In the past when a shopper was looking for a TV, they went to their local retail store. To combat choice overload in product aisles, shoppers were met with tools designed to influence their decisions and help them buy confidently. End-caps showed featured products. Signage and POP displays grabbed their attention. Sales staff was on hand to answer any questions. For manufacturers and retailers, these merchandising efforts were meant to lead the shopper to purchase their product.

Traditional merchandising efforts don’t translate to the social web.

But the decision-making process is no longer an in-store activity. Many shoppers are increasingly making their purchase decisions online before ever setting foot in a retail store; Forrester even predicts that by 2014, more than half of total retail sales will be influenced by the web. Today’s shoppers don’t go to a store to determine which TV they want — they already know which product they want when they arrive.

But traditional merchandising efforts don’t translate to the social web. Trust in marketing is gone — people want to hear from others like them. "Social" is no longer a label that can be applied to certain aspects of business and ignored in others; it's just one way to shop amongst all the ways we have always shopped. For merchandising to be relevant, it has to get social.

Social merchandising is all about context. Shoppers research online to discover products, compare or reduce choices, and build confidence in their final purchase decision. Bring contextual user-generated content (UGC) to the research process that maps back to the shopper's task. Here’s how UGC helps shoppers in some different phases of online decision-making.

Discovery phase

At the widest point in the purchase funnel, shoppers go online to discover products. This often starts in a search engine, and UGC equips pages with the scalable freshness that search engines crave to maximize search results and drive traffic. Increasingly for some shoppers, this search starts on social networks. Friends' shared reviews, questions, stories, and products on these networks introduce shoppers to new products and draw them into the purchase path.

Golfsmith shoppers can shop by golfer profile.

Once on an ecommerce site, shoppers in the discovery phase can shop by profile, starting their search on profiles of customers like them to see what products they like. UGC adds additional filters for discovering products, such as top-rated category pages.

Choice phase

Online, the same obstacle confronts shoppers as in-store — choice overload. Product specs and marketing copy can be nearly identical from product to product. Reviews and stories from "people like me" add a new filter to product choices to help shoppers decide.

Ecommerce doesn't exist in a vacuum. Most shoppers arrive on your site with preconceived notions about products and brands. UGC helps to validate or combat these with trustworthy testimonials from real customers.

Additionally, customer Q&A helps shoppers make choices based on their specific needs. Reviews and specs may lead a shopper to a specific flat-screen TV, but they may need more info to make a purchase. The ability to ask questions like "Can I hang this TV on my wall?" can lead to the information shoppers need to move past the choice phase and select a product for purchase.

Validation/confidence phase

Once they’ve decided on a particular product, UGC can give shoppers the last bit of confidence they need to make a purchase. Much like in the discovery phase, shoppers can check profiles of reviewers to make sure people like them like the product. With features like Facebook Connect, they can also see what their friends on social networks think of the product.

PETCO products with reviews 20.4% lower return rate. Click to read the case study.

Customer opinions also work to set expectations for shoppers. Reviews (especially negative reviews) give a realistic depiction of performance, leading to more satisfied buyers and decreased returns. And UGC can point out product details to help shoppers make the exactly right purchase for them — "These shoes are fantastic, but they run a little small. Be sure to get the next size up."

Shoppers are never alone online — networks of customers are always just a click away, ready to share their opinions. Will that click steer them away from your site? Social merchandising helps manufacturers and retailers alike by serving the end-goal of both — helping shoppers buy. As more shoppers make their decisions online before ever entering a retail store, merchandising must get social to stay relevant.

It makes sense that consistently adding customer reviews, stories, questions, and answers helps people find the right products on a site. However, there are subtleties to make the content even more impactful – especially now, with the advent of fairly recent features by Google: Google Caffeine and Rich Snippets.

While search engine providers have talked about fresh content for years, Google Caffeine's enormous and costly infrastructure update centered on freshness gives user-generated content a lot more weight. Maintaining a good SERP (define) ranking now requires that at least some of the page's content is fresh and dynamic, which indicates to Google that the page is still relevant.

Adding customer reviews or user-generated Q&A can obviously help provide fresh content, and to make sure Google can easily find it, make sure that at least a few reviews are included in your primary page for each product or service. A handful of fresh reviews or Q&A content can make a significant impact on how Google perceives that page's freshness.

"Integrated blogging" or adding snippets of customer stories on product pages can also help improve search results. Each time the snippets change, Google Caffeine will see those updates and once again consider your page fresh, and thus more relevant.

Even before Google introduced Caffeine, OpenTable changed the way it displays reviews on its site and saw a measurable increase in search results. OpenTable.com provides real-time online restaurant reservations for diners and reservation and guest management for more than 13,000 restaurants worldwide. Rather than requiring the restaurants to continuously rewrite their content (which just isn't scalable), customer reviews create a ready stream of fresh content for search engines to crawl.

In 2009, OpenTable began placing the content of the first four reviews for each restaurant directly into the pages' code. Since implementing, each restaurant profile page receives updated content as often as once a day. Only three days after making this change, OpenTable noticed an uptick in natural search traffic to the restaurant profile pages and to the overall site, as well as an increase in the number of keywords driving traffic to their pages.

Over the next four months, the total search engine traffic to the restaurant pages on OpenTable.com increased by 10 percent, as compared to the same months in the previous year, and 17 percent from Jan. 2009 to Jan. 2010. The number of unique search terms for these pages ranked also increased by 100-plus percent year over year.

Google Rich Snippets has also improved the impact user-generated content can have on sites, by displaying star ratings and review "snippets" in search results.

Google says its own experiments have shown that users find the new data valuable – if they see useful and relevant information from the page, they are more likely to click through. Google's Rich Snippets show a summary of review information, and pages with more reviews will appear more favorable, so it's important that products get as many reviews as possible.

By paying close attention to how user-generated content is arranged and displayed, its impact can have an even bigger impact on Google search results. Take note of these details and make the most of your users' contributions.

Wrong. They may end in front of the register, but they often start behind the cozy glow of a computer screen. eMarketer found that the internet influences $3.45 of in-store sales for every dollar spent online. And Forrester predicts that more than half of total retail sales will be influenced by the web by 2014.

Customers behave in a channel-agnostic way. They seamlessly move between a retailer’s online store, brick-and-mortar stores, Twitter and Facebook pages, advertisements, and email campaigns. So why do so many retailers’ different channels often act like totally separate mini-companies? Online prices are different from in-store promotions. Sales people give a different message than catalogs. Customers can use gift cards in store but not online or over the phone. There are countless examples.

Making your channels consistent and complementary is the aim of cross-channel marketing. The difference from multi-channel marketing (using many channels to fuel your business) may seem like semantics, but it’s not. Getting an organization to embrace the channel-agnostic viewpoint of a consumer is a big organizational shift – but it’s one that helps capture shopper loyalty.

Here are some inspiring and visual examples of retailers effectively amplifying the voice of their customers across their shopping experiences. Note: click any image to enlarge.

Television – QVC regularly designates top rated products on-air, and now has a show called “Customer Choice” devoted to customer top-rated products, based on reviews collected on their website. You can also go online and immediately see what is playing on air at any time. Genius!

QVC's "Customer's Choice" program highlights top-rated products.

Catalogs and Advertising – Browse the L.L.Bean catalog and you’ll see they regularly feature customer favorites from their website.

L.L. Bean features top-rated product in print catalogues.

Twitter – Searching for a gift but are fresh out of ideas? The Container Store regularly tweets new 5-star customer reviews on merchandise most relevant to the buying season. August? You’ll find school items. November? Holiday essentials. All the information is timely and relevant.

The Container Store tweets timely five-star reviews to their Followers.

In-Store Merchandizing – LEGO includes customer reviews on in-store merchandising. No need to call home and ask someone to look up product reviews while you’re standing in front of the shelf.

LEGO's in-store signage highlights top-rated products.

Mobile – Want to read customer reviews in the store without ever moving away from the product? Text Best Buy SKU numbers from the in-store product tag and they’ll text you back with a quick link to the online product reviews on their mobile site.

Best Buy integrates customer reviews into their mobile retail experience.

These innovative companies prove that there are tons of opportunities to create a cohesive cross-channel shopping experience that includes the customer voice. The mandate is clear – it’s time to un-silo your channels.

• What does it mean?
• Should we be scared?
• Are our rankings and search traffic going to disappear into a black hole?

Image from flickr user Dick Mooran

In all the messaging from Google about this update, this much is clear: Caffeine is an infrastructure change that will allow Google to identify content changes and update their index significantly faster than their previous system.  From the Official Google Blog:

"Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it's the largest collection of web content we've offered. Whether it's a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before."

Whether it’s an Official Google Blog post like this or one of Matt Cutts’ videos, you always have to read between the lines to find the real story.  Let’s do just that.

By dissecting this snippet and the rest of the Google blog post, it’s clear that they are placing primary emphasis on freshness, with a secondary focus on relevance. Language like, “50 percent fresher,” “much sooner after it’s published,” “relevant content,” and a few others make a strong statement about Google’s understanding of human nature. Let me explain: Who really wants the top items in their SERP (search engine results page) results to be outdated articles from three years ago?  Google knows that people want the latest information, and if we don’t find it through Google, we’re going to turn to a competing search engine until we find what we want—fresh, relevant content.

Google prefers fresh-baked content (Image from flickr user Let Ideas Compete)

So what does this mean for the average website? It means that Google is likely to“get bored,” with its pages if rich, relevant content updates are not made often.  Google is indirectly messaging here that it is not acceptable for the copy on your website to become stale (no matter how great it is). SEO’s have been talking about freshness for years, but Google’s recent messaging around Caffeine, and the fact that they just completed an enormous and costly infrastructure update centered on freshness, mean that these conversations have suddenly been lent more weight.

Obviously, it’s neither practical nor efficient to rewrite your website frequently just to make Google happy.  And, it’s entirely possible that the content written 2 years ago about your best-selling widget is indeed still fabulous.  That said, maintaining a good SERP ranking now requires that at least some of the page’s content is fresh and dynamic, which indicates to Google that the page is still relevant.

For websites with reviews and Q&A, it’s important that Google can see and read that content.  Make sure that at least a few reviews are included in your primary page for each product or service.  A handful of fresh review content, or questions and answers, can make a significant impact on how Google perceives that page’s freshness.

You should also consider a technique called “integrated blogging” or “stories”. With this method, you proactively share stories about your products or services,  placing snippets of those stories on your product pages.  Each time the snippets change, Google Caffeine will see those updates and once again consider your page fresh, and thus more relevant.

It’s important to note that the other rules of SEO still apply and that freshness alone will not solve the world’s SEO problems.  However, without fresh content, Google Caffeine will get bored with your pages and they will eventually slide into no man’s land.

Learn how fresh content through SearchVoice Inline contributed to a 17% increase in OpenTable’s natural search. Read the SEO case study.

"Engagement" is a fuzzy concept to most brands.

“Engagement” is a buzzword that’s applied to nearly everything in social media these days, but buzzwords don’t pay the bills. Tie the concept of engagement to driving sales, however, and now we’re talking social commerce.

According to the Catapult and Forrester Study on social technology’s impact on shopping:

Social networking was found to fail to have any meaningful influence on purchase decisions, although it was still viewed as helpful by shoppers…

If the above is true, then why are so many brands investing in social? Marketers tell me it’s to “drive engagement” with their brand. Sounds nice, but when I ask how they plan to turn this engagement into sales, they tell me sales is the responsibility of the retailers, not the brand. If not to drive sales, I ask, “what are the goals of your social media efforts?”  Their answers nearly always amount to engagement for the sake of engagement—a sorry excuse for a strategy devoid of measurable results or goals.

But what if you could take the same type of user generated content you find on Facebook and Twitter, and drop it directly in the consumer’s purchase path?  Now we’ve defined engagement in a way that justifies your company’s investment in social. Here's why.

We know that consumers seek the recommendations of other consumers to influence purchases, and we know that consumers report that advice received on social networking sites do influence purchases.

The disconnect is that marketers are often fixated on social sites like Facebook and Twitter exclusively as content distribution engines, rather than as tools to drive the sales process. The same Forrester study highlights the missing link for most brand marketers:

…consumers visit retail and brand sites for very different reasons and that if the two worked in partnership it could improve results for both. Because the retailer draws large numbers of shoppers to research and find the best prices, the brand can add value to the site by providing content to help drive traffic and loyalty.

The most impactful content a brand can add is consumer opinions and answers to shopper questions at the point of purchase.  This vital content appears in the form of reviews and answers on ecommerce sites. Several of our clients have actively engaged—there’s that word again!— their end-customers for content, and distributed it for display throughout their retailer distribution network. These same clients have also actively answered shopper questions at the point of purchase. A few results showing impact of social engagement on sales:

• Three manufacturers experienced a 26% increase in sales when they sent reviews to the retailer site
• Samsung’s answers to shopper questions were voted the most helpful on a major retailer site
• For the questions Samsung received, 91% of them were not covered by their product information

When tied to increased sales, the term “engagement” loses its fuzziness and genuinely becomes part of a winning social strategy. By focusing on sales, brands make their engagement measurable.  The right placement of compelling content throughout the buying experience can make all the difference, through the retailer distribution network, social networks, and multi-channel marketing efforts, such as coupons.

What kind of impact do you think a social strategy designed to drive sales would have for your brand? Take a step back from the tools for a moment and think about how the content you’re collecting might be used to make that happen. How is your social strategy “making the sale”?

Make the most of customer conversations. Learn about our Interaction Suite.

Brian Heil with Social Wildfire

This blog post is guest-written by Brian Heil, Social Media Consultant at Social Wildfire. We asked Brian to share the story of the social media success of his client, Dingo Brand.

Dingo is a leading dog treat brand that has lately also become a rapidly growing interactive organization by connecting and resonating with savvy, articulate consumers. In addition to partnering with Bazaarvoice to capture, display and amplify consumer contributions, Dingo also aimed to increase its interactive footprint by engaging Facebook users. To do so, they decided to run a promotion through the social website that just surpassed 500 million users. In just 3 days, Dingo went from 330 Facebook Likes to over 6,000. How were they able to foster such success so quickly? Simple: Dingo put the power in the hands of the consumer.

Just one of the 1,000+ posts from Dingo's Facebook fans

Their goals?

• Capture more Dingo users, adding to their existing database of power users.
• Find dog owners who haven’t tried Dingo and drive trial of their product.
• Utilize the power of Facebook to build a community in which Dingo could have easy, real-time interaction with consumers.

Facebook users love Dingo, too!

How? Dingo challenged their existing fan base of 330 people to help get their Like count to 5,000. The first 5,000 Likes who provided their e-mail address would receive a $20 coupon redeemable at Dingobrand.com. In order for anyone to get the $20 coupon, Dingo had to reach at least 5,000 Likes. Then, in order for the individual consumer to receive their coupon, they had to submit their e-mail in the “Join My List” tab (powered by a Constant Contact Facebook app) which added them to the list of emails that would be able to use the coupon.

What happened? The original 330 started posting the link on sites like My Pet Savings, Nana’s Deals and More, and the promotion spread virally. As the fan base grew, its rate of growth accelerated. Dingo exceeded their initial goal and surpassed 6,000 Likes within 3 days! They gave the consumers the task of finding Facebook Likes for them and that is exactly what happened.

Are there some users that signed up because they just want free stuff? Of course. Does that muddy the waters a bit? Definitely.

However, in one week there have been almost 1,000 posts and comments by Facebook users on the Dingo fan page, an amazing amount of user generated content. In addition, there have been almost 250 photos posted of users’ dogs, many of them enjoying Dingo products – priceless content. All the while, Dingo has kept up with the posts and has been using this as an opportunity to have a flowing conversation with what has become a living, breathing community.

Within 3 days, Dingo was able to significantly increase their database of prospective customers, have them try their brand, and create a rich community of dog owners who can be utilized as a learning lab as well as a medium to promote new products and programs.

User-generated content (UGC) is different than any other content on a brand site, so presenting your customers’ voice in an effective, purpose-driven way presents some challenges, because…

• …the content is complex. A review, for example, has many pieces of data: stars, bars, title, username, review text, and tags, to name a few. It can also have many interaction points: helpfulness votes, social media sharing, reviewer profile snapshot, call to write a review, etc. Good design helps keep users from feeling overwhelmed.
• …contributors don’t share your exact agenda. UGC is personal and authentic, written by passion-driven customers who have no financial interest in conversion. They contribute to help others make decisions – use design to reinforce the personal and authentic nature of the content to help drive sales.
• …UGC is repetitive. You’ll display your collected UGC as multiple reviews, questions, answers, stories, etc, per page. Each type of content should appear different to your users, and each piece of content should appear distinct.

Users don’t read – they scan. Here’s how good design can help them find what’s most important to them, and fast.

1. Establish a visual hierarchy to help readers scan quickly. Visual hierarchy provides context, and makes complex information easy to understand. Creating patterns and shapes within your layout lessens the cognitive load on your shoppers. Use large review titles to separate content, and vary font sizes and styles to emphasize relative text importance.
2. Provide anchors and contrast to draw readers’ attention where you want it most. Engaging design encourages users to interact with your site. Buttons get more clicks than text-based links. Use large, colorful stars and bars in your reviews that contrast in color with your logo and your brand site’s overall color scheme. Emphasize calls to action, like helpfulness voting and invitations to contribute, with attention-grabbing graphics and colors.
3. Build trust through attractive design. On some subconscious level, people have been shown to view attractive people as smarter and more competent than their unattractive peers; this attractiveness bias also relates to design and usability – aesthetically pleasing designs are perceived as easier to use than their less sexy counterparts. Attractive, smart design thus creates a halo effect for your user-created content, causing shoppers to perceive your UGC as more usable, trustworthy, and authentic than that of a poorly-designed site.
4. Make your UGC friendly and relatable. UGC is effective because it comes from real people – help them share their personalities on your site by letting them create profiles and add photos, for example.

Our designers have optimized and tested these and many other practices to create effective design that will fit in with any brand. The bottom line? We combine the best of a brand’s identity with standards that make user-generated content as effective as possible.

Boost your sales and look good doing it.

Request a demo to see how user-generated content can help you drive sales (and how easy it is to get started).

I’m trying new brands every day, looking for the best new stand-by products. Turns out, I’m not the only one. Loyalty is low these days — consumers are on “The Hunt.” Switching behavior is running rampant as people look for deals– 33% of consumers are changing the stores they visit (up 13% since 2008) and 57% are buying different brands (up 5% since 2008, according to comScore.  The internet is getting more and more important in aiding that search.

This is a scary environment for businesses – but it’s also a huge opportunity. Just think – you can acquire a ton of new customers if you can get them the information they need in The Hunt.

Where is The Hunt happening? Two words – Facebook and Twitter. This makes sense; people are searching for product information where conversations are happening and they can get an inside scoop. In fact, 23% of Twitter users are specifically looking for deals or product reviews.

Facebook and Twitter are mainstream and attract an exciting group of consumers – it’s not just for college students anymore. Facebook’s demographic profile mirrors that of the general population – even my Dad, a self-described tech laggard with an AOL email account, is an avid Facebook user. Facebook and Twitter users spend more money online than the average non-networked online shopper. I recently heard an industry analyst say, “Ignore Facebook and Twitter at your own peril.” This traffic trends graph from Compete.com drives his sentiment home.

How can you help consumers find you in The Hunt? That same question has been inspiring us and it drove the innovation in our new SocialConnect™ social marketing suite of products that we’re launching today. SocialConnect weaves your brand and social networks together to acquire new customers, promote loyalty and most importantly, drive sales.

GolfSmith, for example is enabling customers to post helpful product reviews, answers and stories directly from the GolfSmith website to their personal Facebook profiles. All of the poster’s friends – on average 150 potential customers – will see the review in their news feed. Some of our clients are seeing up to 28% of new reviews being shared on Facebook profile. That’s a tremendous amount of free advertising to potential customers from a source that people trust most – their friends.

Gina reviews her club, it posts to her wall, and...

...it shows up in Maria's News Feed

Benefit Cosmetics is taking a different approach and giving shoppers access to their full product catalog directly on Facebook, where new customers are already hanging out. They allow customer to browse and submit reviews all on Facebook, while being only a click away from the purchase path.

Customer acquisition in this time of trial is a big opportunity, but there’s a hidden challenge businesses can’t ignore. Given that switching behavior is high, you really have to work to keep your current customers and any new ones you win. Flash sites like RueLaLa.com and Groupon are doing a great job of this right now – they attract people back to their sites by offering something new to check out on a daily basis. They’re smart – this frequent communication appeals to heavy online buyers, who spend 20 times the amount of money online that light shoppers do– about $592 vs $30. (comScore) Capture their interest and you’ve got a goldmine.

The Container Store and Laithwaites are two companies appealing to this demographic in a creative way. They regularly tweet user-generated content like product reviews to their corporate Twitter accounts. They can filter what’s tweeted, tailoring the content based on seasonal factors, like showing champagne reviews around Valentine’s Day, for example.

It’s official – The Hunt is on and the battles to win and keep the next generation of loyal shoppers are being won on Facebook and Twitter. Bazaarvoice is paying attention to this and the SocialConnect product suite is our answer. Expect a lot more exciting news and investments in this area in the future.