Interestingly, the debate isn’t quite so black-and-white when it comes to applying Social Media to eCommerce.  The main question we get from our clients is not “Should we get involved with Social Media?”, but “How can we use Social Media to Increase Sales in a Measurable Way?”.  The answer to most of our clients is “You already ARE!”…through the use of reviews and Q&A (and combined with our In-line SEO solution and recently introduced Facebook/Twitter widgets).

Of course, that’s just putting a new name on old tricks…the NEW strategies that are emerging for eCommerce companies to engage in Social Commerce I believe will come in 3 primary flavors:

1)  User Generated Content will evolve into Social Recommendations.

The debate over the mechanical aspects of UGC (moderation, SEO, etc) is quickly falling into the background — meaning that, most mature websites will have some sort of reviews and/or q&a content, and that content will be well managed by an outside vendor or otherwise.  However, the process and technology of utilizing that content to guide other customers toward a better purchase decision (i.e. a Social Recommendation) is still an emerging frontier with tremendous opportunity.   Instead of competing for the “largest selection” or “lowest price”, I believe that Websites will eventually compete to have the “smartest customers” whom other shoppers can trust.

2)  Brick & Mortar experiences will include Social Recommendations.

Not overnight, since there’s some change in consumer behavior required, but it will become pervasive .  Whether it’s on product packaging, store signage or mobile devices,  Customers will insist on easy access to recommendations and feedback from their peers (and specifically peers “like them”) to supplement the assistance of a sales associate.  Let’s face it, no matter how experienced a sales associate is, he/she can’t know the collective experience of all their customers using each product.

3)  Social Media will be the Brand-Building tool of choice.

No matter how hard your PR or marketing works, because everyday people can talk about your brand with a high level of authenticity and trust, your advocates and detractors will continue to hold the largest sway on how other customers perceive your brand.  Figuring out how to amplify the opinions of your advocates and enabling them to recruit new users is a major opportunity.  The challenge of this effort is to execute a strategy in a credible, transparent manner.  For examples of what NOT to do, read about the Belkin’s fake reviews fiasco (if you haven’t already) or about Murphy-Goode Wines backfired video contest.

At PowerReviews, we are certainly working hard to experiment and find solutions that take advantage of these upcoming trends…mainly as extensions of our Reviews and AnswerBox solutions.  There are also several other innovators that are taking a different approach.  The first is LiveClicker, that is amplifying the power of recommendations through video.  Look at OnlineShoes.tv as a great example of ecommerce-enabling UGC.  Another is Ripple6 (see MomsLikeMe.com) that works with big publisher sites to identify and nurture brand advocates by offering robust community tools.

No matter what the ultimate solutions are, we are excited to be on the forefront of this Social Media groundswell, and I look forward to working with our clients and partners to creating a new vision together.  Oh yeah, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

How It Works
Facebook Connect is integrated directly into the write-a-review process so it’s super easy for users to publish their reviews to Facebook.   In the past, users could post content to Facebook, but only if it was already on your site.  This meant that users had to keep checking back to see when their review was posted on the site.  How many people do you think remembered to do that?  Once it was live, they could then post the product page to Facebook.  Even then, their review may have been one of many on the page.  This posed too many barriers to the user to be an effective marketing tool for you.

With Facebook Connect, users can now post their review to Facebook immediately after they write it, while their excitement about a product is fresh in their mind (and before they forget to do it).

Facebook Connect highlights their specific review content in the post and allows them to add their own comments.

The key is that PowerReviews posts only a “snippet” of the review on Facebook, requiring their friends to click on a link to read the rest of the review – which takes them to your site — and that’s what drives the immediate traffic uplift.

When their friends arrive on your site, the review is highlighted, making it a fulfilling experience once they arrive.

Why Use It
Facebook is the largest social network in the world.  In April 2009, Facebook reported an estimated 200 million monthly active users.  This is a powerful network that you can use to spread the word about your products and your site, driving significant short term and longer term traffic to your site.

During Citysearch’s initial beta testing of Facebook Connect they found:

“In the four months the site has been testing Facebook Connect, 94 percent of reviewers have published their reviews to Facebook, where an average of 40 people see them and 70 percent click back to Citysearch. That has translated into new members: daily registrations on Citysearch have tripled.” New York Times

That’s an average of 40 people seeing a post about your site and 28 people coming to your site for each review posted to Facebook.  Not bad.

If you are interested in using Facebook Connect with Reviews on your site, contact us at info@powerreviews.com.  If you happen to be at the Internet Retailer Conference East in Boston, June 16 and 17, stop by Booth #1036.

In the last year, my work has focused primarily around leveraging reviews and other user generated content before and after the validation stage of shopping – to attract new shoppers to their site, help shoppers sort through and find the right product for them and get more engaged with the Brand after they leave.  I wanted to share with you some of the key lessons I’ve learned in this process that will help you get the greatest sales uplift value from customer reviews.

1.  Maximize the number of credible reviews on your site

It’s no secret that the most important step to getting full leverage out of reviews is sending an automated email to invite customers back to write a review after a purchase – commonly called a post-transaction follow-up email.  This is the proven method to generate the most reviews on your site from a very credible source – your known customers!  In fact, one client recently increased reviews by 26 times by implementing the follow-up email.  Our system marks these reviews with a “Verified Buyer” badge, which creates trust among your customers.

We recommend that you send the follow-up email to all past purchasers from the previous 6 months prior to launching reviews on your product pages.  Within the first month, you should have 20% of your total SKUs have at least 1 review, with 100% review coverage for your top sellers. Further, as the Netshops Case Study shows, it’s the number of reviews per product that drives sales uplift, with 4-7 reviews per product being enough for 75% of shoppers to “have sufficient confidence to judge the product” (etailing group study of 1200 typical internet shoppers).

Did you know the follow-up email also ensures a more balanced and improved overall product rating?  Because the email captures reviews from a wider cross-section of customers, our customers have experienced a 15% increase in the average product rating across their site once they implemented the follow-up email!  If you need help, let us know.  We’ve created a tool to help you send the follow-up email.

2.  Make a great first impression

It’s one thing to collect customer reviews, but if you don’t display the reviews in a user friendly way, with an informative and easy-to-absorb review summary, you’re not getting the greatest sales impact from these reviews.  That’s why we created the next generation of our review summary, called Review Snapshot 2.0.  Initial tests showed an 18.3% reduction in product page bounce rate and a 16.7% increase in product page conversion.  Check out the Review Snapshot at Jelly Belly.

3.  Maximize SEO Benefit

Since the inception of our review solution, we’ve provided customers the ability to increase natural search traffic from customer review content via our SEO Mini-Site.  This solution leverages a set of SEO-optimized review landing pages, which drive traffic through the landing page to the product page.  Late last year, we launched our next generation SEO tool called – In-Line SEO(tm), which enables customer review content to be indexed directly on the product page itself.  Early customer review adopters, such as eBags, Newegg and Zappos, created home-grown review solutions to achieve the SEO benefit of reviews directly on the product page.  Now everyone else can benefit from this approach without having to manage the review display themselves (so you can easily adopt all the review enhancements in the future).  Check out Robert Chea’s blog post last week for more details.

4.  Take review content everywhere it can drive more sales

After you’ve spent the effort collecting credible, high quality reviews, make sure you leverage those reviews throughout your site and in your email marketing efforts.  In our case, the review content is “tag-based”, which means you can take it entirely new places in social merchandising and social marketing.

• On category pages and anywhere you list products, include the star ratings snippet.  Thirty days after adding ratings on the category page, Diapers.com experienced a 15% increase in product page views and a 14% increase in conversion.

• Highlight Top-Rated products on your site.  Check out REI’s Top-Rated products section on REI.com.  Utilizing our tags, you can also take it one step further by creating more personalized Top-Rated pages.  See Top-Rated women’s comfortable shoes for travel on OnlineShoes.com.

• Embrace Social Navigation to its fullest by adding ratings and review tags to your site navigation so people can narrow by “use” or “pro” or “lifestyle” (about me).  Check out Social Navigation implementations at sites such as OnlineShoes.com and Dick’s Sporting Goods.  For a very different Social Navigation interface, using tag clouds, check out Kiddicare.com.

• Add ratings and review tags to your email marketing campaigns.  By adding ratings to their email, Mountain Gear increased click-through by 8%, conversion by 17% and Average Order Value by 85%.  Impressive results!

5.  Take your online reviews offline

With the retail market still dominated by offline sales, it makes good business sense to bring ratings and reviews to your offline customers.  PowerReviews allows you to provide customer reviews in store with mobile applications that fully leverage the powerful Review Snapshot feature – high impact in a small form factor.  We also can suggest ways to maximize the display of customer reviews in store by leveraging both the ratings and the tags in store signage.

I encourage you to fully harness the amazing content your customers are creating for you every day.  These are just some of the ways you can do that, with clear wins for you and your customers.  As always, if you have any questions about the information shared, please contact your Account Manager.

On a smaller scale, PowerReviews has undergone its own significant changes this past year.

1. We now have more than 350 Enterprise clients (up from 150)
2. We launched PowerReviews Express to help small and mid-sized retailers take advantage of our solutions
3. We launched some some exciting new products including AnswerBox, an iPhone App to aid in-store shopping, Social Cross-Sell and Hero Images
4. We expanded internationally to the UK, France, Germany in multiple languages with La Redoute, KiddiCare, iRobot, Shop Direct and many more leading retailers
5. Buzzillions broke past 4 million reviews and established itself as a leader in using reviews to help customers make smarter shopping decisions. See the write-up on Buzzillions in the WSJ

Although there are many factors that contribute to this huge success, we truly believe that it was primarily resulted from building true partnerships with each individual client. This spans from working together to collect as many highly-relevant reviews as possible to drive conversions, to working together on experimental ideas through Buzzillions, to SEO optimization methods and Social Navigation deployments. Our original vision of creating a highly-aligned network of retailers, manufacturers and partners has solidly taken root this year.

Looking ahead into 2009, we see a lot of exciting new trends in the world of ratings and reviews (and other customer-generated content/community).

1. Reviews will be ubiquitous.  Most of the IR Top 500 retailers will have deployed reviews and that trend will continue to the smaller/niche retailers. Brands and luxury retailers will also start to adopt these technologies.
2. Because reviews will be everywhere, consumers will actively seek out those sources that are more CREDIBLE and RELEVANT…which means that consumers will become ultra-sensitized to reviews that look like “testimonials” or “marketing copy” vs. “unbiased reviews”. I also expect that more unethical marketers will try to sneak fake reviews into the system.
3. Reviews will morph into a 3-way dialog between other customers, the retailers and the manufacturer. Everything we build (Customer Reviews, AnswerBox, etc) encompass the idea of a “network” where content can be easily aggregated, analyzed, shared amongst all the partners.
4. Retailers & Manufacturers will start tapping the rich data to improve their businesses. Manufacturers will use customer feedback to improve their product development and product marketing processes. And Retailers will do the same to tune their product assortment and merchandising strategies.

What are your predictions?

On a closing note, as we contemplate all the opportunities (and challenges) ahead, I want to thank all of our fabulous clients who have worked so collaboratively to make PowerReviews successful, our network of partners who have evangelized our products and leveraged the reviews in creative ways, and the entire PowerReviews team whose talent and dedication have made this year successful.

Thank you again for another great year, and have a relaxing and well-deserved holiday!

-Andy

On August 19th 2007, we launched “Brand Publishing”, where brands could publish their reviews with retailers that carry their products. The first brand to use this was Trek Bikes, who published their reviews on the “Trek Bicycle Store” – Schererville – on the SmartEtailing bike store network. It wasn’t a man on the moon, but it was pretty cool to see a system that we had dreamed of in 2006 to go live. After over a year of review sharing, 154 Trek products have pushed PowerReviews-generated reviews to their retailers in the SmartEtailing group. The mechanics of the system are fairly easy for us since we work with product data all the time on our portal Buzzillions. In addition, our standard tool set allows the recipients of the reviews to moderate the reviews that are coming from brands if they chose to.

As with any agreement or dance, it takes two to tango. While brands are interested in publishing this information to retailers, retailers are just starting to warm up to the idea of publishing consumer content that did not originate on their site. Their concern is understandable as it is critical that the reader have transparency as content might be coming from one of many sources:

• A retailer staff member
• A manufacturer employee
• An unconfirmed reviewer
• A consumer who has verified to have purchased the product

Your consumer’s trust cannot be valued highly enough, and brands or retailers who try to game the system will feel a strong backlash when the users sniff them out. How many top reviewers can really review more than one dishwasher? (another post for another day).

I predict 3 positive things are going to happen in 2009:

1. Brands that already embrace what people are really saying will look to leverage that content by publishing it to trusted partners
2. Brands that have not embraced the consumer voice will move in that direction because consumers expect it and they are missing out on valuable feedback
3. Retailers will see this new digital version for in-store displays and want to get plugged into their best brands. The best thing about this version is that it is automatic and nobody has to set up a cardboard display in the aisle

We all know at the end of the day customers will ignore how loud you shout from the mountain top or who had it first when they have a great selection. The biggest things they will care about is whether they trust the product really works and does what it is supposed to do at a reasonable price. This is as true from us as a company, as it is for any brand or physical product they produce.