To illustrate some of the social touch-points brands have with holiday shoppers, let’s walk through fictional shopper Tara’s search for a gift for her friend, Neill.

Like 27% of holiday shoppers last year (according to eMarketer) and likely even more shoppers this year, Tara begins her gift search on social media. She heads to Neill’s Facebook profile to look for clues as to what he might like.

Shoppers are using social media to figure out what friends and family want for the holidays. Help them find the answer by encouraging your customers and site visitors to share gift ideas or wish lists with their social networks. PETCO, for example, includes social sharing buttons on every product page.

PETCO includes social network sharing buttons on every product page.

Had Neill shared a product directly from a retailer site like PETCO, his post would pull Tara into the purchase path. He unfortunately hasn’t shared any specific products, but as a live music lover, his recent posts indicate that he might like a digital pocket camcorder to take to concerts.

27% of shoppers who researched and bought holiday gifts online last year looked for ideas about what friends and family wanted on social media.

With her gift idea in mind, and like 59% of gift shoppers, Tara starts her specific gift search at a search engine. Regularly updated content like customer questions and reviews feeds the freshness search engines crave to boost search rankings. Indexing this content directly into product pages’ code maximizes this benefit – indexing drove a 17% increase in natural search for OpenTable. Make sure you’re properly indexing your UGC to show up in holiday shoppers’ gift searches.

Additionally, features like Google Rich Snippets place star ratings and review snippets directly in search results, drawing shopper attention. We’ve even seen UGC improve effectiveness of paid search ads – review content drove a 196% increase in paid search revenue for Office Depot. Use customers’ words in your search marketing to drive traffic.

Star ratings in search results grab shopper attention.

Tara’s search takes her to SmartStore’s shoot-and-share camcorder category page. Here, she finds a number of product options with similar specs and marketing copy.

Like endcaps and signage in a retail store, customer reviews draw Tara’s attention, and help her differentiate between like products. These authentic opinions are the most trusted form of advertising, with 70% and 90% of consumers trusting recommendations from unknown and known reviewers, respectively. Shoppers today expect and demand reviews – according to a ChannelAdvisor study, 83% of ALL holiday shoppers this year will be influenced by customer reviews.

Top-rated pages and ratings help shoppers narrow their choices.

On the category page, Tara can sort by rating to help narrow her choices, and she looks for products that have lots of reviews – number of reviews can be more important than star rating. Retailers and manufacturers should work together now to increase review volume in time for the holidays, both through customer participation and by syndicating reviews from brand sites to retail sites.

Ratings help Tara narrow her choices to a specific product. The product has high reviews, but Tara wonders if it's good for recording live music. Surveys have shown that having “no way to get a specific question answered” is the most frequent issue shoppers face online, and their search for answers can take them away from your site. Let customers ask questions directly on your site, where other customers and brand reps can answer them.

Tara posts her question on SmartStore's site, and SmartStore even tweets it to their followers to ensure a speedy answer.

Retailers can tweet customer reviews and questions to their followers.

A few days after posting her question, Tara receives an email from SmartStore – her question has been answered, and the email leads her directly back to the purchase path. Notify shoppers when their questions are answered to bring them back to your site.

Answers from actual product owners build confidence in hesitant shoppers. Click to enlarge.

Confident that she’s found the right gift for Neill, Tara adds the camcorder to her cart. And, realizing she’s under budget, she adds the peer-recommended carrying case to her order as well before checking out. SmartStore can rest assured Tara found the right product – UGC is proven to reduce return rates.

This is how many gift-hunters will shop this holiday season. Is your brand ready?

Want to connect with shoppers this holiday season? We can help.

See how every interaction with a consumer can help drives sales and increase loyalty in this three-minute video.

Ready to discuss how your business can benefit from any of these tips? Request a live demo to see how your brand can get social in time for the holidays.

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.

This post was guest-written by Anna Skaya, Bazaarvoice Community Manager in the UK.

Argos, our largest European client, released an email campaign last week to all customers who had either purchased or reserved a product during December. They had postponed sends during the month of December due to the high level of gift purchases and a possible lower level of response, and this strategy really paid off.

The Argos decision to hold all email until January was an important one from a level of return perspective. It also ensured that fresh reviews were received ahead of their January Catalogue launch, a key milestone in their trading calendar. We were under pressure to process and moderate the content quickly and accurately – Argos requires the highest degree of moderation so no drop in SLA or quality would be acceptable!

Result: Argos set a Bazaarvoice record by amassing more submissions in a 24 hour period than any other Bazaarvoice client, plus it doubled the previous highest number, set by a large US client. Way to go, UK!

The epic success of this campaign is not only based on the sample size. The internal Argos team followed our post-purchase email best practices: send out the email on a Tuesday or Wednesday between 10am and 4pm when most people are at the office as this is when review submissions seem to be most prolific. We also recommend waiting to send Christmas post-purchase emails until after the holidays, to help ensure a better return of high quality reviews. This not only generates more relevant content as the gifts have been opened and the returns have been made, but it will also increase review volume, since most people are now back in their ‘normal routine.’

Community Managers help our clients hone their post-purchase emails all the time – we have seen small tweaks to marketing campaigns equal huge changes in email open rates and review volume.

How did the Argos email do in numbers? See for yourself:

1. Total reviews submitted in one day (11am to Midnight): 63,232 reviews
2. Total reviews collected in 24 hours: ~70,000 reviews
3. Total reviews since email launch: 90,000+ reviews
4. Total reviews that might make it out of SLA: NONE!

This was the single biggest spike we have seen from our hundreds of clients. Argos sets a new record on number of reviews gathered in a day, beating out the previous record of 40,000 reviews set last fall. As our case studies show, more reviews equals higher sales conversion.

I love seeing a UK retailer drive such results! Look to Argos to being a key player in the online social commerce market – with a solid internal team, the right initiatives and innovative ideas, this is a true partnership!

Click on each image to see it full-size.

Williams-Sonoma has quickly realized the value of UGC. This holiday season they used customer reviews in several emails to promote holiday foods and merchandise top-rated cookware.

Beauty products purveyor philosophy re-styled the look and feel of Ratings & Reviews for the holidays. They also used top-rated gifts as one way to merchandise products in their holiday shop and promoted this on their homepage.

 Throughout the holiday shopping season Best Buy featured three different homepage banner ads with pop-up URLs to direct the consumers to various shopping categories. One of their favored merchandising categories was top-rated products.

Levenger featured top-rated products as “Customer Favorites” in their holiday gift guide and highlighted this in an email.

Land of Nod gave away a $1,000 gift card in return for reviews…just in time for customers to do some holiday shopping and for the Land of Nod to collect some great content to help indecisive shoppers.

This holiday season saw a huge reflection of the customer voice in retail. We’ll keep you posted on other unique holiday promotions this year!

Click here to view the embedded video.

A few weeks ago, during a visit with my almost four year old niece, Zoey, I heard her scream, "I hate commercials!" during a commercial break as she watched one of her favorite TV shows.  Toyota, this is your nightmare.  Or at least, this will become your nightmare in about 12 years, when my sixteen year old niece starts begging her parents for a car.  It will probably be whatever make and model her friends are raving about at the time, not the car she saw advertised on TV or the Internet.  [For the record: I am the very satisfied owner and primary driver of a Toyota-made automobile.]

All of this brings to mind a short essay called "Brandalism" written by Banksy, the semi-anonymous British street artist that some authorities call a vandal.  He happens to be my favorite artist, as I find his work to be more thoughtful and politically and culturally relevant than most of the work I see in contemporary art exhibits.  Moreover, his work is truly public, whereas most "art" as we commonly know it sits in private collections, to be appreciated by only a privileged few.  In his book, Wall & Piece, Banksy writes:

"People abuse you every day. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

"You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

"Screw that. Any advert in public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

"You owe the companies nothing. You especially don't owe them any courtesy. They have rearranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs."

To some, the passages above probably sound a bit militant.  To me, they are a wake-up call and a vision of the future.  The day is coming.  My niece is already there.  Colin Anderson, the 'community organizer' behind the Facebook group mentioned above, is already there.  With those qualifications, he'll probably be President one day.  The question is when will The Advertisers get there?

It will take some time.  In the meantime, advertisers will attempt to delay the inevitable by paying their agencies to build websites that allow us to create clever commercial mash-ups that we can send to our friends and post on our Facebook profiles.  In my opinion, that's the equivalent of handing out free bags of rocks for us to throw at our friends' heads (see first rock reference above).

For the record, I don't have the perfect answer to this quandary.  At Bazaarvoice, we're developing alternative ways for consumers to learn about brands, products, and services and arm themselves with the information and confidence to make the best decision for their needs.  The consumer perspective is the most important one in our product development process, although we sell to . . . The Advertisers.  Products like Ratings & Reviews, Ask & Answer, and Stories are the result.  We're in the first phase of a massive change in the power structure, and we're doing what we can to make that transition a smooth one, one that CMOs and CFOs and CEOs are comfortable with.  We're enabling companies to engage and communicate with consumers in ways they would have never conceived of just a few years ago.  A great example is the Christmas campaign launched by Canadian Tire using our Stories product.  Rather than bombard consumers with a repetitive advertising message (and risk a backlash like the one Toyota has recently experienced), Canadian Tire has simply enabled their best customers to create and BE the advertising for them.

In closing, if you are responsible for your company's advertising spend or if you report to the person that is, please read and share this post.  This post isn't a threat, it's just an opinion piece, and my opinion is that there are other "Saved by Zero"-style backlash movements out there just waiting to happen.  Don't be one of them!  There are more authentic, creative, and meaningful ways to accomplish the same goal and enlist the passion of your most loyal and satisfied customers at the same time.  If you give your customers the tools, they'll become the Sales & Marketing department you wish you had – millions strong, absolutely ecstatic about your products, and willing to work overtime to help you succeed.  (No offense intended to Bazaarvoice's Sales & Marketing teams, who are the best I've ever worked with!)