The Austin 2010 Social Commerce summit hosted by Bazaarvoice kicked off this week with an inspiring double act from Bazaarvoice CMO Sam Decker and Dennis Maloney, VP Multimedia Marketing at Domino’s Pizzas (after a little Bazaarvoice chest thumping from CEO Brett Hurt (five years old, 800 clients, 550 employees, 100,000,000,000 review-based impressions served…)).
Entitled From Participation to Transformation, here’s our speed summary of what they duo had to say:
The Big Idea: Social commerce can transform your business into a truly customer centric organization by hardwiring the Voice of the Customer (VOC) into everything you do.
– Social Commerce is most effective when it goes beyond simply encouraging shoppers to engage with you in social media (by posting reviews, posting to Q&A forums etc). Success in social commerce means using user content to transform what you do
Marketing – using UGC in marketing collateral, such as Office Depot, which saw online ad effectiveness jump 197% when online ads included content from customer reviews. Best Buy lifts sales by adding customer review content to in store POS.
Innovation – using UGC to inform product development and service improvement, such as Domino’s pizza that, on the back of negative feedback, transformed its pizza recipe (with much PR hype) (conference guest Dennis Maloney, VP Multimedia Marketing at Domino’s, pointed to positive effect of this VOC-driven initiative on sales that also contributed to a 75% increase in stock value).
In other words don’t just generate UGC, use it (to transform your business)
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- Portals: Syndicate UGC to external sites
- Media: Publish sponsored stories (testimonials) to media sites
- Social Networks; Syndicate content, share profiles
- Other Marketing: Integrate UGC copy in campaigns
- SEO/SEM: Brand or product ‘discovered’ through search
- Product Team: Reports, analytics and alerts from Voice of the Customer
When deploying social commerce, work create “participation chains” that generate usable user content and that stimulate further participation (and create more usable content); white paper.
When deploying social commerce, speak the language of commerce, not social media – especially when making the business case and choosing metrics. Forget number of fans or comments, it’s the effect you need to measure on hard metrics such as site visits, conversion and average order value – i.e. metrics with know commercial value.
Remember the social commerce mantra; ‘Be the Conversation“ – which means doing stuff worth talking about, not just talking the social media talk (e.g. creating a remarkable new Domino’s Pizza). If you do something worth talking about – you will get talked about (the new pizza resulted in coverage by 400+ local TV channels, 500 million digital media impressions, 25 million social media impressions, 100K new FB fans, and 3K new Twitter followers).
