The iPad, displaying the latest recipe creation on the kitchen counter, has replaced the traditional cookbook, provided one can avoid spilling spaghetti sauce or splattering it with oil.  Even just weeks after its release in April 2010, the New York Times saw it “poised to be an indispensable tool” for the kitchen.  And now, augmented reality apps like Blippar allow consumers to create interactive recipe books by scanning products while in the store aisle.  From the first release of Betty Crocker’s Big Red in 1950, and thousands since, recipe-sharing has gone digital and mobile.

Always based on word-of-mouth, recipes on 2×4 index cards that were once traded between neighbors, at PTA meetings and from generation to generation are now shared, researched and reviewed online.  For instance, Google sees over one billion recipe-specific searches per month and both Google and Yahoo have their own recipe search engines.

The popularity of competitive cooking-shows like Top Chef and the Food Network has captivated an audience well beyond the traditional homemaker, targeted for decades by advertisers.  The folks tuning into these programs are the individuals who won’t try the new local restaurant without first checking reviews on Open Table and Yelp and those who tear out recipe ideas from waiting room magazines.

The enthusiast

For food brands, this creates the opportunity to reach and engage a broad segment of enthusiasts, those consumers who are passionate about food and simply love to cook.  Food and cooking, for them, is an experience to be enjoyed.  They list “cooking” under their hobbies & interests on their social profiles and talk about all things culinary with their friends. These customers can be the most valuable, most vocal and, in turn, most influential for brands.  Enthusiasts include moms, young singles and those “cooking for two” or “for picky eaters.”   But their needs and motivations are anything but the same, even within their social networks.  Therefore, tapping into the interest graph of these diverse enthusiasts holds more opportunity for food brands to create a richer, more compelling experience for customers.

Meat brands, for instance, want to engage those who love grilling with a passion, the kind of people  willing to shovel a path through snow just to get to their grill.  To help these grilling enthusiasts connect, persona-based filtering and sorting will go a long way. These grilling gurus should be able to easily find content from people like them, say, by checking “Grill Guru” to display hyper-relevant recipes and reviews. Taking it a step further, geographic information might be used to find people in similar climates, or a “My Fridge” app could be created to display only recipes that can be prepared with ingredients that users have on hand.

Enthusiasts also include those interested in or curious about the benefits of a particular diet, such as only drinking soy-milk or avoiding gluten all together.  While the core consumers for these products are those with health restrictions like lactose intolerance or Celiac Disease, the growing popularity in the lactose or gluten-free diets is attracting much broader swaths of consumers.  Not long ago, “gluten-free” was practically ignored by marketers.  But just last year, the New York Times declared it “the golden age of gluten-free,” highlighting the demographic appeal outside of those with dietary restrictions.  One can now find “gluten-free” labels on everything from cereal boxes to entire aisles in the grocery-store.   

Focus on pre-meal planning

Shopper marketers know the growing emphasis on pre-meal planning means consumers want both ideas and inspiration, whether it’s how to get kids to eat more vegetables or a desert that will impress their friends.  According to Google’s Zero Moment of Truth, many of today’s shoppers make their choice of what to cook or bake before they reach the store.   How? A recent Bazaarvoice survey, conducted by Kelton Research, revealed that nearly three out of four consumers say it would be important to read user-generated content before making a decision about purchasing food.  Recipe research, either for a family dinner on a Tuesday night or a special occasion, helps consumers build their basket for the in-store visit.  For brands, this translates to incremental baseline sales.

Consumers are also buying online: 40% of online shoppers have purchased food items within the last six months, according to a 2011 study.

Social cookbooks

A growing number of brands and recipe sites are keeping up by asking their community to share their favorite recipes (and the stories behind them) with online social cookbooks.  Enthusiasts can share new ideas for cooking chicken or using condiments, like ranch dressing or ketchup. Through the creativity of their advocates, brands get to demonstrate the diversity of their products.

Perhaps the iPad as the new cookbook is most apparent with Millennials—consumers in their mid-teens to early 30s who have graduated in the digital age of Facebook and smartphones.  Our research reveals that more than half of this generation values the opinions of strangers on brand websites more than recommendations from family and friends.  What does this mean for one’s favorite recipe passed from generation to generation?  For food brands, it means creating a community where individuals with similar cooking interests and skill-levels can rate, review and share their opinions.  Helpfulness voting, Facebook sharing and community reviews will determine whether or not your creation is, in fact, really a masterpiece.  For the food enthusiast, the kitchen just got a whole lot bigger.

It seems like we’ve been talking about augmented reality for years now. It’s perpetually the next big thing in mobile, and is still at the very beginning of the technology adoption curve. Honestly, I had kind of checked out of the AR conversation—unfairly—after waiting for it to move from flashy demos to actual utility. AR’s utility has only been realized in a few apps, like Yelp’s Monocle, but the wow factor has overshadowed the practical applications of this technology. And then I met the guys from Blippar at CES.

Blippar is an app from the UK that succeeds where most augmented reality fails—utility and ease of use. Blippar lets consumers interact with products, ads and media in really interesting ways. One of the best examples they showed me was their work with Heinz Tomato Ketchup, which overlays an interactive recipe book onto their products, as you can see in the picture above. Ambarish Mitra, their CEO and Founding Director, was kind enough to answer my questions for this blog post (which I’ve left in the original Queen’s English).

In what ways does Blippar deliver where other augmented reality apps do not?

Blippar is not a techie app, it's a new behaviour which will change how we engage with the world around us.  To blipp is to hold your phone up to anything in the real world and enjoy an instantaneous interactive or content-rich experience.  We are the world’s first business model driving this new behaviour specifically out of traditional press, media and outdoor messages – and through a single “lens” on everyone's smart phone.  Not only that, but our technology provides the quickest and most seamless interactive experience found anywhere today.

What adoption numbers can you share for the UK, and how do you plan on entering the US market?

In UK we have over 350,000 users in 5 months and growing every day. Exhibiting at CES was our first initiative of entering the US market where we showcased our platform to numerous leading brands. There is huge demand for blippar in the US market and we are taking all the relevant steps in terms of infrastructure and resource to accelerate fulfillment.

What is the number one suggestion you have for brands looking to explore the potential of augmented reality?

Content, content, content. They key ingredient to a successful campaign is to deliver what's in it for the customer. Meaningful and useful content still holds the highest importance be it augmented reality, social media or any form of above the line marketing.  Secondly –brands reed to educate the consumer that a campaign is interactive and “blippable” by utilising specific and compelling calls-to-actions to create the awareness. We have seen examples where in spite of great content by brands using AR, the campaigns didn't do well because of lack of communication of call to action to drive the user to engage with the chosen medium.

What would you tell a brand that’s skeptical of the value of creating an augmented reality experience? 

Many skeptics undermined check-ins, tweets, social sharing without realising that these behaviour patterns are inherent within us. All of the above have suddenly surrounded our lives in last 3 years because of mobile acting as the key enabler of this behaviour. In simple terms AR is nothing but visual interaction with real world and even this behaviour is innate to us. A large and growing user base is adopting and enjoying this behaviour via their mobiles. It's a great opportunity for brands to deliver great content and allowing users to experience the brand straight from its posters, press ads, kiosks and the product itself.  They can also track how users are engaging with their ads and products by having a wealth of real time data which was never possible till blippar came along.  Finally – it doesn't come with the price tag that brands might expect from such high-tech stuff!

I’ve been pigeonholing Blippar as an AR app, but how do you describe the space Blippar inhabits?

Blippar is not just a technology, it’s a brand new consumer behaviour – and a verb… “to blip”. Blippar is well on its way to becoming the eponymous verb for this behaviour.   Newspapers, magazines, products, billboards, shop displays and pictures instantly jump to live with valuable, content – whether a game, recipe, coupon, video or interactive digital experience.  Applications are, in fact, limitless and limited only by our imagination.

It's important to note that AR is just one of the formats in which content can be delivered by a blipp – it's the fundamental image-recognition aspect of what the tech offers which is the key to this as a new channel for content delivery and interaction, not the manner in which the content is delivered.

Of all the projects you’ve worked on with Blippar clients, which did you personally find most interesting and why?

We love all the blipps we have created for brands and each one of them have delivered unique experiences for users driving more brand engagement. Heinz Tomato Ketchup blipp is one of the favourites as it extends the actual ketchup bottle into a recipe book with video content and also opportunities for consumers to win prizes every day. Cadburys blipp is also a classic where users could play a game of smacking ducks straight off a chocolate bar. Users required to buy the chocolates to play the game. Suddenly from a snack, a piece of chocolate bar becomes an entertainment medium where you compete for high scores.  Ask everyone here though, and they'll probably give you a different answer!   Just like our consumers, we're all drawn to different experiences…

What new device capabilities or trends are you most excited about from the perspective of a mobile startup?

Faster processors and better cameras are things we look forward to most as it continuously improves blippar user experience with improved tracking and image recognition.  More phones having HD screens which make the blipps look richer. Improved GPS for more precise location services – and more.  In addition, we're watching the phone become more like an extension of our own human senses – audio recognition, image-recognition—and soon touch, with the integration of NFC into the phone hardware.  All are exciting, complimentary technologies – turning intuitive behaviour into innovative and life-enhancing experiences.

The “kids” who invented Facebook, never call when they can text, and don’t go out without their smartphones – they’re growing up. And soon, your business will depend on them.

It’s true. By 2017, Millennials – those consumers now in their mid-teens to mid-30s – will have more spending power than any other generation. This generation, sometimes called “Generation Y,” shops differently than their predecessors. Millennials are hyper-social, constantly connected to social and endlessly curious about what others are doing, buying, and enjoying – strangers as well as friends. They’re marketing savvy and ad averse, having been marketed to more than any other generation. And at the same time, they’re still interested in engaging with brands – most feel companies should offer more ways for customers to share their opinions online.

The bottom line is, Millennials shop and interact with brands differently. As they start to control spending, their habits will inevitably change the way businesses sell – and with it, the way all consumers buy.

The infographic below shares just a few of the stats Millennials expert Jason Dorsey will cover in our upcoming webinar. Register for the webinar to see how Millennials shop, and how brands can win their loyalties now.

Note: For a high-quality PDF version of this infographic, click here.

Almost everyone has spent time at a hospital. Whether you’re visiting an aging family member, welcoming a new addition into the family, or seeking a routine treatment, the service you receive leaves a lasting impression. No matter the outcome, patient satisfaction along with the quality of treatment has never been more important. We want to feel cared for. We want to be treated as an individual and respected as a patient. And we will share our experience with others.

When selecting a health care provider, we often turn to our friends for recommendations, browse for information from insurance provider websites, and search the Internet for third-party reviews and opinions. In a soon-to-be-released study conducted by Bazaarvoice and Kelton Research, we found that 26% of consumers ages 18-34, and 32% of consumers ages 47-65, would never choose a health care provider without reading at least one piece of user-generated content. So how does a health care provider turn patients into brand advocates?

Hill Country Memorial Hospital, a Bazaarvoice client, began collecting reviews from hospital patients and guests a year ago. They don’t just capture basic service information, rather opinions on their quality of care, their doctors, wellness, outpatient services, and the overall experience. The reviews are posted on their website and circulated throughout each piece of the business so they can stay close to the customers and provide better services.

How many times have you been asked to rate the service of your hospital or care you received? Hill Country Memorial empowers each patient to share their experience after each visit. Whenever a staff member receives a review, a copy of the review is sent to them as well as their director. The team feels rewarded when they see the positive impact their work is having on their patients.

As with any industry, whenever you open yourself to feedback it’s not always positive. Hill Country Memorial sees this as an opportunity to change how they do business. When their online payment service was identified as a problem, from a customer’s review, the Business Office and IT team were notified and the problem was quickly resolved.

Because consumers trust other consumers over traditional marketing, Hill Country Memorial adds customer reviews to their advertising and media placements. And no marketer could ask for better content to use than the authentic reviews they receive like “I couldn’t be any happier if they named a wing of the hospital after me,” or, “I was treated like a king”. Their 4.9-out-of-5-star patient experience is a testament to their customer centric approach.

As time continues, more people will not only expect good service but a great overall experience from their health care providers. Mark Peterson, Director of Customer Experience for Hill Country Memorial Hospital feels that hospitals must put the patient first in order to retain their strength and market share, preserve their brand, attract more business, and maintain a high level of satisfaction and accreditation.

Case study: Charles Schwab boosts acquisition with online Ratings and Reviews

I've been thinking about the best way to answer that one, inevitable CES question: “What’s the big, new thing this year?”

My answer is (and will be): “Nothing. And we should all be very excited about that.” I’m not a trend-basher; I think things like huge, capacitive-touch TVs and washing machines that text us when loads are ready are fascinating developments that deserve our attention, not cynicism. Some of what I saw was incredible, even ground breaking. But nothing this year was bleeding-edge-new and seen everywhere.

If the innovation on display at last year’s CES coalesced into an identifiable theme, it was the connected experience—the destruction of silos between devices, people, brands and content. As my colleague Brandon Willard wrote then:

“The biggest thing this year was actually an idea: that the boundaries that once existed for consumers are evaporating, and as far as consumers are concerned, they can’t crumble quickly enough.”

Companies were exploring the true potential of the internet of things. They were beginning to question the walled garden. They were finally realizing what consumers already knew—brands have no choice but to give consumers more choice. The cloud hit the shelves, and our chosen content was accessible from the myriad devices in our lives. The new smartphones on display promised to make posting a Facebook status as easy as making a call. It felt like the beginning of something that was powerfully customer-centric.

CES 2012 was an extension of this understanding, and companies continued to innovate toward the connected experience. Instead of abandoning what they promised consumers in 2011, companies showed products this year that delivered on this promise. Instead of chasing what they thought would be yet another “next big thing” this year; they focused on delivering better connected experiences. Because a promise of this kind requires an obsessive commitment to the customer, not a line of shiny new products to convince people they want.

Microsoft’s keynote reflected this commitment. It impressed me for what it didn’t contain. Nothing altogether surprising, no new products that represented complete departures or 180’s. Instead, Steve Ballmer and the other presenters emphasized the way Microsoft products are connecting consumers to the things they care about. The Windows Phone was described as “the first phone that put people first,” a phone for “celebrating all the relationships in your life.” Windows 8 was shown to work with touch, as well as mouse and keyboard, across a huge array of devices. It was a nice ending to the 20-year history of Microsoft’s massive presence at CES.

The products on display this year emphasized user experience over pure utility, and intuitiveness is being built-in to more and more consumer electronics. We owe a lot of this to the rise of professional user experience design, and the continued success of Apple, who didn't have an official physical presence at CES, but was nonetheless present on the floor in the hands of thousands of attendees. Given a choice between everything-but-the-kitchen-sink complexity, and simplified, satisfying product experiences, CE companies are starting to choose the latter—because that’s what consumers are demanding. The social integrations that some considered clunky last year were streamlined this year. Things like social television-watching are no longer just cool ideas or hasty product additions; they are now being woven-in to device design in ways that make absolute sense to consumers.

My colleague Shawn Gaide sums up the opportunity brands are now unlocking:

“What I think people forget about is how quickly device integration is happening, and more importantly, how quickly consumers are picking up on that trend in actual practice. If you’re a marketer, you just got at least one (if not two or three) more mediums to reach people with simultaneously. That will drive a new wave of implicit and explicit conversations with potential customers.”

CES 2012 proved that the show can be more than a product launch pad for the next big thing. It can be a showcase for a richer, more mature kind of innovation—the forward momentum that is generated by keeping promises made to customers.

Note: This a guest post by Kathy Mandelstein, Director Of WW Marketing, Social Business at IBM. IBM is a Bazaarvoice client. 

As one of the leading voices in the marketplace on Social Business, our team at IBM believes in practicing what we preach. This week in Orlando, Florida, we are running our annual flagship conference, IBM Lotusphere along with a new two day event for Business Leaders, IBM Connect. Of all the events that IBM runs, since these two events are focused on Social Business, it is critical that all aspects of the conference are truly social, transcending from online to the physical conference itself with a tight integration between the two.

We have taken our three tenets of a Social Business to heart as we built out the social plans for the week.

Transparent

The voices you will see in the social media efforts for IBM Social Business are not just those of IBMers. Our customers, business partners and many industry experts are helping us define and share the IBM Social Business point of view. Some good examples of that include:

• Social Stories Every company has a unique journey on how they are transforming into a Social Business. We have invited our customers and IBM Business Partners to share theirs in their own words and literally make it shareable to the major social networks as well. This goes above and beyond the traditional IBM case study and reference to socialize and learn from each other what has worked for them, what tools they are using and the cultural shift within their own company. We developed this capability in partnership with Bazaarvoice.

Screenshot of IBM Social Business Stories. Click image to visit site.

• The voice you will hear in our conference social media is not just from IBMers. We have the IBM Champions, actively helping us with our social media efforts at the conference. They have named themselves “Team Social.” An IBM Champion is an IT professional, business leader, developer, or educator who influences and mentors others to help them make best use of IBM software, solutions, and services. This volunteer army has been blogging both on their own blogs as well as contributing to our Social Business Insights Blog. They will also be helping us throughout the week with our onsite social outreach and activities.

Engaged

We wanted to make sure that our social efforts helped bring the community together in person at the event and then carried on long after the conference online. Here are a few examples of how we are engaging the community:

• We have set up Social Cafes throughout the event which serve a number of purposes and will be staffed by Social Hosts, both the IBMers and the Champions that are part of Team Social. They will be a gathering place to interact and learn more about a social topic of interest, or a place to get help. We will also be offering social topics throughout the day that an attendee can come by and get a quick start or refresher on in a very informal, collaborative way. One of the central elements of these spaces are large interactive touch screens that allow the attendee to physically interact with conference tweets, blogs, video, photos, daily polls and the Social Business stories that I mentioned and literally take items with them right from the screen by sending it to their mobile device or email address. They can even tweet from these screens, too.

Inside the IBM Social Cafe

• We will be running tweetups throughout the week to give attendees the chance to meet many of the people they interact with, often for the first time. We will also have social scavenger hunts to physically engage attendees in exploring all the different elements of the conference. For examplem taking a picture with a certain key person they have to track down–and yes they can use our foursquare location lists to find them–and then posting that photo to the conference Flickr stream. If they are the first to successfully complete the scavenger hunt they can come by a Social Cafe to pick up Social Business prizes.
• We have established IBM Connections communities for both Lotusphere and IBM Connect so that the attendees can interact before, during and long after the conference. To participate in the communities, they sign up for our solution showcase of the latest social technologies, IBM  Greenhouse and then they join the event community.

Nimble

Throughout the conference, we want both the attendees who are physically at the conference as well as those who could not be there in person to have access to what is happening real time at the conference. They can do this in several ways including:

• The Conference Social Media Aggregator, which brings the social media feeds for tweets, blogs, videos, photos, tag clouds all in one place. This gives a true sense of what is going on at the conference at any given time and on the back end helps us capture our social analytics for volume, interaction and sentiment.
• Also available from the aggregator and on the IBM Software Group Livestream Channel, we will be broadcasting the general sessions live Monday through Wednesday from both Lotusphere and IBM Connect. We will also be streaming key strategy and overview sessions, as well as interviews and discussions led by Information Week Editor, Lenny Leibowitz. All of this great content will also be available for replay, too.

These are just a few examples of how we are focused on leading by example by really integrating Social Business into everything we are doing at the conference. To share them all would require more than one blog post. If you didn't know about Lotusphere and were not able to join us this year, I would like to encourage you to still check it out at participate from wherever you may be. Be sure to check out the Social Media Aggregator to see what is going on and you can follow our hashtags on Twitter for updates: #ls12 and #IBMConnect. And if you have a Social Business story of your own, be sure to share it with us.

We like to switch things up a bit here at Bazaarvoice. When it comes to Net Promoter Score, most companies give a survey, in which each responder rates the company once on a scale of 0-10 as to whether or not they would recommend this business to a friend.  At Bazaarvoice, we use our review submission process to accomplish this task. Each time a contributor submits a review, they are asked, “Would you recommend this company to a friend?” So, if they submit multiple reviews, they have the opportunity to give multiple Net Promoter Scores.

In this way, we have a unique and powerful case where we can get multiple NPS from one contributor, and track it over time. This individualized information can be super insightful when paired with net promoter comments , which are collected along with the NPS to give contributors an opportunity to explain their rating. Our recommendation to handle multiple Net Promoter Scores:

1. Determine a timeframe for your NPS. (ie. Holiday NPS from Nov – Jan, or your company’s Q1)
2. Look at all NPS within that timeframe
3. If any contributors have submitted multiple NPS, take the most recent NPS for each contributor
4. Calculate your business’ NPS by subtracting percentage of detractors from percentage of promoters
5. Ta da! You have your NPS. Now trend this over time and see if customer sentiment towards your company is going up or down. Or you can compare yourself against others in the industry.

What’s our reasoning behind taking the most recent NPS? We assume you want to know how your customer’s would rate you right now and if they would recommend you to others. Perhaps they had a bad experience three months ago, but you reached out to them and now they would promote you to their friends and family. It only makes sense to use that last score as a way to determine their sentiment.

Other interesting stats and facts about NPS:

• Good: Two-thirds of contributors are promoters, rating the likelihood to recommend your company a 9 or 10 out of 10
• Bad: Only 16% are detractors, rating 6 or below
• Ugly: Detractors rate their product 46% lower than promoters
• Random: Detractors write 14% more than Promoters. Complaints are wordier and more detailed than praises

The million dollar question

“What can I do to improve my NPS?” I don’t want to point out the obvious, but NPS decreases as your product or service rating decreases. In other words, your company’s reputation and WOM is directly related to how people view your products, so improve those products and services! “Service” and “products” were some of the most frequent words in net promoter comments.  If you have great products and service, you will have a rocking Net Promoter Score, and thus be more profitable. In the words of Satmetrix:

“The Net Promoter Score, or NPS®, is a straightforward metric that holds companies and employees accountable for how they treat customers. It has gained popularity thanks to its simplicity and its linkage to profitable growth.”

Well, duh. Great Products + Awesome Customer Service = High NPS and High Profitability.

But there’s more you can do

Analyzing a sample of 30,000 net promoter comments from over 550 brands, we found that the store experience, especially having friendly and helpful staff, is crucial.

Promoters also rave about:

• prices
• delivery
• value
• selection/variety
• shipping,
• speedy service

What Promoters are saying:

Detractors are unhappy about:

• store experience
• online orders
• shipping
• and delivery

But poor customer service and product quality were still the largest offenders.

What Detractors are saying:

For a sky-high NPS, focus your resources first and foremost on products and service, and then on store experience, delivery, selection and shipping.

Note: This post was co-authored by Kurt Krake, Bazaarvoice advisory board member and President of Search-Werks

At this point, if you aren’t incorporating user-generated content (UGC) into your SEO content strategy, you are already behind. For several years, a trending topic in the SEO industry has been the power of “fresh” web content, that which is updated frequently. Benefits such as traffic from long tail keyword searches and boosted relevancy have always been very real, but an additional benefit has recently been given new attention.

After making infrastructure changes (called Caffeine) last year to allow for faster indexing & crawling of the web, Google recently announced a change to its “freshness algorithm,” which impacts what pages it shows to searchers, and is “designed to give you the most up-to-date results.” This algorithm change appears to affect up to 35% of Google searches which dwarfs the much talked about Panda Update.  Doing back of the envelope calculations, this affects roughly 11K searches/second and over 30B searches per month. This is clearly further affirmation of the Query Deserves Freshness concept that the SEO community has observed over the last couple of years. Google’s blog post to announce this algorithm change has three key use cases to follow for many types of websites.

The first example of a search that requires fresh content applies to news-related topics, and Google mentions:

"Now when you search for current events like [occupy oakland protest]… you’ll see more high-quality pages that might only be minutes old."

So, for websites that have a tendency to show fresh content every time Googlebot shows up, it’s likely those will get a boost from this update.

The second example Google uses is a recurring event. For example, it’s unlikely that this calendar will remain the #1 result for “seo conferences”:

Third, the post highlighted product content, describing it as, “information that changes often, but isn’t really a hot topic or a recurring event."  When content has been recently generated on an existing page, that page is more likely to rank than other pages with no new content. Google specifically discusses review content here, but this could apply to tweets, questions and answers, or any other type of user-generated content (UGC).

“Being a large merchant with hundreds of thousands of pages, it can be challenging to keep the entire site fresh,” commented a customer of ours, Mike Miller from Build.com, when we asked how he keeps his webpages fresh in the search engine algorithms:

 “I've come across many websites that spend far too much time focusing on optimizing for search engines and not enough focus on the customer.  I encourage my team to keep the customer top of mind at all times.

Promoting customers to submit product reviews and ask questions is an extremely useful method for keeping content fresh.  Customers tend to trust each other, so by providing tools for them to share their experiences creates an enjoyable buying experience.”

Here are some ways to reap the benefits of Google’s focus on freshness.

Keep XML sitemaps updated

This oldie but goodie tactic is often rushed or overlooked entirely. By adding appropriate priority and last update flags to the URLs in your sitemap, you can indicate to Google when page content is new. Also include mobile pages and video content in your sitemap!

Add social and news feeds

Add recent blog headlines, newsfeed items, or your Twitter feeds to high visibility parts of your site because fresh content is what tends to get tweeted about most. This ensures that prominent areas of your site have the fresh content Google is looking for!

Keep your content current

Develop a content strategy for your website based not only on target keywords with lots of traffic, but also ever-changing keywords for current issues, topics, or trends. Use Google Insights and trending on Twitter as keyword research tools to identify those current issues that you can develop a video, blog post, or tweet about. For example, a Christian ministry site posted a blog about using the term “Xmas” instead of “Christmas” – Does Writing ‘Xmas’ Take Christ out of Christmas? Every holiday season, this is a popular subject, so the site incorporated it into their content strategy and posted their point of view. Since this post  was timely, it generated lots of shares.

For major brand websites, which have been impacted both positively and negatively by this change, it is not practical to do large-scale content freshness updates to thousands of product detail pages individually. UGC is your best and most scalable method for meeting the freshness ranking signal across those pages (learn about our approach to content freshness).

Customer-centric SEO

As users, most of us probably realize the validity of finding the freshest content when we are looking for information. As web marketers, sometimes we forget that content we created just weeks ago may not be in line with this week’s topics or priorities. By following some of the steps above, you will not only be tackling long-tail traffic; you will also be improving your site’s relevance for topics that require freshness. Members of the Bazaarvoice SEO team have been speaking at conferences all year (most recently at #SESCHI) and during that time, companies have been eagerly finding out how to add UGC to their toolkit to benefit from fresh content.  Go forth and be fresh!

What strategies do you use to increase the amount of “fresh” content on your site?