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Social Megaphone / Reviews go Viral?

Nice post from Olivia Hayes over at Ignite Social Media, musing on the potential for PowerReview‘s soon-to-be-launched social commerce tool called BrandConnect- a white label customer reviews tool that allows merchants and brands to

  • a) collect structured customer reviews and selectively publish those it wishes to (datasheet here) and
  • b) enable their customers to syndicate their reviews to their Twitter, Facebook and blog pages (WordPress, Blogger, Live Journal & Windows Live Spaces supported) (datasheet here)…

As Olivia notes Brand Connect is surfing a big wave here built on two digital swells – social media with customer reviews:

In future tense, any business selling products that doesn’t utilize some customer review functionality is absolutely going to see it hurt their bottom line.

I haven’t had the chance to check out the functionality of Brand Connect, but to maximise utility for clients, PowerReviews will no doubt be adding strategic value to the reviews. For example, it would be nice if the reviews get aggregated together to provide the Net Promoter Score (would/would not recommend – predictor of future sales) for store items. Add in customer spend, and you have a strategic tool for driving online sales (sell more stuff that profitable promoters like).

In terms of the integration with social media, PowerReviews are sensitive to client worries about negative reviews – providing a statge-gate process where clients can review reviews and decide which get published. But with one of the advantages of the social web being “realtime”, realtime publication and syndication of at least positive reviews is important. (a simple “if you like it, tell others – if you don’t tell us” mechanism would work here.)

Here are some screenshots of the tool (click thumbnails to enlarge).

megaphone1megaphone2megaphone3listen

Integrating customer reviews with social media (dubbed “Social Megaphone”) as PowerReviews is doing is smart – it will turbo-charge the effectiveness of customer reviews in driving sales (link courtesy of Olivia’s post) – and make the inclusion of customer reviews even more compelling for brands and merchants. With the recent launch of Squidoo’s Brands in Public customer reviews service that aggregates free flow (non-structured) social media commentary on brands, this swell is growing…

Written by
Dr Paul Marsden
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2 comments
  • Yeah indeed social media act like a word of mouth which is the best form of marketing or advertising. For cars, for example when people encountered problem with their cars and wants someone to ask for a solution or where to find auto parts for replacement they usually go online to forums and communities. It’s a good avenue also for sellers to promote their products.

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Digital wellbeing covers the latest scientific research on the impact of digital technology on human wellbeing. Curated by psychologist Dr. Paul Marsden (@marsattacks). Sponsored by WPP agency SYZYGY.