BrandVoice is taking off in a big way with manufacturers, and we’re pleased to see some great results.

We recently turned “on” BrandVoice for Dell, Epson, and Kingston on a major consumer electronics website and on OfficeDepot.com. These manufacturers had been gathering their own product reviews on their sites for several months; however, product reviews had been average on the retailer sites.

As soon as we started syndicating reviews via BrandVoice to retailer sites, review volumes on these sites dramatically increased for these products, with Dell seeing a 34X increase in number of reviews, going from about 32 reviews per product up to more than 1100 review per product.

In every case, BrandVoice helped each brand show way more reviews per product versus other competitive products in the product category. Epson products, for example, had 33X more reviews than other products in their category. Kingston now shows 7X more reviews than their competitors, and Dell product reviews show up 55 times more than other reviews in their categories, on average.

This online visibility increases product visibility on a retailer’s site. Just like brands fight for “shelf space” and placement within a store, product reviews can help products stand out more to research-driven consumers. Consumers trust products that have customer reviews, and higher review volumes lead to higher sales conversions.

If you’re a manufacturer capturing product reviews on your site, ask your online retailers how you can syndicate your reviews to their sites. And if you don’t yet capture reviews on the products you create, what are you waiting for?

Read more about how BrandVoice drives review volume increases, and also read how Kingston doubled its conversion with BrandVoice at OfficeDepot.com.

Let’s start this with what we’ve learned. It’s been nearly three years since the public launch of Bazaarvoice. We and our retail clients have discovered so much about the demand and effect of customer-generated content.

We know consumers want to hear from others like them. In fact, they demand it. Jupiter and Forrester report over 70% of customers seek reviews when shopping online. Forrester found that the number of online shoppers reading reviews has doubled year over year. And Jupiter reports that over 60% of people who buy offline had researched online, thus reviews impacts a large percentage of offline purchasing as well.

We also know customer content affects the top and bottom line for retailers, driving dramatic improvements in online conversion, average order value, search traffic, returns, advertising effectiveness, and customer satisfaction. Together we’ve learned that more customer content equals more impact. 25 reviews on a product can have up to 400% higher conversion than if it has five reviews. Products with more than 30 reviews see a 49% increase in time on that product page. Many of our clients are leveraging the customer voice to not only effect conversion on their ecommerce site, but also to impact search advertising, print advertising, catalog, product selection and much more. We expect this trend to accelerate. See the abundance of research, stats and case studies.

So, consumers want content from other customers because it helps them make a purchase decision. Retailers want customer content because they know it helps them sell products. However, looking across over 200 retail clients, we see that less than 20% of any manufacturer’s/brand’s products have reviews. Where can retailers and customers get more customer content?

BrandVoice is a new Bazaarvoice program which enables brands and manufacturers to collect customer-generated content (such as reviews, product answers, or stories) on their site and syndicate that content into retailers. As you will see later, we have proven this program has a truly dramatic impact on that brand’s sales, as well as brand equity.

Today Bazaarvoice serves over 50 manufacturer brands, some which sell direct and some which don’t. Shown are just some of the brands Bazaarvoice serves (see client list).

These brands were later to adopt customer content on their site than retailers, for obvious reasons. But in the last year brands have become a growing percentage of the Bazaarvoice client base. Manufacturers are realizing they need to embrace transparency in today’s customer-driven economy. They’ve also realized, as retailers have, that over 80% of reviews are generally positive. And the negative reviews are ‘gifts’ to help them improve products to be a stronger company.

Now, with the announcement of BrandVoice, we can enable our client network of over 200 retailers who can opt in (for FREE) to receive reviews, customer-generated Q&A, or stories directly from customers who contribute content on the manufacturer’s site. This is the first “user-generated channel marketing” program (as we’re calling in) in the market. And unlike typical co-op and MDF (market development funds) programs that push a brand’s logo or marketing message, retailers can now promote the authentic word of mouth into the shopping experience. And get measured results.

Let me give you an example:

In February 2008, Kingston launched Bazaarvoice Ratings and Reviews solution on their site. Thousands of customers who visit their site could write a review on memory sticks. Meanwhile, Office Depot (also a Bazaarvoice customer of Ratings & Reviews) was also collecting reviews on Kingston. By October 2008, only 66% of Kingston products on Office Depot had reviews, averaging only one review per product. Then, last month, Bazaarvoice matched the products and syndicated reviews from Kingston.com into OfficeDepot.com’s retail site.

The results were as follows:

• Reviews for Kingston products catapulted to 10 per product from one, compared to the category average (i.e. their competition) of 1.5 reviews per product
• Conversion on Kingston products that had syndicated reviews shot up 92% that month
• Even conversion of Kingston products that still didn’t have reviews went up 35%! (we’ll come back to this)

The online sales impact is impressive. And if findings from studies holds true, Office Depot should see higher customer satisfaction scores. Also, both Office Depot and Kingston should see better upsell on these products as well as lower returns.

Let’s expand on that last finding…conversion on Kingston products that didn’t have reviews went up 35%. It tells us there is a “halo” effect of shoppers seeing so many Kingston products with reviews. Visibility of so many products that are highly reviewed, in turn, lifts conversion on other Kingston products. Thus the increased review penetration dramatically lifted the brand equity for Kingston. Now, imagine that impact after Kingston reviews are syndicated across multiple online retailers that carry their products.

Over 70% of shoppers seek review reviews before shopping. These shoppers are closer to the point of purchase. The volume and quality of the customer voice on a brand becomes a brand’s competitive differentiator. It becomes the “uncommoditizer” effect for the brand, if I can make up a word. Compare this to search advertising: further from purchase, more intrusive, more ignored, and less scalable.

You may be surprised at how many reviews these brands could solicit from customers coming to their site. We did some analysis for a brand to look at review volume for their brand (all their products) across three major retailers. After the brand launched Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews on their own site, within six month they collected 4X the number of reviews compared to the three retailers.

We performed the same syndication for Dell into a major retailer, and they saw reviews per product go from 32 to over 1,100, compared to a category average for laptops of 21. For Epson, their BrandVoice syndication grew reviews per product to 33 from one, compared to their competitors who averaged one review per product.

The impact of this program doesn’t stop at the web site. As mentioned earlier, through working with Bazaarvoice Community Managers and sharing best practices, retailers are getting more sophisticated at putting customer content in the center of their entire marketing strategy. Top Rated products are being merchandised in navigation, search, sorting, email campaigns, catalogs, search ads, catalogs, and in store signage. Retailer marketers are changing their strategy, and the brands with more customer content are more likely to be included and visible through these strategies. So the syndicated content has a growing, amplified effect as Retailers continue to evolve towards these best practices.

The impact of BrandVoice is conceptually captured in this formula:

Salience and credibility of customer content
X number of syndication nodes (retailers accepting content)
X amplification through Retailer marketing tactics (search, filter, sort, email, advertising, etc.)

Plus, the content also lives on the brand’s site, improving brand equity for those visitors, giving valuable product feedback, and attracting natural search traffic.

These are tough economic times. Retailers are challenged to sell products amidst discerning customers. We believe customers will seek customer created content now more than ever to make wise purchase decisions. Therefore, your customer’s word of mouth becomes the most critical marketing asset you can have, in good or bad times.

From a financial perspective, the elegance of user-generated content is that it’s a growing annuity.

It is a marketing asset that blossoms and becomes working capital for your company. The net present value of a user-generated channel marketing strategy is far greater than traditional advertising, because the customers contribute content every day and the impact is multiplied through the channel. Unlike traditional advertising, there are not heavy design or agency costs or creative depreciation. Over time, costs scale compared to the return word of mouth brings. It’s possible your CFO has fantasies that marketing investments like this actually exist!

This is the eighth in our series of key takeaways from some of the presentations and panel discussions offered at the Social Commerce Summit in May 2008.

Dan Noonan, Senior Counsel at Dell Inc. spoke on identifying and addressing issues with UGC.

UGC proponents should encourage concerned parties to learn about appropriate uses for UGC. One approach: create analogies between traditional parts of the business and those to engage UGC. For example, customer care associates hold candid conversations with customers all the time. The legal team does not pre-screen this content.

Once a dialog opens, foster a budding program with a proactive legal approach that manages concerns regarding copyright issues, defamation, and rights to submissions.

1. Do not encourage comparative claims — disclose that submissions cannot engage third-parties.
2. React quickly — take questionable material down and respond to cease-and-desist orders.
3. Do not always seek ownership.
4. Consider pre-publication screening or moderation.
5. Clearly state that content cannot contain copyrighted materials, third-party likenesses, trademarks, etc.

Following the success and customer engagement Dell has earned through IdeaStorm and Direct2Dell, Sean McDonald and Stuart Wallock shared their ideas and strategies for harnessing user-generated content to nurture their customer community.

According to Sean and Stuart, the success of any customer-centered strategy is:

10% Technology + 90% People and processe

This means the tools used to empower a customer community are only a fraction of the equation, being overwhelmingly supported by how an organization embraces the strategy and how new, consumer-generated ideas are incorporated (see Customer Oxygen).

As an example of Dell’s commitment to customer-centricity, the company’s Linux PCs went from a customer suggestion to market in less than 3 months – a development time unheard of for an organization of Dell’s size.

Overall, Sean and Stuart recommend the follow tips for succeeding with UGC:

1. Promote and Encourage Participation – 70-80% of Dell’s review volume is the result of either promotional activities or post-purchase emails. Listen to your community managers and follow best practices to achieve optimal results.
2. Expose Your Content – Amplify your customer voice in every channel possible. Whether you’re looking for new product ideas or authentic product feedback, be sure to make use of and amplify the content you collect.
3. Use All the Information You Collect – Every time you solicit reviews from your customers, you are collecting an equally important amount of information in the form of consumer context. Use that information to make informed decisions about future products or further customer engagement.

Rich exemplified leadership. In fact, he had the rare quality of being a Level 5 Leader, as outlined by Jim Collins’ book, Good to Great. He excelled through confident humility amidst a (typical) corporate environment of politics, ego and alpha aggression. He always put decision in terms of what was right for the business, and helped others grow in the process. Everyone loved to work with Rich or for him.

So many of us were awestruck at Rich’s knowledge and wisdom. Rich often put up ‘observations’ on his small whiteboard in his cube. One time he made the observation that time and quality of mission statement are inversely related – graphed on the board, the more time spent on the mission statement the less it resonates. So true. And so funny.

Rich was a devoted father and husband. He excelled in this role as much as he excelled at work. We often played basketball together before work, but for a lot of the year, he also found time to teach children’s Bible study. Rich always left at 6pm to get home in time for dinner with his wife and growing family (now three children: David, Josh and James). Here you see pictures of him at my 30th birthday holding our new sons.

Occasionally we would joke in Spanish to each other, and I gave him the (inside joke) nickname of “El Bueno”, because in every way he was good. He was bound for greatness, and achieved it quickly at Dell accelerating his career to be Director for Global CRM and Customer Experience, reporting to Dell’s CMO.

Two months after I left Dell in early 2006 Rich called to seek advice about his decision to leave. He was interviewing to be President of Peruvian Connection in Kansas City. His Dell career was skyrocketing, and Rich could get a senior exec job at any other large company, but we agreed leading this growing multi-channel retailer (with much better margin than computers!) was his dream job.In February the recruiter responded to my endorsement of Rich:

Thanks for your endorsement of Rich Lloyd.  We had him tested, and the management testing center said he's brilliant.  Rich seems to be a rare combination of raw intellect and leadership capability.  Off the charts in both categories.

They saw what I didn’t have to tell them. He got the job, and on March 28 he sent this email:

This is my final week here at Dell and I want to say thank you to all of the mentors, leaders, and colleagues, and truly, friends, that have meant a great deal to me in my nearly seven years here.  I am moving on to become President of Peruvian Connection, a private, direct-sales luxury apparel company based in the Kansas City area.

I came to Dell in 1999 seeking the world's best post-graduate business education — and I got that, and then some. Along the way I met some truly remarkable people and was given some incredibly rewarding and enriching assignments.  I want to thank all of you for a great experience, and in particular, four great bosses/mentors in Mike George, Tom Vogl, Bobbi Dangerfield and Kurt Kirsch, who believed in me and in my potential…  People who were great business leaders, but even better people.

Many people would say the same good things about Rich; he was a great boss and mentor to many people I know. He impacted many others through the example he set at work and home.Rich and I kept in touch sporadically as he thrived at Peruvian. I saw him at a couple conferences and he was in great spirits. He was very happy in Kansas City and at his job, making a bigger impact on a smaller scale. I had to bottle some of his wisdom, and interviewed him on my blog here.

In August 2007 Rich was diagnosed with Brain Cancer. He moved back to Utah with his family to seek treatment, and kept everyone who knew him up to date through his CaringBridge journal. Like hundreds of others, I read every alert. Over the last 8 months he shared his ups and downs, but ALWAYS with a sense of hope, optimism, strength and gratitude. I never read or sensed despair from Rich or Marianne (his wife). He inspired hundreds (perhaps thousands) of people through his battle. Even up to –  especially up to – the very end.

Rich is in a better place now, and he left us something that can put us in a better place on earth. In the midst of his battle with Cancer, Rich and his family came up with a phrase that captured Rich’s outlook on life. They called it “LIVE RICH”, yet it has nothing to do with money. As you’ll see, it has everything to do with living RICHLY. A week before he passed, Rich recorded his words on what it means to LIVE RICH (Thanks to Rob Sorensen for sharing). I will be thinking about Rich and the example he set for the rest of my life. I hope you (and everyone you pass this along to) do as well. Life is short. Live Rich.

Below are Rich’s own words from his recording…

1. SEIZE THE DAY: Every day is a precious gift from God

“You’ve got one life.  You’ve got a limited amount of it.  You don’t know how long it’s gonna be.”

2. LIFE IS ABOUT PEOPLE NOT THINGS: make memories with the people you love

“Living rich to me is like I always say life is about people and not about things.  And so living rich consists of spending time with family, friends and all the people you love.  Cause you never know how finite that time is.  Even more so, that’s what makes life rich.  It’s about people.  It’s about relationships.  It’s about loved ones.  It’s about friends. Make a memory.  Life is about people.  People get caught up with day to day errands and shopping and things that you won’t even remember them.  It won’t even register on your radar screen.  But if you set up an activity with your kids, or you take advantage of some vacation opportunity, you just make some sort of memory, you’ll never regret it.”

3. LIVE WELL ROUNDED: learn continuously and always challenge yourself

“It means trying to do things that really are enriching, where you’re learning, you’re growing, you’re challenging yourself. You know in my case it’s keeping up with old skills, like making sure I keep my piano up, making sure that I stay writing and doing the things that I love to do.  So when I Live Rich I don’t give up.  It means I still try to learn stuff, and I richly tackle new challenges and problems.”

4. MAKE CHOICES THAT ENABLE LIVING RICHLY: make good choices every single day no matter how hard

“I remember the old poem “two roads diverged in the yellow wood” – the Robert Frost poem – “and I chose the one less traveled by and that has made all the difference”.  And it goes without saying, no matter who you are or what stage you are in life, if you’re a teenage, or if you’re an 8 year old like my son, or a cancer-stricken 35 year old, you have choices every day…every single day.  And those choices will lead to other choices…they lead to some bad ends if they’re poor choices.  And to me I always think, “what’s it gonna mean down the road?”  If I decide to do XYZ what’s that gonna mean for ABC decisions?  The answers do mean a lot."

“And so I just think about every day we have to make choices, and their outcome might seem small but the significance of making that choice might seem teeny, it might be I go to my son’s soccer game or I drag myself out when I’m cold and tired go see my sister speak in church and all these choices get harder when you have a trial or this adversity like we’re experiencing.  But just because they’re hard doesn’t mean they’re not worth making. So just remember that your choices lead to other choices, and they need to be good choices. “
LIVE RICH. Live Richly.

———

More…

* Hear Rich’s own words on How to LIVE RICH
* Read his inspiration journal of his battle with cancer on CaringBridge
* Read Rich's Obituary
* Donate to the Lloyd Children Missionary and Education Fund through any Wells Fargo Bank

We started answering that question today with the launch of our newest feature, called ShareThis(tm). It is a FREE feature for our clients allowing their shoppers and customers to share a review, profile or product to their favorite social networking or bookmarking site. And because we’re already hosted in their site, we can turn this live within days without IT involvement.

Dow Jones covered the launch, including commentary from Dell. Here’s a snippet from the article:

The feature enables a person who is, say, excited about the Dell monitor he just bought to share the news by posting on his Facebook profile a link to a review that he or someone else wrote. The post, which can also include an image of the monitor or the Dell logo and brief comment from him, will show up on his profile mini feed and in the news feed his Facebook friends see. Bazaarvoice says no money will change hands; shoppers won't be paid for posting reviews and Facebook won't get fees.

"It's making (consumers) an advocate" for brands on sites where the audiences are highly desirable to marketers, yet tend to be skeptical of online marketing, says Greg Sterling, of Oakland, Calif., consulting firm Sterling Market Intelligence. "It's trying to leverage a more trusted environment" and a form of marketing — word-of-mouth — that is particularly trusted by consumers.

It is also an effort to engage people who online-marketers have come to call "influencers" — people who through their expertise and efforts to share that expertise in online forums have gained outsized influence over other consumers. Sites like Facebook, del.icio.us and Digg are places where these people, and other less-active Web users, love to express themselves and have access to large numbers of other people.

"Now, for the first time ever, whenever (consumers) see a product they like, they can post it as a representation of who they are and what they like," says Sam Decker, chief marketing officer at Bazaarvoice.

I couldn’t have said it better myself!

You can see it live on these sample product pages from Dell, Toshiba and Jewelry Television.

We have future plans for this functionality, plus other ideas on social network integration with user generated content. Drop me a note if you’re interested in discussing them (sam at bazaarvoice.com).

If you’re a client interested in adding this to your site, it just takes a call or email to your Community Manager…otherwise you’ll be hearing from them! Remember, it's free! I mean FREE!

Deciding which projects were built before the holidays involved a strategic decision-making process that I went through each year for many years. Many of our retailers we talk to are going through these decisions right now, debating if they should add reviews before the holidays vs. other priorities. The case I would assert for adding reviews now — before the holidays — is on a simple premise of Net Present Value (NPV). The business case process I helped build at Dell was based on this simple financial principle.

Any feature you put on your site has a NPV, meaning the value to the P&L is the sum of the impact over some time period (say 2-3 years). Some projects may have an opportunity to drive immediate benefit, but the impact declines over time.  Other projects (such as reviews) have a growing impact, where the impact immediately is not as great, but the sum of the impact over time is much greater. With ratings and reviews, the value is in the content, which grows over time. The value is identifying and engaging your influencers, which grows over time. The value is in programs and marketing strategies leveraging this content and your influencers, which is a multiplicative effect as you leverage this in email, natural search, advertising, catalogs and other marketing vehicles.

I’ve launched over 100 projects / features on Dell.com on a $3.5B revenue site. It was high stakes. We came up with business cases for almost every one of those projects, and measured the impact of almost every one. There were projects ‘above the line’ and ‘below the line’ that didn’t make the cut. After 14 years of online experience, and Brett’s many years of measuring online impact through Coremetrics, we believe reviews is a priority for a very simple reason: it is the highest impact strategy, highest NPV project, to  any other project we’ve seen (unless your checkout functionality is broken!). Check out some of our case studies.

How long until you see benefit? In our experience with over 120 clients, not very long…

• Let’s say you launch reviews in late October (we can get you live in 2-4 weeks). You immediately email an invitation to customers of the last 6 months to come back and write a review.
• In come thousands of reviews (we’ve seen some clients get tens of thousands in one week!).
• By mid-November you can merchandise top rated products on your home page, in email, and start to benefit from natural search as people search for product reviews in search engines (We’ve seen 60% growth in week over week search visitors for many clients).
• Customers can share reviews and products with their friends and family, driving viral marketing.
• You and your merchants will have a new set of data through workbench reports and alerts to help decide what to merchandise over the holiday period.
• All this benefit takes you through January, which is also a healthy holiday sales month.
• After the holiday rush, you have the reviews platform in place to solicit these customers to come back and add more reviews to the system, which you can use to drive sales after the season and exceed your spring year over year sales goals.

We have case studies that prove more reviews equals higher conversions. The sooner you allow customers to review products on your site, the sooner you build an annuity that drives sales over time. This is what makes ratings and reviews (or any social commerce applications, such as Ask & Answer), a higher NPV project than most other projects. If you calculate the impact of reviews used multiple ways as they grow and the impact it has for you for the holidays and the rest of the year, this low effort project (20-30 hours of IT time with Bazaarvoice) also becomes the biggest ROI project. We have an ROI calculator to help you figure this out.

This is the holiday season that reviews will be used. Shoppers are expecting reviews now. Not have reviews on your site means you risk losing your customers to your competitors. Allurent did a study that shows that 67% of consumers who don’t find the information they are looking for on a site, will abandon that site in favor of another that has the information. According to Forrester, 77% of online shoppers seek reviews when purchasing, and over two years ago there was a study from eVoc Insights that suggested 50% of shoppers would not even buy unless they had reviews. Are you going to turn away half your visitors this holiday to other sites that have reviews?

The time to get reviews on your site is right now. This year the number of retailers with ratings and reviews has doubled, from 25% last year to 45% this year (according to shop.org and MarketingSherpa). Build a competitive advantage with how you use reviews over the year. Our Community Managers will help you with maximizing your social marketing potential through best practices on driving review volume and marketing strategies.

If you want to talk to me directly about prioritization, feel free to drop me an email (sam [at] bazaarvoice.com). You can see see this article I wrote on eBusiness prioritization for Dell’s magazine several years ago.

1. As the author of "The Influentials", former CEO of Roper, President of WOMMA, Board Director at Bazaarvoice, and CEO of your new business, why do you think the word of mouth movement is buzzing like never before?

Why now and not five years ago?

Word of mouth has always been an important factor in consumer decision making about products and services.  Over the course of many decades, consumer research has shown it to be among the most important factors to consumers.  However, over the past several years two major forces have aligned to make word of mouth considerably more important to consumers than it has ever been in the past, and considerably more important than other forms of consumer contact with brands.  The first force is declining trust – over the past 5 or 10 years consumer trust in official sources of information has plummeted, replaced instead with rising trust in friends, family, and "people like me."  The second force is the rise in technology, which enables consumers to see out peer-to-peer advice and recommendations more easily than ever before.  And the more they "try it," the more they "like it."  So the trend is accelerating. 

2. Do you think the reason trust in official sources is plummeting is the rise of the Web?  Or is some other factor, maybe sociological, at work here?

The decline in trust started with the corporate scandals of the 1990s (e.g., ENRON and others).  I think the transparency that the Web facilitates provides an additional means for people learn the facts and seek out the truth about matters more quickly and thoroughly than the could in the past.

So it is an enabler and an accelerator, in my view, but not the initial impetus.  History then shows that trends in trust (up or down) come in cycles, so once the trust decline starts declining it will generally take a while before it turns around the starts climbing again.  The trust must be re-earned.  And for some businesses, they are beginning to re-earn the trust through their word of mouth initiatives, showing they are sincerely interested in being enablers of open, honest, and beneficial consumer conversation.

3. Do you view what we do as an effective way for companies to improve trust?

The short answer is, yes.  And the reason is that when companies open up and let customers express themselves in their own voice — talking both about what they like and what they don't like in order to help other customers make smart and informed decisions — it sends a message that the company values openness, transparency, and (most importantly) that it respects the consumer.  All of those attributes help to build trust.

4. What are other ways that companies can earn trust via word of mouth initiatives?  What are some of the best examples you have seen?
There are many ways for companies to engage in word of mouth — some of which take place through online channels while others taking place offline.

Dell's IdeaStorm is proving to be a powerful way for Dell to listen to customers, and act on their suggestions.  Companies like Harley and eBay and others are creating customer communities that are very powerful way to cement customer loyalty and create advocacy.  Apple earns trust and customer respect through a wide variety of initiatives, including a very powerful experience that takes place in their retail stores which generates a considerable volume of positive word of mouth for Apple (in addition to a considerable sales volume). 

5. Let's talk about your new company.  What are the some of the exciting word of mouth insights that you have discovered for your current clients?

My company's research involves ongoing survey research with consumers about their word of mouth conversations regarding products, services, and brands.

We monitor this on a continuous basis to help companies understand the dynamics of consumer word of mouth about their category, their brands versus the competition, and among their target consumers.  Some important findings:

1. By a 7 to 1 margin, consumer word of mouth about brands is positive, rather than negative.  As Bazaarvoice has noted in its research about the J-curve, consumers are more interested in sharing advice and recommendations with consumers about "what works" and what they should be doing, rather than knocking down brands.  This debunks a major myth about word of mouth, and should encourage companies to be more comfortable with "letting go" and inviting consumers to talk about them and their services. 
2. Media and marketing play a big role in stimulating consumer word of mouth.  About half of all consumer word of mouth conversations about brands include a reference to some type of media or marketing.  By channel, TV is the number one medium, but the Internet is very close behind reinforcing the important role that the Internet plays as a channel to drive word of mouth.
3. Finally, our study proves just how ubiquitous word of mouth is. The typical American consumer engages in about 125 conversations each week about products and services, and talks about brands over 90 times per week.

That's a lot of word of mouth.  In fact, our projections are that there are 3.4 billion word of mouth conversations each day in America about products/services, and 2.3 billion brand-specific conversations.

There are just a few of the many insights we have learned.  But the real power of our research is to dig into the data at the category and brand level to help companies understand their strengths, and opportunities for improvement, in a word of mouth era.

6. What do you think about Wal-Mart's decision to launch customer ratings and reviews?

I think Wal-Mart's decision to offer ratings on reviews is a very significant development in the growth and development of word of mouth.

Anytime the industry leader in a category gets actively involved in something new and innovative it sends a very loud signal. And, in this case, the signal is to multiple parties: 

(a) to Wal-Mart's consumers: the message is that their voice is important and that Wal-Mart wishes to listen and let them be heard;
(b) to the many manufacturers whose products will be reviewed, letting them know that Wal-Mart is serious about opening up this new and important channel of conversation; and
(c) to other retailers who have been sitting on sideline, wondering if they should engage in word of mouth or not.  So this is both an important development for Wal-Mart and it's customer base, as well as for the word of mouth movement.