Creating buzz around a product on an external forum or blog can be very effective, especially if the blog is full of relevant links to deep product or service pages on the brand site. But it’s not always easy…

It’s also not hard – just time consuming, and you need to know what you’re doing. Here’s one way that won’t break the bank, or deviate too much from any social presence or initiatives you already have running:

• In order to facilitate and encourage participation in brand related product forums and social networking sites to gain decent anchor text backlinks, you might consider starting an unofficial blog where you provide interesting information about your brand, your direct and indirect competitors and suppliers.

• Include insights and mentions of complimentary and supplementary products and services highlighting faults, advantages, customer service and other relevant feedback from all related forums, social media and industry sites. Nofollow non-prime site external links; there’s no value to sharing out your newly gained link-juice, but there is value to providing those external resources to your knowledgeable, info-seeking visitors. Open those links in a new window.

• Build a solid reputation as an objective industry source of information and pay attention to regular commentary contributors – positive and negative – building a brand game plan to deal with both on the brand site itself.

• The potential for YouTube exposure is infinite if you offer brand based prizes for (examples) ‘funniest’, ‘weirdest’ or ‘most innovative’ use of your product, or ‘most extensive use’ of your service. The potential is limited only to the brands legal and social responsibility, and your ability and innovativeness as their lead.

ABDUCTION OF THE INFLUENTIALS… This is one of the best vids I’ve ever seen to explain UGC… Just CLICK!

Harness the Power of Social Networks

There are social networks for pretty much everything; Go Green, IT, design, architecture, SEO, electronics, home goods, kids stuff, books – you name it, it’s out there. Find a few really targeted and relevant networks and integrate. Again this can be in the form of both main brand and pseudo-brand.

• Create a FaceBook/MySpace account – invite people via search, and incentivize them with an offer; e.g. a draw; once we reach 1000 we will send 15 random entrants a Starbucks discount… It depends on the brand, your insights, your involvement, and how you handle your SMM. NEVER be in the position where you can be accused of bribing.

• Create a Twitter account – if you’re really big, offer a free software package, but offer daily/weekly tidbits of info to folks who have already purchased it, including updates and engage.engage.engage.

• Digg both detractor and evangelist type articles.

Social networks can be particularly powerful for brand-building. If you are a brand and want to engage the power of consumer feedback, take an active part in those communities that work best for you and link to them from your blog or your prime product page/s.

Enabling your users to find ‘more’ information from their peers via your facilitation might generate a bit of a flux in the social network, but if you have a name in the network, not only can you answer them, you can expect your brand evangelists and followers to take part in dealing with their queries as well, even if it is simply to the point of linking them back to an FAQ or review page.

Problems With UGC And How To Deal With Them

To help site owners manage the potential avalanche of UGC headed their way a number of platforms have been developed which allow companies to add UGC elements to their sites. Ensure that whichever option you choose you stringently evaluate the SPAM management offering. Most CMS enable spam monitoring and blog creation; setting goals, expectations and limitations is up to you. It is advisable if you are unsure to check the full disable functionality of any CMS or blog software.

Spam hurts everyone...

Anonymous commentary or feedback must always be run through a stringent spam detection program which prevents spam blog or review commentary prior to live publication. Simply ensure you have a disclaimer on the page that is very direct and simple indicating that if feedback doesn’t show within a set period of time, to contact you by email and include a link to your spam definition. Never allow profanity, blasphemy, or plain vileness through. Filters sort that, don’t make the mistake of enabling it – it’s in your power; it’s your brand.

Transparency is good, enabling ‘hate’ or plain disrespect and bad manners is not. Make your filters as transparent as possible – that’s what the filter is for, and that’s what the disclaimer supports. You can’t stop what other sites say about you, but you can – to an extent – ensure that your commentary, while transparent, is palatable.

It is absolutely vital to monitor your online presence, and take the initiative wherever possible and/or necessary. For example; if a well known industry blog writes about your product in a less than flattering manner, detecting that mention of your product or brand name quickly is imperative. It allows you to be proactive in two ways:

1. Copy the negative feedback from the blog on your own product site with a link to the blog post, with immediate, genuine company feedback, including a link to the other reviews or UGC (hopefully positive) on your site.
2. On the ‘offending’ blog itself post a comment to the effect that you have seen their post, thank them for their time, and urge them and their other readers to view your full response and other user commentary on your product review page via a link.

While there are numerous online reputation management tools if you are going ‘free’ I personally recommend Google Alerts; if you are prepared to spend money, then TrackUR.com is a paid service, but far superior, and affordable.

Conclusion

The boost of interest in UGC and the need to implement it while watching for on-site spam has intersected very nicely with the desire to monitor both positive and negative commentary around the web. Monitoring what is being said about your business on the net and in the blogosphere also enables businesses to discover what people do and don’t like about their company, brand, product line, specific product, customer service, affiliate, brick and mortar store, and more. It’s a great way for a business to be knowledgeable while at the same time proactive, assuming the strategic ability deal quickly, diplomatically, carefully, and positively with brand detractors and evangelists as they gather insights for R&D and insight and planning.

This is Part 3 of a 3 part series on UGC. Part 2 is UGC and Small Business – What Works & Why and Part 1 is  UGC – Maximize Your Online Exposure with People Power!

Follow Laura on Twitter!

1. How do I make sure UGC is optimized and ranks well?
2. Are there strategies I can use to get the most out of my UGC from an SEO point of view?

The simple answer is that the optimal solution will likely be different for each business and/or site, but in general you should begin by controlling the pages on which the UGC will display, as well as the primary pages within your remit that link directly to them. And remember, your target market may be more tech savvy than you think and ready and willing to start engaging more actively, especially if you have a large loyal return base.

(this is BIG because this is both a really big pain point and a really big stumbling block; funny yet just a smidge tragic if you like)

A common example that comes to mind when thinking about a business and the ways users provide feedback about an online offering are ‘Customer Reviews’. These reviews are enormously important in that they have proven to be the primary medium used to facilitate the transition of the traditionally powerful word-of-mouth referral system from offline to online. The question remains: How best can you make use of the power of reviews on your site?

For product reviews and commentary, there are two main approaches to enable UGC integration on product pages (the most relevant place to put them). One; it is possible to list a few reviews on the page with a link to a full review/feedback page; or, two you could simply include a hyperlink on the product page linking to the reviews. If you choose the former, ensure feedback is provided by registered purchasers if you sell online, or via registration or captcha requirements for non-purchasers.

The next step would be to ensure that you optimize the review pages themselves. Conduct keyword research on the product or brand, targeting words of negative and positive association. For example; this is one way to encompass the issues (in summary):

Scenario: I conducted some preliminary keyword research on iPhone looking at very generic research phrases like ’good iphone’, ‘bad iphone’ [sounds like a puppy in training] ‘great iphone’ and ‘iphone fail’. It generated a number of insights; we’ll look at three (please note, these findings are drawn from an external keyword research tool, and do not reflect the opinion of the magazine, nor those of the author of this article, regarding the iPhone’s ability or lack thereof to send emails, to deal with mobile messaging, or to work ‘overseas’):

1. A common question: ‘is the iPhone good overseas?’
2. Some people are concerned about iPhone email failing
3. iPhones are ‘good’ with mobile messaging

 How might you deal with this information?

1. Create one optimized page for each issue,
2. Link to each page from a hub area on the primary product page.
3. Generate external buzz and links to these pages by monitoring online conversation around the primary topic and answering and linking back using nofollows where warranted.

There are, of course numerous other strategies you can utilize to optimize your UGC including:

· Use featured reviews, where you place the reviews that receive the most ‘votes’ in a defined top area nearer to the fold included by date and possibly subtly. Never place your most positive reviews at the top and your negative reviews at the bottom; users may become wary of manipulation. If you’re getting a lot of bad reviews, think about your offering or the associated service, investigate and rectify. It’s great for R&D, for in-house cleaning and for in-house acknowledgement when individual people get named as ‘stars’!

· Inviting ‘opt-in email’ purchasers to review with a non-monetary incentive to do so

· Ensuring that ‘cleared’ reviews go live immediately. Frequent updating is important to rankings due to the fact that fresh content encourages more ‘frequent’ crawling by the ranking algorithms. Frequent caching has been found to impact positively on search results. Use webmaster tools if you don’t already.

· Minimizing bounce rates; those who surf to a review page are usually more qualified than those who bounced or left somewhere in their visit without clicking to the review page. They have already moved along the pathway in their quest to find a product to satisfy their need or want. Time spent on site is usually greater with reviews than other types of content, and conversion rates are higher than those who only visit the product page.

Consumers want to know what’s great about a product. If positive reviews include objective emotional feedback, the review can ‘speak’ to potential consumers who are looking for the same kind of experience. For example, a book review written by a mother highlighting the positive emotional bonding she experienced sharing the book with her teenager will be a sure hit for many moms trying to connect with their teenage daughters. 68% of consumers trust ‘people like me’ first for product advice. (Edelman Trust Barometer).

Dealing with Questions

· FAQs are an area that can be enhanced by UGC to make your site more usable and more valuable to visitors. Enabling an advanced UGC based FAQ hub can not only provide a more satisfying user experience while facilitating R&D via disclosure, it may also facilitate actual transactions due to easy question-response detection and direction, and decrease product returns. Also, include post sales service UGC as a primary link off the main product page.

· Live Q&A with a tech support member dedicated to all FAQ and other support issues should be enabled, with the option to allow the question and to be published online, incognito, or with some or full disclosure at the users discretion. If you service multiple time-zones, ensure you have staff to deal with the potential service requirement.

Negative vs. Positive Feedback

Don’t silo negative and positive feedback into separate areas. Negative feedback must be included with positive. In most cases, the majority of feedback will be positive, unless it is a really bad product or service in which case you withdraw it from the market, but keep the reviews live as Amazon did with the apparently diabolical HotWheels Slimecano;

· ‘My six year old son bought this with his own money and has already offered to give it away,’ and

· ‘ATTN: Do not buy this toy, even if it is on sale for 5 cents…’ are two relatively mild reviews.

Despite being discontinued, Amazon retains product information along with the more than 170 reviews which most certainly contributed to the Slimecano’s withdrawal from the shelves and halted production.

Bear in mind that negative consumer feedback provides authenticity and an opening for brand evangelists to offer alternative solutions; such as other consumers mentioning to potential iPhone customers that, even though the surface scratches easily, you can simply buy a case – thus providing great feedback for R&D and rebuttal.

This is Part 2 of a three part series on UGC. If you’d like to read part 1, it’s here UGC – Maximize Your Online Exposure with People Power!

Follow Laura on Twitter!

Online UGC is something that has been growing in incidence and importance over the last few years, but it’s only recently that search marketing practitioners have seriously begun to consider the impact of UGC on SEO, and actively tried to harness its power to boost search engine rankings, exposure and enhance site usability. The growing importance of UGC can be seen in the following data:

1. Consumers are relying more on UGC

• 83% of shoppers said online product evaluations and reviews had some level of influence on their purchasing decisions. (Opinion Research Corporation, July 2008)
• As of October 2008, almost half of US online adults read ratings and reviews at least once a month (Forrester)

2. Marketers are relying more on UGC

• In a BazaarVoice Case Study of a major electronics retailer site search visitors landing on user review pages converted 60% more often, spent 50% more time, and viewed 82% more pages than search visitors to other pages.
• The Shop.org State of Retailing Online study, conducted by Forrester Research, found only 26% of the 137 top retailers surveyed offered customer ratings and reviews, but 96% of them ranked customer ratings and reviews as an effective or very effective tactic at driving conversion.

3. Offline sales are influenced by UGC

• According to eMarketer (a 2007 study), for every $1 in online sales, the Internet influenced $3.45 of store sales.
• More than 75% of review users in nearly every category reported that the review had a significant influence on their purchase, with hotels ranking the highest (87%). (comScore/The Kelsey Group, October 2007)

From a purely SEO point of view, a telling statistic is that 26% of search results link to user generated content (Nielsen Buzz Metrics). The fact that users are increasingly turning to UGC is compounded by evidence that the engines are displaying this information. It is vital that online marketers actively and proactively investigate and integrate user generated content into their online mix.

If you think your site might be ready to benefit from UGC (and almost any site can), then its time to consider how UGC can best fit your online offering. You need to determine which of the multitude types of UGC will most effectively and efficiently complement, supplement and/or push your online SEO initiative including:

· product reviews (e.g. Amazon.com)

· service reviews (e.g. Google Local),

· seller reviews (e.g. eBay),

· blog comments,

· news comments,

· forum posts or comments,

· video/audio and photo sharing sites (e.g. YouTube and Flickr),

· social networking sites comments or posts (e.g. Twitter, SecondLife, Facebook, MySpace),

· wikis and composite review sites (e.g. ConsumerReport.org)

Targeting for Acquisition

Once you have determined where and what UGC you wish to employ, it is vital that optimization be applied to reap the full benefit.

Optimization can take many forms; UGC help you rank higher in search engines, particularly through manipulation of the long tail according to a recent Search Engine Land post. There is also the fact that effective navigation and internal linking based on a UGC acquisition and inclusion initiative will make your UGC both more visible on your site and more useful (or applicable) to visitors. The two are not mutually exclusive, and working together they can increase your visibility in the SERPs and rocket your conversion rate and ROI.

What is important is that you don’t mess with the actual UGC itself. In other words you target optimization efforts at the review page’s URL, Title, META description and header. Then let the UGC flow freely, within reason.

User generated content – it’s all about YOU!

Which forms of UGC to leverage, why, where and how can be a challenge to even the most professional marketing team.  Please read more about UGC and SEO here.

VOC (voice of customer) is another part of the same puzzle. Traditionally:

• “…[VOC] is a market research technique that produces a detailed set of customer wants and needs, organized into a hierarchical structure, and then prioritized in terms of relative importance and satisfaction with current alternatives.” Wikipedia

Usability Study

I was recently provided detailed information as part of a team knowledge sharing initiative on a usability study that one of my colleagues spear-headed across Canada and the UK.

It’s interesting that no matter how objective you try to be, once you have been working on a specific account for any period of time, you will be myopic on certain points, complacent on others and oblivious of yet more.

Some feedback from these studies that I can freely share include the following three general points:

1. Don’t ever assume that your online market is nearly as tech savvy or internet experienced as you or your team are. Issues with misunderstood navigation, unseen buttons, confusion on how to even begin to find the site from the engines were not uncommon, even though most issues identified seemed like total no-brainers to the more internet experienced internal team – even those not on the accounts in question – we’re not (in most cases) selling to our technical/internet peers. I’m not saying that our target markets are less intelligent, I’m saying that they don’t spend all day working in html, refining Google advanced searches, using Google and Yahoo operators, visiting numerous completely diverse sites for research, competitive intelligence or pure interest reasons.
2. Don’t assume that features and functionalities you think will be of great interest and benefit to the customer, actually are. Mistrust, uncertainty and the pure search and swap instinct is very prevalent. If you are offering something fancy or informative, make sure you provide them with full information on what they are getting, whether it be in the form of information during a download, or an explanation to the effect that the retailer testimonials they are seeing are not purely self-promotion (link to the original – that simple, but so often overlooked – heck, we know it’s real… right?).
3. Many usability victims… err, test subjects actually think that they are only expected to provide negative feedback. Make sure you ask them to tell you what’s positive. In some cases, it might be the opposite (less common) so ensure that you tell them you want feedback on both their positive and negative experiences and feelings. Try to get them to quantify all feedback via a simple scoring system including positive and negative scoring throughout to keep that top of mind.

What about UGC?

Well, let’s backtrack a little. This usability study was regarding test subjects’ experiences with the web site itself. Admittedly unless a site is particularly awful or particularly blindingly awesome, not too many people comment on the actual site usability of their own free will, and usability is pretty darn important if you’re involved in ecommerce.

BUT… what about conducting a usability test for an online application. I guarantee some of the feedback would be ‘great, fast and easy’ as well as ‘so slow’. Well sometimes, UGC is as effective if not MORE so than usability studies for gaining real time interaction and feedback from real customers as they are using your app/product/service. So what can you do?

1. track the social networks (Google alerts; Radian6; Twitter Search and more)
2. aggregate the feedback and see which comments on which features are the most prevalent (more ‘this is slow’ or more ‘this rocks with speed’)
3. respond to every positive and negative comment and follow up with PR and feedback where possible/required and take it offline if it gets too long, or too confusing – you have other followers
4. feed learnings back to product development and marketing on a regularly scheduled basis (don’t ping them with every tweet, post or comment; they’ll hunt you down and disconnect you)
5. blog about interactions with the socnet including after-the-fact product/app/service fixes based on feedback with a big thank you to all followers/commenter’s etc
6. link out of comments and twitter posts where possible and relevant to followers/readers to specific pages within your site encouraging readers to go to the site with a snippet of highly relevant info followed by an ellipsis ‘…’.
7. Never comment or tweet/forum etc spam. Just don’t do it.
8. get back to initial pure voluntary commentators/tweet peeps when you have a usability study or other research factor on a feature or function as a potential add to your test target market – it’s predefined and you already have an in… awesome J

Why bother with UGC when we have VOC?

• It is likely that when you really impress someone on the socnets (social networks) with customer service, you may well turn them into a fan as opposed to a neutral or a potential/real detractor.
• It is possible that you will generate a ready made contributor base for future usability studies
• It is possible that your socnet folks are UGC addicts themselves with their own blogs, and if you engage them effectively, they may very well blog about your product, your site, or your twitter account/blog/forum etc. All exposure in the socnets that is positive is a good thing, weither indirectly or directly for SEO – both in terms of pure backlinks, but also in terms of SERP real estate and exposure… this is the minefield of the longtail, if you can harness it effectively. Referral traffic is very likely to spike if you make this work, so don’t keep your SEO analytics figures (if you use GA for example) limited to actual organic/non-paid traffic; after a socnet initiative go in and measure before and after referral traffic along with the long tail of referral sites… you may be very pleasantly surprised. I did that today for an SEO post mortem one of our sites – over a 200% increase in referral traffic over a specified period of time. (You can monitor Twitter backlinks currently with BackTweets – one of my faves).
• MOST importantly, if you have free VOC in the socnets, track it, harness it and use it as real time, real people studies of how your real customers feel about your offering (product/service/app etc) in real time. It’s the best kind of VOC out there from a purely qualitative point of view if you record and feed it back accurately and appropriately. It may not be quantitative, but you can assign values to comments (positive and negative) and thus determine a mean value as well as outliers and other statistically significant data to provide some form of non-qualitative data to your stakeholders. Make sure you explain your methodology, but don’t blind them with your process.

Conclusion

UGC and VOC are part of the same puzzle – they’re just on different sides of the board. Don’t lose one, or you may scupper the other.

Follow Laura on Twitter

Before I read the comments on Tom’s blog (which I have summarized and compiled below) I thought about it. These are my thoughts:  

User Generated Content

I am a huge proponent of user generated content (UGC), and its impact on search results, conversions, and online transparency which contributes to the accessibility and exposure of product or service related feedback and reviews. It has also resulted in a significant contribution to site usability, information accessibility and more where it has been effectively and applicable incorporated on official company sites and blogs.

While UGC is by no means a new concept (it entered mainstream use in 2005 according to Wikipedia), it might be considered to have gained enormous traction and exposure, and thus interest over the past 12-18 months due to new studies from big name research corporations including Rubicon, Forrester, Juniper, AdAge and others (see this great list of UGC stats and their compilers). The studies revealed, reiterated and supported each other entirely in their data to the (summary) effect that:

·         Users are actively seeking input from other ‘people’ online via reviews and feedback

·         Usability in the form of ‘satisfaction’ increased with the inclusion of reviews on a site

·         Sites with reviews had higher conversion rates

·         Sites with reviews had higher ‘recall’ rates

·         More than 60% of potential purchasers research online regardless of whether they purchase on or offline and look for both positive and negative reviews

·         Negative reviews are unlikely to detract from positive reviews as long as there are positive reviews, and the negative review is deemed ‘constructive’.

·         Brands appreciate the ability to include reviews as it enhances transparency, and enables the publication of information on the site that they would normally, due to brand legal or marketing constraints, be unable to publish.

The 1to1 Media Survey of the 1to1 Xchange panel in April of this year summarized overall trend based predications on the findings of the studies very concisely in my opinion:

·         By 2020, 84% of marketers agree that building customer trust will become marketing’s primary objective, and 82% agree that collaboration with customers will prevail over marketing.

Reputation Management

The same type of scenario (not new, but ‘newly realized’) is true for the discipline of monitoring one’s, or one’s competitors, reputation online. Despite the fact that Google Alerts has been around for quite some time (2006 I think) reputation management really got a kick in the rear this year with the publication of Andy Beal’s book Radically Transparent, and the advent of TrackUR and numerous other reputation management tools.

I think the boost of interest in UGC and the need to implement it while watching for on-site spam intersected very nicely with the desire to monitor both positive and negative commentary around the web. Finding out what brand evangelists are saying can be a great way to build out a social media campaign, or any other form of online marketing initiative. Knowing who the brand evangelists are enables a company to ‘recruit’ them via empowering them with early news tid-bits, free stuff (like screen savers… no, I don’t mean a new Lamborghini – though that would be nice…), special offers for their readers and other similar free tools or offerings of gratuity and incentive. There is a fine line between empowering brand evangelists and bribing them. My heart-felt advice is;  ‘don’t cross the invisible line’.

Monitoring what is being said about you on the net and in the blogosphere also enables a business to find out what people don’t like about their company, a brand, a product line, a specific product, customer service, an affiliate, a brick and mortar store, and so on. It is a great way to be knowledgeable while at the same time proactive, assuming you develop a strategy to deal quickly, diplomatically, carefully, and positively with brand detractors. Answer them on their own site/blog or wherever they have posted the review or comment, and copy the issue raised along with your responding solution or answer onto your official site.

Not only can you answer your detractors quickly and effectively, you are also likely to gather some great insights for R&D (research and development) and I&P (insight and planning). 

In closing – my thoughts are that…

…the potential impact of effective integration and management of UGC via effective use of a well-thought strategy and a great reputation management tool  is what I think we have really come to see as a ‘significant advance’ in SMM this year.

Other comments from Tom’s readers:

Please do read his post and comment there first as I have unashamedly lifted this whole blog-post-idea-thingey from him via LinkedIn.

Tom’s readers feel that the following are the ‘significant advances in SMM during 2008’ – in no particular order:

·         Microblogging

·         Reconsidering the social dynamic

·         Adoption and consolidation

·         Mobile and iPhone use and effect

·         Leveraging online and offline more holistically

·         Personalized platforms (like Ning)

·         Mobile microblogging facilitation

·         Aggregation of multiple profiles and streamlining enabled

·         Simply the enormous boost in interest as the idea of social networking has grown, matured and solidified as ‘something to stay’ as opposed to a ‘fad’.

Have a wonderful festive season and a blessed New year if I don’t get around to stealing blogging again in the next 2 weeks J !!!

What is Consumer Generated Content?

It is content that users (or consumers) write and submit online and can be:

·         Product reviews (e.g. Amazon.com)

·         Service reviews (e.g. Google Local)

·         Seller reviews (e.g. ebay)

·         Blog comments

·         News comments

·         Forum posts or comments

·         Video/Audio and Photo sharing sites (e.g. YouTube and Flickr)

·         Social networking sites comments or posts (e.g. Twitter, SecondLife, Facebook, MySpace)

·         Wikis

·         Composite review sites (e.g. ConsumerReport.org)

Is Consumer Generated Content (CGC) Really Such A Big Deal?

The data is two-sided; and both sides of the coin – Consumers and Marketers – answer with a resounding ‘Yes!’:

1. Consumers are relying more and more on UGC:

·         According to Rubicon, ‘online comments and reviews posted by the enthusiasts are second only to word of mouth as a purchase driver for all web users. Those personal reviews are far more influential than official reviews posted by a website or magazine, or information posted online by a manufacturer.’

·         The Rubicon data also indicates that around 80% of all UGC is contributed by around 9% of the US online population. This 9% is in the majority impartial, honest and equally likely to post both negative and positive comments or opinions. In some cases, such as on Amazon, the reviews themselves are open to voting:

·         As of October 2008, almost half of US online adults read ratings and reviews at least once a month, and 19% post them. Nearly twice as many read reviews compared with 2007. (The Growth Of Social Technology Adoption, Forrester, 2008)*

·         Satisfaction for those who recalled customer reviews on the retailers’ site is 10% higher than those who said there were no reviews offered. (30 UK Online Retail Satisfaction Index, January 2008, ForeSee Results)*

·         83% of shoppers said online product evaluations and reviews had at least some level of influence on their purchasing decisions. (Opinion Research Corporation, an infoGROUP company, July 2008)*

·         74% agree—including 14% who strongly agree—that they choose companies and brands based on what others say online about their customer service experiences, the survey shows. (Society for New Communications Research, May 2008)*

·         70% of online consumers said they use the Internet to research everyday grocery products. (Prospectiv, 2008)*

·         91% of millionaires say they always or often look at reviews before buying luxury goods; 68% of ultra-affluent shoppers use consumer reviews. (Unity Marketing/Google study, reported in AdAge October 2008)*

2. Marketers are relying more and more on UGC:

·         The Shop.org State of Retailing Online study, conducted by Forrester Research, found only 26% of the 137 top retailers surveyed offered customer ratings and reviews, but 96% of them ranked customer ratings and reviews as an effective or very effective tactic at driving conversion. (Forrester)*

·         68% of online marketers believe “media is in big trouble and will lose dollars to user-generated content.” (iMedia Connection, February 2008)*

·         By 2020, 84% of marketers agree that building customer trust will become marketing’s primary objective, and 82% agree that collaboration with customers will prevail over marketing. (1to1 Media survey of the 1to1 Xchange panel, April, 2008)*

·         11% of retailers reported a 20% or more overall increase in conversions as a result of adding reviews to their sites, 21% reported an 11% to 20% increase and 5% reported a 1% to 10% increase. (eTailing Group, 2008)*

·         Consumers were willing to pay between 20 to 99% more for a 5-star rated product than for a 4-star rated product, depending on the product category. (comScore/Kelsey, October 2007)*

·         Reviews usage drives higher spending: 27% of users report an increase of 5-10%; almost 7% report an increase of 20%+. (Avenue A/Razorfish “Digital Consumer Behavior Study,” October 2007) *

·         In a study of a major electronics retailer site of 30,000 search visitors landing on user review  pages converted 60% more often, spent 50% more, and viewed 82% more pages than search visitors to other pages. (Bazaarvoice case study with major electronics retailer)*

Case Study: PETCO (2007)*:

• Shoppers who browsed the site’s “Top Rated Products” page, which features products rated most highly by customers, had a 49% higher conversion rate than the site average.
• Giving shoppers the ability to sort products within a category by customer rating led to a sales increase of 41% per unique visitor.
• After their order, PETCO asked customers, “What online tool most influenced your purchase decision?“ The Number 1 answer was product ratings and reviews, with site search coming in a distant second.
• PETCO realized a 5X increase in email click-through rates by including relevant ratings and reviews content in the campaign promotion.
• Products with reviews have a 17% lower return rate than those without reviews.

…But, the impact of UGC doesn’t stop there…

UGC Influences Offline Commerce

·         For every $1 in online sales, the Internet influenced $3.45 of store sales. (eMarketer, 2007)

·         24% of internet users reported using online reviews prior to paying for a service delivered offline. (comScore/The Kelsey Group, October 2007)

·         More than 75% of review users in nearly every category reported that the review had a significant influence on their purchase, with hotels ranking the highest (87%). (comScore/The Kelsey Group, October 2007)

·         97% of those surveyed who said they made a purchase based on an online review said they found the review to have been accurate. (comScore/The Kelsey Group, October 2007)

·         Consumers who shop online for digital cameras and TVs spend 10% more on in-store purchases than consumers who do not search online. (ChannelForce for Yahoo Search Marketing)

·         90% of those surveyed say they have a better overall shopping experience when they research products online before shopping in-store. (Harris Interactive, October 2007)

“But What About Negative UGC?”

If people are researching a product online, they are looking for what might be wrong with it. If you can be transparent on your own site about your product or service by offering reviews, then you can be sure that both positive and negative feedback (if warranted) will be included.**

1. Negative Reviews are actually of interest:

Based on the fact that folks are likely to continue searching if there is nothing negative about a product, just to make sure, especially with electronics or high-end purchases, if you don’t offer a transparent insight into your offering on your own site, by people who have actually bought from you, these researchers are very likely to go elsewhere to keep researching.**

·         “As for the product(s) with negative reviews … my experience is that negative reviews do not hurt a product as long as there are also positive reviews associated with it.”  - Don Zeidler, Director, Burpee.com**

2. Negative reviews provide helpful feedback to consumers and R&D:

·         “For example, what’s one of the best selling products so far this decade? The Apple iPod. It gets a ton of positive reviews, but one negative comment you’ll see over and over again is that the surface of the iPod scratches easily. Customers say things that the retailer and Apple can’t say: “When you buy this, get a case”. Obviously this is not stopping customers from buying the iPod, but this constructive advice is getting them to buy a case.” – Sam Decker, VP Marketing, BazaarVoice

3. Negative Reviews provide authenticity:

Why would a well known, enormously powerful and successful online retailer continue selling a product that had far more negative reviews than positive? Should they? Yes!

·         Case Study**:

·         Product: Hot Wheels Slimecano

·         Reseller: Amazon.com

·         Some Review Titles:

o        “Junk, not worth any price”         

o        “I wish I could give it zero stars”

o        “If you want your son to cry, buy this toy!”

o        “If you want your husband to cry, buy this toy!”

·         Reseller Objective:

If the retailer’s mission is to be a trusted editor of its assortment, then products with overwhelmingly negative reviews will prune the assortment quickly for the best products. But the reseller needs to continue selling the product as an ‘objective provider’ and let the market forces, or in this case, parental voices, have their impact. After a year and half, Amazon stopped selling the toy, but kept the reviews, the image and the page… Good Job!

4. Positive Reviews Outweigh Negatives:

·         62 percent of brand-related talk features products in a positive light, while less than 10% of conversations feature products negatively. (KellerFay Group)

·         60 percent of online shoppers provide feedback about shopping experiences, and they are more likely to give feedback about a positive experience than a negative one.  (Jupiter)

Conclusion

If you sell products and services, and if you have a web site, make sure you allow for reviews. If your products are great to mediocre, you should get far more positive than negative feedback, and a resultant positive impact on sales and revenue.

If you sell a crappy product – in the words of Sam Decker:

1.  Without reviews, you keep selling the product and risk costly returns and low customer satisfaction

2.  With reviews, you can use the leading indicator of negative reviews and quickly remove this product from inventory to reduce returns and improve satisfaction

3.  Or, just allow the negative reviews to steer customers to a more satisfying purchase within the category. Let the best products win, and you will win.

Therefore, make sure you enable and allow feedback, optimize your review pages, and get traction for them in the search results by supporting brand evangelists, and answering detractor issues promptly and diplomatically.

Happy UGC integration!!!

* BazaarVoice

** iMediaConnection

Please take our 4 quick surveys for SEM Pros everywhere!