After lab tests for reception issues led Consumer Reports to recommend that readers skip the new iPhone in favor of an older model, The Unofficial Apple Weblog found that Apple’s support forum moderators were deleting threads referencing the poor review. The story has since been covered by sites like Wired, Financial Times, and Fox News.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: negative reviews are a gift. Here are five reasons Apple (and all manufacturers) should embrace and learn from their negative reviews.

1. Negative feedback builds authenticity.

The mere presence of some negative feedback on a site creates trust in the brand. A site full of nothing but glowing reviews can make a shopper skeptical – consumers fear “white washing” from the brand. Allowing a mix of positive and negative feedback shows customers you’re willing to let them share their authentic opinions, and that you care what they have to say.

2. What’s bad for some isn’t bad for everyone.

Not all shoppers will use your products in the same way, so negative reviews from one customer won’t necessarily deter another. A designer’s criticism of a laptop’s lack of adequate graphic design capabilities wouldn’t necessarily deter a college student seeking a laptop for schoolwork. A negative review from a mother about a remote control’s small parts won’t deter a bachelorette from buying it.

3. Reviews – even negative reviews – drive sales.

Case studies prove it: reviews drive sales. We’ve found that even products with three-star ratings sell better than products with no reviews at all. Quickbooks enabled customer reviews on ProAdvisors, experts businesses hire to help them use the software. They found that not only did ProAdvisors with reviews get more clicks than those without feedback, but the number of reviews was more important than the rating. For example, a ProAdvisor who rates four out of five stars but has nine reviews gets more clicks than a five-star ranked ProAdvisor with just two reviews.

4. Negative feedback uncovers opportunities to improve.

Reviews turn your customers into an ongoing group of beta testers, uncovering areas brands can improve their offering to deliver a better customer experience. Oriental Trading Company brings negative feedback to their vendors to create better-quality products. Land of Nod and QVC UK have done the same. Domino’s Pizza recently made headlines with their “Pizza Turnaround” campaign, publicizing their decision to act on customers’ feedback to radically change – and improve – their fifty-year-old recipe.

5. There’s nowhere to hide.

Consumers are reviewing your brand and products online, and as Trendwatching hypothesized in December, they’re doing so in real-time. Social media gives your customers a voice just as loud – if not louder than – your brand’s. Ignoring the negative feedback that’s out there won’t make it go away. And in this case, it only made things worse. What was one negative review (be it from an expert panel) has now become a national story on Apple censorship, with some bloggers going so far as to draw ironic comparisons to the brand’s infamous “1984” ad. Which did more damage – the poor review, or the censorship story that followed?

“Bad” reviews are not the enemy, they’re an opportunity. Brands that recognize the value of this feedback are acting on it – and reaping the rewards.

Rule #1: Hang out with the cool kids. Hanging out with the cool kids usually landed me in detention, but it tops the list of 12 rules for Urban Outfitters’ approach to social marketing. Dmitri says that marketing through social media revolves around building relationships and making friends with your customers. The way to begin that friendship is to identify who you want to socialize with and ask for their participation.

One way Urban Outfitters “hangs out with the cool kids” involves identifying and seeding street bloggers. The bloggers use Urban Outfitters’ products, then their networks hear about their experiences. But Urban Outfitters doesn’t stop at a one-way conversation. They invite these influencers to participate in their marketing, giving them an opportunity to speak for the brand through photo submissions used in email campaigns, featuring them on the Urban Outfitters blog, and even asking them in some cases to moderate forums.

Urban Outiftters features Joshua Kissi and Travis Gumbs, two influencers, on their blog.

Rule #2: Don’t be a snob. While hanging out with the cool kids is key, Siegel says, don’t ignore your real customers. This is where user-generated content becomes a key strategy in social marketing.

Customer photo submission from the “Way You Wore It” Campaign.

While they were initially nervous about sharing customer feedback and featuring actual customers in their marketing, UO now works to engage with all types of customers in many ways. A great example is their The Way You Wore It campaign, where customers submitted photos of themselves wearing Urban Outfitters clothing styled in their own ways. Dmitri and his team quickly saw that the customer photos were as artful as those their own marketing team created, and they also saw how their products are used in a very natural, participatory way.

Urban Outfitters has seen great success by focusing their social media strategy on engaging the actual customer instead of running up the numbers. How close are you to feeling a connection to people you are experiencing in social media?

How to speak your customers' language.

Hear Dmitri speak about all 12 rules to Urban Outfitters’ social marketing in a live webinar on Monday, June 21, 1:00 – 2:00 pm CST.

]]> http://www.bazaarvoice.com/blog/2010/06/17/urban-outfitters%e2%80%99-rules-to-social-marketing/feed/ 7 http://www.bazaarvoice.com/blog/2010/05/04/how-facebook%e2%80%99s-new-features-fit-into-your-social-strategy/ http://www.bazaarvoice.com/blog/2010/05/04/how-facebook%e2%80%99s-new-features-fit-into-your-social-strategy/#comments Wed, 05 May 2010 04:34:22 +0000 Brant Barton http://www.bazaarvoice.com/blog/?p=3888 Mark Zuckerberg’s prediction that Facebook’s Like Button would have 1 billion impressions in its first 24 hours was a modest one, judging from reports last week that over 50,000 sites have implemented the feature and that the 1 billion impressions threshold was exceeded in a timely fashion.

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!

The inspiration for this post is the now infamous "Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt", currently the #1 selling Apparel product on Amazon.com. No, that's not a typo. I could efficiently end this post by just telling you to read a few of the reviews for this product. That would more than accomplish my goal of demonstrating the value of not taking yourself (or your brand) too seriously. But I have a minimum length requirement to meet, so I'll go on . . .

Our good friends at Econsultancy in the UK beat me to the punch with an entertaining blog post on the t-shirt. The Washington Post published an article on the same day. No matter who you trust, that's one damn funny t-shirt. If you trust me and took my advice above to read a few of the reviews, I bet you are now making your way through the checkout process while you finish reading this nailbiter of a post. That's impressive multi-tasking.

We see our share of humorous reviews and many of those are just too inappropriate to post, but as reviews of the Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt aptly demonstrate, there is a very fine line between inappropriate humor and pure genius, not to mention a word of mouth marketing bonanza. I won't speak for my colleagues at Bazaarvoice (you know who you are), but this t-shirt is responsible for a major drop in productivity last Friday because I was personally contributing to the millions of word of mouth "impressions" that the product received. While it may be difficult to put a dollar value on each of those impressions, you can most definitely put a dollar value on lost productivity.

In closing, if you offer customer reviews of your products and services, whether you are a Bazaarvoice client or not, I urge you to evaluate whether your definition of inappropriate is too strict and your tolerance of humor too low. Millions of dollars and an immeasurable wealth of customer word of mouth could be at stake!

The study finds that consumers are planning to spend less this year. Accordingly, we know that retailers are feeling the consumer's pain and don't have budgets to purchase and utilize all of the tools they would like, so they must choose right the first time. The study results confirm what many retailers have already discovered, Ratings & Reviews have been and continue to be consumers' most used and most trusted peer-generated content tool outside of the standard site information provided by retailers and manufacturers.

Key findings from the study:

• 48% of consumers plan to spend less, primarily in the automotive sector (50%), travel (46%), and CE (43%).
• This group plans to do more due diligence, looking for more information in more areas than the other groups (42% will visit 3 sites or more)
• Many of those reluctant to spend can still be positively influenced – 61% report that their confidence can be increased via online shopping resources
• 77% cite reviews as being useful in making a recent purchase
• Ratings & Reviews are the top ranked Content Discovery Tool for driving consumer trust and loyalty
  800 consumers were surveyed on their changing propensity to spend this year and on what tools they plan to use to help them feel more confident about their buying decisions.

The results showed that many consumers are planning to spend less (49%), more consumers are now going online to research their online AND offline purchases, and that very few of them have made up their mind on price (33%), brand (23%), and store/retailer (16%) associated with their purchase. 61% of those who said they were more reluctant to spend said their confidence could be increased if presented with the right information online.

This information should be empowering to retailers and manufacturers.
They have a clear opportunity to influence and win new customers, even in this challenging economy. The reality is that consumers know the data they need exists online, and they will find the content whether on your site or somewhere else. Check out how Amazon's heavy adoption of social commerce content and tools has helped them gain market share during the past couple quarters.

Customer Ratings & Reviews Are Top Ranked Content Tool
77% of all those surveyed cite reviews as being useful in making a recent purchase, making it the most used peer-generated content (ranking even higher than the actual Manufacturers website). 81% of this of those who said they plan to reduce their spend said they used ratings and reviews to make past purchases and that they are the top ranked tool that would make this group more confident when considering a purchase. 

As JupiterResearch states in the study, "Retailers must consider user generated content as a base line component of their overall offering and use it not only to enhance product descriptions, but to augment search and navigation experiences, enliven marketing messages and improve organic search results. In fact, some forward thinking retailers are beginning to incorporate the content consumers write about products in the original product descriptions to make them more accessible or consumer-focused. Furthermore, multichannel retailers can use this valued content in their stores, catalogs and other channels to bring the voice of the customer to all aspects of their customer interactions."

Learn more at upcoming Bazaarvoice events
Patti Freeman-Evans, vice president and research director at Forrester Research, will join Bazaarvoice and richrelevance in a series of retailer events to share consumer intelligence and online marketing strategies based on this research. For more information or to register for the New York event on March 3, 2009 or the San Francisco event on March 26, 2009, visit https://www.bmmreg.com/Engaged/.

I was happy to see Andy leverage the valuable community we assembled at our first-ever and sold-out Summit in May by recording five video interviews. It was truly an amazing group of individuals, charged with word of mouth marketing at many of the largest companies in the world, from Bank of America to Wal-Mart. It was humbling to be in the presence of so many smart industry leaders, sharing best practices with each other in our rapidly emerging field. Because of them (as well as the hard work by our team), we have set a very high bar for our Summit next year.

Andy recently published his interview of me. We discussed how user-generated content is changing the merchandising culture at companies, helping them become more customer-centric and successful as a result.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Read on to see more interviews by Andy.

Andy previously published an interview of Ze Frank, another one of our keynotes and one of the funniest but smartest online personalities you will ever meet. Ze's interview at our Summit by Kelly Mooney (a Summit keynote speaker, author of The Open Brand, and President of Resource Interactive) was a personal mental highlight for me, probing into some very deep issues. Andy covers topics like viral marketing with Ze. By the way, that gong behind Ze in the interview is a very important part of Bazaarvoice's culture, and has been since the beginning. You can thank my co-founder, Brant Barton, for that, and you can find multiple gongs in our Austin office and one in our London office (so far).

Click here to view the embedded video.

Andy also previously published an interview of Steve Leveen, the founder and CEO of Levenger. Steve is a very smart leader, and brought his son to our event. Steve gave me some great tips on raising our daughter, Rachel, and is a very kind person (as is his son, by the way).  In Andy's interview of Steve, they talk about the use of video reviews and Flickr as a natural medium for Levenger's sophisticated customers.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you have not subscribed to Andy's blog yet, do it today. Incredibly useful tips are published on an almost daily basis. I found myself recently evangelizing on why to follow it to the founder of Hey Cupcake, a local joint in Austin. I connected with the founder, Wes Hurt, recently after reading about him in Tribeza because we may be related (it is a long story). You must try these cupcakes the next time you are in Austin – they are unreal. But I'm off topic – I was telling Wes to read Andy's book and subscribe to his blog because he will quickly learn how to build his business as a result. I also found myself telling Wes the story of how Krispy Kreme lost its "specialness", parroting Andy telling me the same story.

On Andy's blog, he will soon be publishing the remaining two interviews he did at our Summit: Bryan Eisenberg (highly respected industry consultant, co-founder of the Web Analytics Association, keynote speaker at our Summit and several other conferences, prominent author [ClickZ, Call To Action, and Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?], and Bazaarvoice Advisory Board member) and Seth Greenberg (former CEO of eHobbies.com – one of the online pioneers, former Shop.org Board peer, and leader at Intuit).

* Note: we are proud members of WOMMA and our own Sam Decker serves on the Board of Directors while WOMMA's President is my fellow Board Director at Bazaarvoice, Ed Keller (keynote speaker at our Summit, author of The Influentials, former CEO of Roper, and co-founder and CEO of The Keller Fay Group).

So why not take it a step further and utilize customer generated content in the form of product reviews in advertising?

Advertising has become so ubiquitous that it is mostly ignored and consumers don’t trust the messages that companies send them. But the customer’s voice is as powerful offline as it is online, so why not take advantage of it?

Best Buy recently featured their customers’ voices – actual snippets from online product reviews along with product ratings – in their nationwide Sunday newspaper circular. They utilized a clear call to action to drive consumers directly to their “Top Rated Cameras” page, giving shoppers quick and easy access to top rated cameras. This not only provides a great way for Best Buy to advertise their top cameras, but it allows them to easily measure the success of this advertisement by measuring traffic to this page and sales conversion of these products.

This is another example of a Bazaarvoice best practice developed by our team of Community Managers – use your customers’ words to fuel your entire marketing mix. We strongly encourage our clients to use their customer reviews (along with other valuable user generated content such as from our Ask & Answer, BrandVoice and Stories products) in all forms of advertising: email marketing, online ads, store signage, print ads, Facebook groups, etc.

There is no more effective way to get customers to listen than to let them hear from other customers just like them. This is the future of advertising or should I say “effective" advertising!
 

There have been many exciting research moments for our industry in the past two years:

• When we discovered the Ratings J-Curve, including how it looks for apparel (a category that many expected not to follow the J-Curve trend)

• When Jupiter and Forrester showed how many shoppers read reviews (77% and 70%, respectively)
• When MarketingSherpa showed how many consumers preferred sites with reviews (58%)
• When we showed how negative reviews have a bigger positive impact on conversion than positive reviews and how smart retailers think about negative reviews
• When we worked with the Keller Fay Group to find out why consumers write reviews (primarily, to help each other) and how many of them are buying offline and then reviewing their purchase online (66%)
• When comScore and The Kelsey Group showed how online reviews impact offline purchasing (released this week)

• When we discovered how Ask & Answer impacts conversion (up 22%), how many users participate in questions and answers even though it is such a new medium in eCommerce, and how clients like The Home Depot are leveraging this new offering to differentiate and benefit their customers
• When we saw how reviews impact customer acquisition and documented our extensive findings in a whitepaper
• When Nielsen announced that consumer recommendations are the most trusted form of advertising (78% trust versus 34% for search-engine ads)

• When Deloitte (one of my former employers) showed how many consumers are influenced by reviews (82% of those that read them)

And this new holiday tradition is another major finding.  It shows just how much influence reviews online are having on offline shopping behavior.  This especially hits home for me because when Brant and I started this company in May of 2005 only around 10 retailers in the U.S. (including online-only, like Amazon.com) had reviews.  Now MarketingSherpa reported that 43% of retailers do (as of Feb-07).  That is having a broad impact on consumer expectations – reviews are quickly become a must-have for retailers and a norm for online shopping.

Most of these are intuitive findings and could be easily dismissed as "obvious".  But data informs strategy, as I learned so many times while working with clients as the founder of Coremetrics.

So, what do you do with this new data?  Here are a few ideas:

• Promote reviews for the same products featured in your Thanksgiving circular on your home page the week of Thanksgiving – this will make it easy for the 70 to 77% that are seeking reviews (and the 82% that are influenced when they read them) to realize that you have them

• Send an email about reviews on Thanksgiving morning with a subject line like, "Read Thousands of Customers' Reviews Before You Go Shopping on Friday".  In that email, feature the same products or categories of products that you have in your Thanksgiving circular
• Create distinct shopping paths linked for your home page such as "Our Best Friday Deals on Customer Top-Rated Holiday Gifts" and so on for all of your major categories featured in your in-store (and online) sale
• Push reviews again on Cyber Monday – both in email and on your home page – but with a distinct focus on online shopping
• Put top-rated circulars in your stores for greeters and category managers (like HD TV) to hand out to help in-store shoppers
• Feature reviews in your print circulars so that readers know that your site has reviews before they go online to research them

Want more?  Watch the holiday webinar that our Community Management team recorded.  And please don't forget to tell us your ideas as well!

And, finally, please support the Ray M. Greenly Scholarship Fund this holiday season by shopping at Shop.org's Cyber Monday portal.  All proceeds go to honor a great man that I had the pleasure of working with.  He helped grow Shop.org into the great organization that it is today.  And you will be helping to fund the future visionaries of the eCommerce industry.