Baazaarvoice Debuts Suite to Break Down Walls Between Brand Sites, Social Networks
SocialConnect lets marketers share customer reviews from their brand site on Facebook fan pages, and to move reviews from Facebook back the other way.
Bazaarvoice is unveiling a new suite of social media tools to help marketers more easily move product reviews from Facebook and Twitter to their own sites and back again.
The tool, called SocialConnect, allows marketers to automatically share reviews that customers leave on their brand site on their Facebook fan pages, and to move reviews from Facebook to their brand sites.
From the consumer’s point of view, it allows them to log into a marketer’s brand site with their Facebook or Twitter ID to immediately call up the reviews of people they are connected to on those sites. SocialConnect also gives consumers the option of sharing reviews they leave on a marketer’s Web Site on Facebook or Twitter.
“There’s really not a cohesive way, certainly if you’re an online marketer or merchandiser, to be able to bring these environments together in a way that’s consistent and real-time,” said Mike Svatek, chief product officer for Bazaarvoice, which is based in Austin, TX. “And as a user there’s not really a seamless way to interact with all these environments.”
“What SocialConnect does is offer a suite of capabilities to really connect all these environments together in a way that’s very fluid, very transparent and real-time,” he said.
Among the clients already using SocialConnect are Best Buy, The Container Store and Petco.
Valerie Hoecke VP of digital experience and commerce with Bazaarvoice client Benefit Cosmetics, said her company had been using SocialConnect for a month to bring some of their brand’s positive Facebook chatter to their own Web site, where customers could actually make a purchase.
“Where we have a little bit of a challenge with Facebook is customers aren’t transacting, there’s no cash register,” said Hoecke.
SocialConnect is making it easier for Benefit to “capture and save some of that word of mouth that is already happening in a more organized and less temporal fashion,” she said.
Svatek said that SocialConnect allowed marketers to choose for themselves whether to give consumers the option to opt out of having their comments shared on other sites, but that the software was not set up to automatically give consumers that opportunity.
