If you lean in a bit further and look a little more closely, you’ve known this thing called social media for years.  It’s ripped right out of those social studies textbooks that weighted many a sixth-graders’ backpacks, in their curricular insistence on opening young minds to the strands that define culture.  It’s really not any different from moms sharing recipes and dropping off pies at the neighbor’s house to welcome a newborn.  Sharing “space” and exchanging ideas, knowledge and information. This natural human behavior to reach out is the fabric that binds neighborhoods and communities, cities and countries.

What is different about social media, however, is that the “media” part of it has made all of these social activities scalable. Social media can happen at home and within your community, but you can engage in it whenever and among whomever you want, across continents and time zones.

And when you bring business into the equation, the dynamic shifts.  Personal versus business goals shape the way each of us approaches this behemoth that binds.  Social media has opened up creative possibilities for social commerce: customers are active participants of the marketing and development of products, and businesses are actively cultivating relationships with their customers.

Businesses have come to find that peer-to-peer trust is the engine that drives social commerce—and this “engine” is fueled by community.  But how do businesses and consumers sift through the vastness of the information out there to get to what they really want? With the possibility of scalability comes a more critical question:  how can customer communities form around seemingly endless spaces?

Invoking Seth Godin’s mention of Dunbar’s Number might help here. Dunbar’s number references the number of 150 as the maximum capacity of one’s ability to sustain engaged relationships (people can’t have more than 150 friends and still maintain meaningful connections).  Where the idea of separating noise from truth in online conversations persists, social commerce solutions address the challenges that have surfaced as a result of the infinite ways to connect and the insistence of online participants on the web to gain true value from this vastness.  Social commerce solutions hone in on and make sense of what businesses should focus on based on the needs of their customer communities.

The scalability that social media affords is a phenomenal opportunity for businesses – but we have now entered the phase of social commerce in which we are learning that maximum growth potential can only be tapped into if businesses sharpen their focus on how to effectively harness scalability and find ways to create those meaningful connections, and, ultimately, build robust customer communities. That’s where our solutions come in. You could say we’re majoring in Social Studies. We’ll be the first to tell you that it’s not easy, but with each client success story we help build, we’re learning more to provide you with better solutions that help you stay ahead of the curve.

The Wall Street Journal featured a story yesterday that credited PowerReviews with helping ecommerce businesses boost customer review volume and build trust among online shoppers. The results: shoppers feel more comfortable buying online, while merchants are better able to identify problems with their products or services.

The article highlighted the success stories of PowerReviews clients drugstore.com and Diapers.com.

Drugstore.com’s 300% lift in review volume after implementing our software and launching a follow-up email campaign (a PowerReviews best practice) not only helped to lend credibility to their products, but garnered a legion of verified buyers, adding even more authenticity to the reviews. Layering on the lasting benefits of the follow-up email, drugstore.com CMO David Lonczak said that this practice helps customers receiving these requests in their inbox “feel important” and “increased our brand’s connection [to drugstore.com customers].”

Our AnswerBox solution also received an honorable mention–with a focus on its capability to help merchants “reap the benefits of input from consumers before a sale is made, by posting questions from people thinking about buying a product and the answers, including comments from other consumers.”

Bazaarvoice’s capability to link customer reviews to users’ Facebook profiles was also mentioned, reinforcing the viral nature of peer-level feedback online.  (Read about our own Facebook publishing feature – Social Megaphone.)

When consulting online reviews, a shopper’s level of comfort largely depends on feeling that sense of connection to the person making a review. Director of E-commerce Solutions at Diapers.com Josh Himwich remarks, “the most important recommender is going to be people who are in a very similar situation to yourself.” However, not all reviews solutions provide this crucial information.

The article pointed to Diapers.com’s use of our Affinity Reviews™ as a feature that sets PowerReviews apart from others in the industry. This PowerTags™ technology, unique to PowerReviews, captures structured customer feedback to help shoppers “distinguish one reviewer from another” (’first-time parent’ or ‘grandparent’), and is critical to helping to guide their purchases online.

The common denominator here: social commerce solutions that drive measurable results for businesses – through more sales and deeper customer relationships.

If you’ve been following our tweets and the latest social buzz, then you already know about the 2009 Community and Social Media Research Study that we conducted with the e-tailing group. The study revealed that companies rank customer engagement as the number one goal in using community and social media tools. Taking this a step further, the Altimeter Group’s landmark study of the world’s top 100 brands (among them: Starbucks, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Mercedes-Benz) uncovered a direct correlation in companies’ deep engagement in social media and top financial performance. Companies who earned the designation of “social maven” were remarkably proficient in their efforts to engage with their customers using social media tools. On average, social mavens experienced 18% revenue growth over the last 12 months alone. Conversely, their socially uninvolved counterparts experienced a 6% decline in revenue over the same period. In short, “Money talks and it’s declaring that it pays to engage meaningfully in social media.”(Source: Altimeter Group).

What does this mean for your business? Engagement is not only a key metric for companies today; it is absolutely vital for business growth and fundamental to understanding your customers.  Read on to find out how one retailer transformed a challenge into an opportunity to increase customer engagement.

Abe’s of Maine Uses AnswerBox to Increase Customer Engagement and Gain A New Traffic Channel

If your customers have product-related questions and can’t find the right answers on your site, it makes sense that they’d surf elsewhere until they find what they need. How do you prevent these potential customers from leaving your site? How do you find ways to truly engage visitors, increase conversion and build word-of-mouth?

Well-known camera and digital electronics retailer Abe’s of Maine was faced with this challenge. Visitors to their site had tons of questions, and this meant countless resources were spent addressing the same types of inquiries for multiple customers on the same products.  Worse, customers who didn’t find answers to their questions right on the product page were lost to other sites or online forums. Abe’s of Maine wanted to find a more efficient way to keep their customers better informed, keep customers on their site, and increase conversions.  Net-net, they wanted to find an effective way to better engage their customers.

Abe’s of Maine turned to AnswerBox, our solution that allows shoppers to ask product-specific questions and receive answers from customers and designated staff experts. Customers who ask a question are given the option to leave their e-mail address to be notified when their question receives an answer. The retailer was able to quickly and seamlessly plug the solution into their web site in a matter of days. Unlike the traditional one-to-one support channels (such as e-mail and phone) that Abe’s of Maine had previously relied on, AnswerBox captures conversations, answers, and insights by displaying them directly on the product detail page for all current and future customers to see.                                                                      

The Results

Within seven months, the implementation of AnswerBox demonstrated significant gains in customer involvement on the retailer’s website. During this timeframe, more than 5,200 questions were posted to the site, with 97 percent receiving an answer. Of the people who requested email notification, more than seven percent returned to Abe’s of Maine to make a purchase via the email link. Further, the return rate for these purchases was 40 percent lower than Abe’s average.  Through all of this, AnswerBox provides Abe’s of Maine with a new traffic channel with a customer acquisition cost of less than $24, a strong number in comparison to their $30-$40 CPAs from many other channels, including comparison shopping engines. 

While these business metrics are noteworthy, particularly amidst a challenged economy, Abe’s of Maine was equally excited about the opportunity this solution provided to build its brand long-term.  AnswerBox helped the retailer increase engagement by:

• Keeping visitors on their site and  eliminating the need for shoppers to seek answers elsewhere
• Initiating dialogue with the 73 percent of customers who provided email addresses when making inquiries via AnswerBox
• Building trust and credibility in the highly competitive world of online digital electronics  by offering user perspectives and real-world scenarios
• Using customer feedback to improve site usability

Listening and responding to its customers’ questions and concerns is continually helping Abe’s of Maine discover more about what their customers want, allowing the company to become better informed and more relevant. The retailer’s success story clearly demonstrates that going social means more than diving in and waiting to see what happens. If money talks through social, then it is earned by allowing your customer community a voice to help tell the story of your brand. It is now critical for companies to engage in the conversation, and Abe’s of Maine did just that, by addressing specific questions and providing answers, thereby building on interactions and deepening relationships with their customer community.

To learn more about how Abe’s of Maine achieved customer engagement success, download the full case study here.

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.

To work around the “invisibility” problem, both companies created special review landing pages (or “review mini-sites”) that search engines could index, bringing a sizeable stream of new search traffic to the mini-site.  But not to the product page, and that’s the rub.  Unlike any other page on the website, the product page is the best equipped page to convince visitors to buy.  And it’s the place retailers and brands have chosen as the place to focus their SEO efforts.

Our new In-Line SEO solution brings together the merchandising and marketing power of customer reviews onto the Product Page, driving search traffic to the place it can generate the greatest sales.  And doing so without sacrificing the productivity benefits of working with an outside service provider.

33% Increase in Sales from Natural Search

I could go on and on about why it’s important to have search-friendly review content on your product page, but the results speak for themselves.  One of our first clients to implement In-Line SEO is Diapers.com, and they experienced some impressive results.

Within two weeks of implementing it, natural search traffic on Diapers.com increased by 49%.  And because all of the incremental traffic landed on the product page, search-related sales increased by 33%. A key driver of the increased sales was a 59% rise in the number of keywords driving traffic to the site. (Diapers.com did not have an SEO solution for reviews prior to the launch of In-Line SEO).

You can find more details in our In-Line SEO™ Case Study, but seriously, “WOW!”

Why not an API or XML?

You many have heard from Bazaarvoice that they offer an API to enable SEO on the product page – providing a coding interface to include customer reviews as HTML content on the product page.  If you have explored this route, you probably discovered it would change the fundamental working relationship you have with your service provider.  We know, because we have long provided an XML interface to our clients as a stop-gap SEO solution, and only 3 clients out of 300+ chose it.  The vast majority of our customers did not because 1) it required them to build their own front-end display, and 2) it required new engineering development every time we released a new feature.  And isn’t easy integration and no maintenance a key point of outsourcing?

Until now, retailers had only two choices for product page SEO — (1) “build-it-yourself” and get the full SEO benefits on the product page, or (2) outsource it to a SaaS provider and live with review landing pages.  In-Line SEO™ gives you the benefits of both.

So welcome to the new world of outsourced customer reviews, where you can have your cake and eat it too!

I’m not surprised at all that people are trying to “game the system” and influence product ratings and reviews, and particularly friends of people who work for a manufacturer. It’s something we’ve been worrying about since the company was started, and something we regularly try to find ways to minimize (it can’t be eliminated completely). The “Verified Buyer” feature from PowerReviews is one way, together with the proactive “survey engine” we set up with tens and hundreds of thousands of surveys being sent out every day by retailers to people they know have purchased the product they are reviewing. The biggest benefit this provides is to “drown out” the few reviews that aren’t real, i.e. gamed.

The other mechanism to minimize the effect of fake positive reviews is the voracity of the community itself, and of the individual reviewer. We believe that most people who read reviews are fairly sophisticated, and can sniff out fake reviews (few specifics, no concerns voiced at all, limited comments…). Plus, most review systems have the question “How helpful was this review?” at the bottom of every review, so the readers/shoppers can vote their suspicions. That way, other shoppers can then sort reviews by “most helpful”. In addition, we believe that having “most helpful” as the default sort order is the best way to empower the shopper to make a confident decision, which is how we do it on our product research portal, buzzillions.com.

The part that did surprise me was the outward and open advertisement for positive reviews. if, in fact, it was the Belkin business development person, then it’s one of the less smart moves I’ve heard of in a while. Especially, given the huge and hungry community of “citizen reporters”, together with Goggle alerts, that get the word out so quickly. But I could see people who have a lapse in judgment actually do something like this…once.

My initial instinct was that this was actually a move by a competitor (or personal enemy) who put up an ad like this with that person’s name on it, know it would be found out and distributed widely (like it has been). But if that was the case, Belkin would have immediately disclaimed it.

Bottom line…I think that gaming will become more of a problem, and, unless we continue to advance our abilities to minimize it, it will become worse. Of course, that’s where we come in.

Internet Retailing fake reviews mention: “Keeping the trust in user reviews”

According to JupiterResearch, 42% of 1,179 consumers surveyed have left a site without purchasing multiple products because they couldn’t get a question answered about just one of the products in their shopping cart.

Today’s shoppers want answers, and they’re willing to leave a retailer’s site to find them. Product specs and descriptions do a pretty good job of educating shoppers about features, but today’s discerning shoppers require more – they’re demanding more detailed information and advice about the unique nuances of real life usage and performance. If manufacturers aren’t able to answer those very specific questions, who is? Actual product users and subject matter experts have answered the call of duty – and savvy retailers are reaping the benefits.

Since launching AnswerBox in July 2008, evo has now generated thousands of questions and thousands of answers. But it’s their proactive response to the incoming content that really is deserving of attention and applause. Seeing how similar questions were coming in for many of its products, evo assessed the newly discovered gaps in existing site content and quickly deployed category-specific sizing and fit guides throughout their site. Also, having answered industry jargon questions like what “Blem” means, and clarifying shipping policies, evo has seen a significant reduction in those types of questions. Congrats to Nathan Decker and his team at evo for providing their customers with the answers that matter most to them. To learn more about evo’s succes please download our case study.

While PowerReviews developed AnswerBox to help retailers provide the most relevant answers to their shoppers, we also wanted to avoid the potential shortcoming of other solutions which sometimes display too many questions without answers. Our product team therefore developed a multi-pronged approach to help answer posted questions quickly and accurately. Answers are collected from a number of sources including people visiting the retailer’s product pages, people reviewing that product, the Buzzillions.com community, staff experts and even designated subject matter experts from their vendors. And most importantly, unlike traditional ‘one-to-one’ support channels such as email, phone or live chat, AnswerBox maximizes the impact of incoming questions and answers by displaying them on the product detail page – for all future shoppers to see and benefit from.

Finding answers just became a lot easier!

So besides all the schmoozing that one must do there (and that’s a fun thing!) I had three different assignments while there. The first is the subject of today’s posting.

I had the distinct honor of introducing one of the first tracks of the show which was on Natural Search Efforts and Techniques – yes the ultimate desire of all online merchants. The timing could not have been more ideal as we here at PowerReviews had just completed an exciting and informative new case study with our client Brookstone and our mutual technology partner YourAmigo.

Working with John Lucey and Gary Smith we tested the power of user generated content in today’s online search behavior and the results were outstanding! By leveraging the content that was generated during the review submission process, Brookstone was able to capture an additional 33% increase in search traffic and corresponding revenue through the use of more socially based search terms!

Just think of it…we are asking today’s online shoppers to read and write UGC in terms of reviews and blogs and beyond, so of course this behavior is trickling into their online search behavior across the major search engines.

To read and learn more about these incredible and inspiring findings, download your own copy of our Case Study.

And, a quick look through the agenda reveals a star line-up of not only keynote folks, but roundtable and case study presenters too – the real nuts and bolts of these types of workshops.

PowerReviews (www.powerreviews.com) is honored to not only sponsor Wednesday’s Retail Case Study Round Tables, but participating as well. Our very own Marketing Analyst Yury Polnar will be presenting a case study in partnership with Jim Healy, Product Manager at Onlineshoes.com, regarding the successes Jim has seen by using customer reviews in their social merchandising efforts.

Today, I am honored to be hosting a round table discussion on Creating a Consistent Experience in the Multi-Channel Environment. And when I say honored, I mean it.

Look at some of the roundtable hosts:

• Tony Brown of Timberland
• Brenda Spencer of Harry & David
• Patti Freeman Evans of Jupiter Research
• Jay Greenberg of Spencer’s
• George Michie of The Rimm-Kaufman Group
• Bryan Eisenberg of Future Now, Inc
• Ben Viscon of REI
• Pinny Gniwisch of Ice.com
• Nancy Miller of Woodcraft Supply
• Stephanie Pike of Circuit City

Not only am I honored by such company but thrilled as well as many of the above I consider not only esteemed colleagues but dear friends as well.

I’ll keep you posted as the events unfurl, but for those of you not here please know this – you are missing out so make plans to be here next time!