices of your employees. In addition, it makes it easy to follow the market’s voice as it relates to your brand. To get started you can download the source code (free of charge) here. Once you’ve set up the environment, TwitterVoice makes it easy for you to create Tribes of employees and to manage them through a simple administrative environment.

We hope you enjoy this application. Please give us your feedback, and let us know when you launch TwitterVoice for your brand.

CNET: Report: Social networking up 83 percent for U.S.

Part of the study asked participants to share their criteria for choosing a technology providers.  Credibility/reputation is as important as a superior product and customer service.  Great products and service will lead to a great reputation but companies need to think about how they spread the word.  In a close second to the first set of answers was previous experience, internal recommendation or an external recommendation. Technical decision makers are talking about their experiences and the companies that can tap into this resource will accelerate their brand recognition in the market. It’s also important to recognize that Sales/Marketing Materials or Presentations are at the bottom of the list.  This is the table stakes of starting a conversation. A great commercial or marketing slick is not going to push anyone over the edge in making a decision.

As a B2B organization you know that you have to reach your customers where they are seeking information. Hill and Knowlton found that over 50% of tech decision makers use personal experience and word of mouth as their most important source of information. Let’s assume for now that you are already delivering a great experience for your customers. How are you helping them spread the word? Are you still using polished testimonials that marketing put together? Your customers see right through this. Testimonials lack the emotion and authenticity that we all seek today. Trust in organizations is at an all-time low. Companies that tear down walls and open up conversations are already seeing massive benefits. This was a topic we wrote about back in 2007 and is becoming even more important today.

IBM is the perfect example. Here you have an organization of over 300,000 employees. They have a killer brand. And despite all of this they started a dialogue with their customers early in 2008. I can also tell you that more and more businesses are recognizing this need. It seems like every week we are having conversations with companies that are exploring how to leverage Social Commerce to deliver ROI in B2B.  What I can tell you is that Social in B2B is here to stay, it is delivering measurable value, and it is reshaping how these companies think about marketing. It isn’t about marketing to customers it is about marketing with your customers.

It was a great opportunity to meet with our consumer electronic clients and hear about how they are using the voice of the customer to drive their business. One of the most exciting conversations was with Patrick Beck, a Marketing Manager for Altec Lansing. Altec Lansing is an industry leader in the design, manufacture, marketing, and support of advanced audio solutions for PCs and related technologies.

Altec Lansing recently launched the Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews service and most importantly are breathing customer oxygen (as Sam Decker would say) into the organization. This was prominently displayed as part of the Altec Lansing future product exhibit room where they bring buyers and partners in to show them the next generation technology coming out of the company. Here are a few pictures from the room (our lips are sealed on what great new things will be coming to market).
 
 
We talked to Patrick about their program and the genesis behind these display ads. He said that at Altec it is “important for us to a have an open dialogue with the marketplace.” This type of conversation is supported from all parts of the organization. One group that is already benefitting is Product Development. Recently they had a product that was being rated very highly; however, when they analyzed the review content they found some great insight. Customers loved everything about the product except for the fact that it attracted fingerprints. The 24×7 focus group created by Ratings & Reviews enables Altec and other companies to learn from their customers in real time.

We also discussed feedback from outside the organization. Customers are clearly supportive of the idea judging by the content already shared. Patrick said their “retailers are really behind the idea as well.” Not only will it help Altec learn about the needs of their customers it also provides them invaluable content to share with their online retail counterparts.

Here is an example where Altec is sharing review content on Best Buy. This type of content syndication helps retailers fill gaps in their review base and most importantly provides a complete picture for customers so they can make an informed product decision.