Sameer Samat, Director of Product Management, Google

At our annual Social Commerce Summit in Austin today, we announced a partnership with Google to introduce an industry-first program that lets brands easily share product review content from their Bazaarvoice-enabled websites with Google properties: SyndicateVoice for Search. Sameer Samat, director of product management for Google Product Search, shared the benefits of the program with a sold-out Summit audience during his presentation, “Organizing the World’s Information for Shoppers.”

This partnership is an incredibly important milestone for Bazaarvoice and for the evolution of social commerce. Why?

We know that shoppers trust customer word of mouth, such as online product reviews, more than any other type of marketing (1). At the same time, 61% of all shoppers use search engines (2), and more people use Google Product Search than any shopping portal (3). Furthermore, user-generated content is becoming increasingly dominant in search results, with over 25% of results for searches of the world’s top 20 brands linking to UGC (4).

In partnership with Google, Bazaarvoice customers can now use SyndicateVoice for Search to combine their most trusted and valuable content – authentic reviews written by their customers – with the most popular search engine in the world to attract the most qualified shoppers to their site.

While this is a big win for brands, who face increasing competition for consumer attention and shopper loyalty each day, the real win is for consumers, who can now quickly find the information they need to make the right purchase decisions for their needs. We’re “democratizing commerce” by enabling consumers’ authentic feedback to help shoppers find exactly what they need, shifting more control of the shopping experience to the most important person in the process — the shopper.

For more information, check out Google’s blog post on the partnership, see their Google Product Reviews Program site, or read our official announcement.

(1) Edelman Trust Barometer, 2006-2009
(2) Compete Online Shopper Intelligence study, February 22, 2010
(3) Comparison Shopping Rankings from CPC Strategy, LLC, April 14, 2010
(4) Socialnomics 2009

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?

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.   

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:

• Pageviews per session rose as much as 33%
• Bounce rates (the percentage of single page visits) declined by as much as 21%
• Search engine referrals rose by as much as 156%

There are three reasons for these results. 

First, the search engine optimization (SEO) methodology – especially with regard to the page-level search optimizations – is based on significant keyword research, and because it is a 100% “white hat” approach, the search engine traffic it yields will be less susceptible to loss due to changes in the search engines’ algorithms.

Second, SyndicateVoice is an open platform.  On an opt-in basis, clients may take advantage of the Bazaaarvoice syndication network, which includes not only RSS syndication and sitemaps, but also 25 premier portals and shopping comparison engines like Google Base & Google Product Search, Smarter.com, and MSN / Live.com.  This syndication not only drives direct traffic back to clients’ reviews, but also builds inbound links to that content that help the SyndicateVoice pages rank better in search engines.

Third, the SyndicateVoice microsite includes helpful navigation keys that provide context to the visitor and increase visitor retention.  For example, every microsite page displaying reviews also displays a list of the “top rated” products for the same category.  If you are looking at a set of bath towels, for example, and decide that it is not the product you want to buy, the list of top rated products will include links to other sets of bath towels that have been highly rated by other customers and, therefore, might be worth checking out before you leave the microsite.  This is great for consumers because they can take advantage of the reviews written by others like themselves.  It is also great for retailers, because it increases the amount of time a visitor will stay on their site, which in turn leads to higher conversions and more sales.

Consider these three things when you publish your own content:

1. Are you using a world-class SEO strategy?
2. Are you open with your content and using that openness to drive inbound links and traffic?
3. Are you providing a multitude of reasons for your visitors to choose to stay on your site once they arrive?

SyndicateVoice clients are already doing this with their review content.  For these retailers, a new product review is not just another thing to publish – it is a traffic driver and a conversion tool.  

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.

With consumer-generated content, targeting unanticipated search terms is easy.  Consumers writing reviews, for example, are using their own words to describe their experiences with a product or service.  Their reviews do not go through a formal editorial process to correct misspellings or to remove personal words like “I”, “me”, and “my”.  The reviewers themselves are not employees who must adhere to the official company marketing message in what they write.  Further, a typical page of reviews is written by multiple, unrelated authors who have different perspectives on the product being reviewed, and these different perspectives result in a greater variance in the words used in the reviews.  This variance means that pages of reviews are more likely than homogenous product pages written by one or two authors to drive search terms from unanticipated combinations of words, that is, long tail search terms.

For example consider the following excerpt of search terms from one of our clients’ long tail data.  Each of the following words was searched on just a few times during the reporting period.  Notice the variance in the words and phrases used:

•    nike free trainer 7.0 review
•    nautica jeans colorblocked polar fleece pullover
•    love tease pleated rhinestone-trim dress
•    desperate housewives perfume
•    simmons beautyrest adrian
•    dz7064
•    love tease beaded organza halter dress
•    alfani safari field jacket
•    belique cookware
•    arturo chiang umiko
•    nike free 7.0 review
•    tools of the trade cookware reviews
•    dkny draped swimdress
•    reviews on benefit firmology
•    towelbuyer
•    love tease beaded babydoll dress
•    nike free trainer 7.0 reviews
•    keds mosaic slipon

Lists of long tail terms like this are typical for publishers of reviews:  some are product names, some include keywords like ‘review’ or ‘reviews’, and still others are brand names or generic descriptions of products.  Even though each term is searched on once or twice per reporting period, the sum of all of them together frequently accounts for tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of search referrals.

No marketer can predict all of the terms that their searchers will use during a reporting period, but it is possible to identify the types of words that are most frequently associated with success – the words that are used most frequently in search referrals that lead to conversions.  For example, consider the following illustration.  On the left side is the excerpt of long tail data mentioned above with each keyword phrase now associated with the number of “Referrals” generated and the number of “Conversions” accomplished during the reporting period.  (A referral is counted when a searcher clicks through to your page from the search engine.  A conversion is counted when the visitor subsequently takes the desired action on your site, whether that is a purchase or some other metric.)
The list on the left is aggregated into a similar list on the right by tallying the number of conversions that were associated with each individual word in the search phrases on the left.  For example, the words “nike”, “free”, “trainer”, “7.0”, and “review” each count for one conversion, based on the first row of data in the chart on the left.  Tallying these numbers up for the entire list (including the rest of the search terms that were not included in the list above), we see some interesting trends emerge.  For one thing, the most important words for generating conversions were “review” and “reviews”.  This is not unexpected, since we are dealing with pages that contain review data.  Other words that led to conversions were “top”, “best”, “ratings”, and so on.

Wise marketers use lists like this to help determine which keywords to put into the page templates of their consumer-generated content pages.  (Incidentally, this is one of the basic principles Bazaarvoice uses in building the SearchVoice Pages that come with our Ratings and Reviews product and in building the SyndicateVoice microsite.)

The long tail is a gold mine for search marketers and the variance of the content contributed by consumers helps you tap it.  Read and analyze terms in the long tail of your data to find out what your site visitors are really looking for.  Oh, and if you are the one that was looking for used men’s hunting socks, please drop me a line and let me know what you were thinking.

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!  

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…