Posts Tagged ‘SyndicateVoice’

Books, Marketing Strategy, New at Bazaarvoice, User-Generated Content, Word of Mouth

Brett Hurt Chris Anderson and Wired on the Power of Free

February 27th, 2008 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO

Wired Magazine CoverAs a businessman who loves technology, Wired is my favorite magazine.  I simply find no other business magazine as innovative, both in the way it is physically organized and designed.  But the real gold is the content.  The Editor In Chief of Wired, Chris Anderson, is one of the most visionary business thinkers of our time.  You remember “The Long Tail“? – an awesome read that nicely summarized the true power of the Internet to reach niche markets.  I had the pleasure of meeting Chris in person at Resource Interactive’s iCitizen event last year, as we were both speakers at the event.  He then ran the tables at conferences, keynoting seemingly almost every one that I attended.  “The Long Tail” had real business impact (see my post on it’s impact on eCommerce).  Chris deserves the success he earned – seeing a commerce-changing trend that none of us could as succinctly and powerful describe.

Now Chris and Wired strike again with a preview of his new book, “Free”, which is due in 2009.  The cover article of this month’s Wired is “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business“.  If you want to read now what everyone will be talking about next year, read this article now.  It isn’t worth me summarizing here – trust me, it’s worth your 15 minutes to read the entire article by clicking the link above.

Free is a very powerful word-of-mouth driver, and Bazaarvoice has certainly placed a lot of “bets” in this area.  Currently, the following Bazaarvoice solutions are free (to at least one stakeholder):

  • ShoutIt!: Share your review on Facebook, digg, and Del.icio.us – free to clients and users; creates a form of advertising without the taint of being advertising
  • SyndicateVoice: free for shopping comparison portal partners, free for new clients for a period of time; creates a form of advertising without the taint of being advertising
  • BrandVoice: free high-converting user-generated content for clients from the customers of their manufacturing partners; leverages the power of channel marketing, which has existed since the dawn of vendors selling through the retail channel
  • Ratings & Reviews, Ask & Answer, Stories: free for users; gives them the context they need to make a purchase decision as well as connect with other customers; consumers used to pay for this type of content from people like “Consumer Reports”, or by physically driving to a store to speak to an in-store sales person who may or may not have the information and context that they need

I look forward to seeing how Chris’s new book shapes up, and I have no doubt that it will be impactful.  As he so eloquently describes in this article, free already surrounds us due to near free transistors and bandwidth.  As more businesses transform to be information-based, this trend will radically accelerate.

How are you using the power of free in your business?

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Customer Centricity, Marketing Strategy, Research, Word of Mouth

Brant Barton Six in 10 US Consumers Share Product Advice With Friends & Family

December 5th, 2007 by Brant Barton Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer

eMarketer reported today that six in 10 surveyed US consumers share product advice with friends and family, a finding from Forrester Research's NACTAS Benchmark Study.  

While the highly sought after "Influentials" segment garners much of the focus of word of mouth marketers, Forrester's findings provide ammunition for more broadly focused approaches to enabling and capturing word of mouth.  Rather than thinking in campaign terms, brands should be seriously evaluating tools and technologies that can widely capture consumer opinions, enable deep analysis of what these opinions reveal about brand strengths and weaknesses, and facilitate the distribution of word of mouth to those who actively seek it, from the brand directly or from other sources.  

Fortunately, marketing spending trends suggest that this is in fact happening.  The eMarketer brief also states that spending on word of mouth marketing totaled $1 billion in 2006.  Small by traditional marketing standards but quickly growing, with 2006 spending representing a 36% increase over 2005.   

Tags: , , , , , , ,
New at Bazaarvoice, Ratings & Reviews, Research, User-Generated Content, Word of Mouth, eCommerce

Sam Decker How SyndicateVoice Took Search Traffic from Good to Great

August 23rd, 2007 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer

By Jeff Watts, SyndicateVoice Product Manager

It seems that just about everyone is publishing something these days:  Technorati claims to be tracking 92.7 million blogs, Wikipedia has around 5 million articles, and more and more sites are facilitating the creation of consumer-generated content.  But publishing and publishing effectively are entirely different.  A site can have the greatest content on the web, but if it is not discoverable by the masses, it will yield little traffic.One of the most important types of content marketers should focus on publishing effectively is customer ratings and reviews.  After all, 77% of online shoppers are seeking review content online before they buy according to Jupiter Research.  Recently Bazaarvoice launched SyndicateVoice, a product that helps our clients dramatically increase the amount of traffic their ratings and reviews receive, particularly through search engines, by using an effective publishing strategy. 

In a nutshell, SyndicateVoice does the following:

  1. Publishes a standalone, review-centric microsite that targets long tail search traffic for review-centric key words.
  2. Retains visitors to the microsite once they’ve entered.
  3. Syndicates excerpts of reviews to a broad network of search engines, shopping portals, price comparison engines, and RSS outlets.

Several clients who have gone live with SyndicateVoice have seen fantastic results.  For example, in a sample of three clients for the first 27 days since their respective launches, SyndicateVoice results show the following: (more…)

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Marketing Strategy, Ratings & Reviews, Research, User-Generated Content, eCommerce

Sam Decker The Long Tail Opportunity of Consumer-Generated Content

July 31st, 2007 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer

By Jeff Watts, SyndicateVoice Product Manager

Question:  What do the following silly things have in common?

1.    what is the approximate size of a banjo
2.    redheads and the men that love them
3.    how to hit the sasquatch
4.    used men’s hunting socks

Answer:  they are all actual phrases that searchers have typed in to discover various Bazaarvoice clients’ review content.  (For the record, I cannot fathom why someone was searching for “used men’s hunting socks”.) 

The long tail of search engine data tells a fascinating story that smart marketers are listening to.  It is not just silly phrases like those above, but obscure and unique terms – perhaps used only once or twice – that give insight into what your visitors are really looking for.  Long tail search terms might not match your page titles or your carefully crafted page descriptions, but they do match some other combination of words on your page – even when you are not anticipating them.   For many sites, the unanticipated terms account for over 80% of the search terms and over 50% of the referrals, and this makes it imperative to understand how best to target those terms.
(more…)

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Marketing Strategy, Research, User-Generated Content, Word of Mouth, eCommerce

Brant Barton Marketers, meet the ‘heavy users’

September 1st, 2006 by Brant Barton Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer

Earlier this week, eMarketer reported on the population size and online activities of "heavy users" – individuals that have accessed the Web at least 11 times in the previous seven days.  According to Universal McCann, who conducted the research, as many as 100 million people fit this description in the US alone.  That's one third of the population!  This number, to me, is staggering.  Sure, 11 times per week is par for the course for industry folks, including myself and most of the people that subscribe to this blog, but we "industry folks" don't number anywhere close to 100 million.  This number means that the Web and, more importantly, online activities like instant messaging, social networking, and file sharing have long gone mainstream.  And not surprisingly, online marketing spending is following the massive herd of "heavy users" as it swells in size and spends even more and more time, attention, and money online.  

My favorite chartdata from the report is posted below: 

The #1 online activity of "heavy users" is researching a future purchase online, an activity that is heavily – no pun intended! -  facilitated by customer ratings and reviews and other forms of online word of mouth.  #2 is actually purchasing online.  Ditto.  And #6, at an impressive 68%, is reviewing a product on a shopping or review site!  So in addition to driving Web traffic and commerce, "heavy users" are an opinionated and communicative bunch as well.  What a combo for marketers to address. 

While devising campaigns to claim the attention and online spend of "heavy users", marketers must also address the group's substantial information, communication, and socialization needs as well.  For instance, it seems logical that "heavy users" would prefer to transact on sites that offer peer reviews and other relevant forms of user-generated content, since they spend so much of their own time sharing their opinions. 

Furthermore, the report states that 40% of respondents use price comparison sites, a finding that underscores the importance of a "beyond your site" strategy to customer ratings & reviews – something that Bazaarvoice is pioneering with our recent release of SyndicateVoice, which leverages two of the things that "heavy users" are most interested in – online reviews and shopping research.  

In summary, the "heavy users" are big in size, busy with online activity, and will soon become the "normal users" as general Web usage and usage of social technologies/media continues to grow.  As a rugged individualist, it's hard for me to say this, but marketers, you must follow the herd!  

Tags: , , , , ,
Marketing Strategy, New at Bazaarvoice, Ratings & Reviews, Search & SEO, Word of Mouth

Sam Decker NEW SyndicateVoice Announcement –> Word of Mouth AS Advertising

August 28th, 2006 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer

We believe word of mouth advertising is effective when word-of-mouth actually IS the advertising. According to emarketer Word of Mouth is top of mind for marketers.

To address this opportunity, tomorrow we announce SyndicateVoice, a revolutionary new opt-in program for our clients, where clients choose the partners they want to syndicate reviews to that are in our SyndicateVoice Network. 

We don't own any of our clients or customer's reviews, so explicit client permission is required and all partners clearly display that they are the source of the reviews. In summary, we are partnering with the leading portals and shopping comparison sites to create additional customer acquisition opportunities for clients that want to participate.

At launch, we are announcing partnerships with MSN, Smarter.com, and PriceRunner. We also feed to Froogle's open API. Many more SyndicateVoice partners will be announced soon.

There are three primary benefits to retailers (our clients):

  1. SEO / natural search benefit – links from the portal to the client's site go to the client's subdomain
  2. Brand impact – clients expose the reviews to millions online shoppers on top-tier shopping sites (for example, shoppers are discovering for the first time that CompUSA has reviews!)
  3. Acquisition results – shoppers who read the review snippet on the portal link to the retailer to see the full review, and purchase from there.

Our goal is to deliver a growing set of features, services and technology to expand the impact of customer content. This announcement follows recent announcements of FeedVoice™ (the first hosted RSS feed for top rated products) and SearchVoice™ (our hosted & branded search engine optimized landing pages). This is the start of a new marketing paradigm – syndicating word-of-mouth to drive customer acquisition.  We expect to make many bold moves in this area.

If you’re interested in learning more about this program, email info@bazaarvoice.com. Ad Age has already covered this.

Here’s what our client’s reviews look like on Smarter.com, for example…

Tags: , , , , , , ,