Bazaarvoice Launches Shout It!™ to Bring Product Reviews to Social Networks

Customers and shoppers at leading eCommerce sites can now share products, reviews, and reviewer profiles with their friends on Facebook, Digg and del.icio.us

AUSTIN, TX– October 19, 2007 –Bazaarvoice, the market and technology leader in hosted social commerce applications that drive sales, today launched Shout It!™, a new service that allows consumers to publish product reviews on leading social networking sites Facebook, Digg and del.icio.us. With a single click, consumers can now share opinions about products with a large social network of friends who can easily see the product review and then click to buy it for themselves. Retailers are able to extend their brands onto popular social networking sites and generate additional sales through true, authentic word of mouth marketing.

According to a recent study by MarketingSherpa, 86.9% of consumers said they would trust a friend’s recommendation over a review by a critic. With 91% of US adults regularly or occasionally seeking advice about products and services (BIGresearch), ratings and reviews have quickly become a must-have feature for eCommerce sites. Shout It! encourages online conversations about products online by extending valuable ratings and reviews content to social networks, where more and more people are congregating to meet, converse, and share their lives with online friends.

About Shout It!
With Shout It!, retailers online extend their brand and products onto social networking sites to attract new customers and generate sales, while allowing shoppers to share opinions about products with friends and peers. Shout It! is a widget that integrates seamlessly onto a retailer’s product page within the review summary, as well as with each specific review. Consumers can click on a Shout It! icon to publish any review - their own or someone else’s - to Facebook, Digg or del.icio.us. The published review includes the retailer’s logo and the review itself, as well as a direct link back to the retailer’s Web site.

“First and foremost, shoppers turn to each other to make decisions about product purchases,” said Brett Hurt, founder & CEO of Bazaarvoice. “Not only do retailers online need to enable these influential conversations, they need to find new ways to encourage them. Shout It! allows consumers to publish opinions about products on popular social networking sites like Facebook, while promoting a retailer’s brand and products at the same time. Our retail clients are extremely excited about this new functionality because it gives them an immediate social networking strategy focused on driving sales and attracting new customers.  Shout It! has the potential to become a new form of ‘advertising’.”

Pricing and Availability
The Shout It! service is immediately available free of charge for Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews™ customers. The service requires no additional integration or IT effort and can be up and running in a matter of days.

About Bazaarvoice
Bazaarvoice offers outsourced technology, services, analytics, and expertise to help companies enhance the online shopping experience with social commerce applications that drive sales. Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews™ and Ask & Answer™ deliver immediate success by minimizing implementation risk and maximizing the strategic impact of user-generated review content through complete customization, deep integration, community management, advanced analytics, search engine optimization, and syndication across the Web and to offline channels.

Download This Press Release (PDF)
Download This Press Release (Word)