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Social Commerce Trends 2011
Social Commerce Trends 2011
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Embracing Customer Centricity through Digital Democracy ................. 3 The immediacy of social gives brands consumer insights that drive business impact .................................................................... 4 Brands build trust, test markets with immediate social feedback .......... 5 Social initiatives based on core business goals help convince wary executives ............................................................ 5 Its a conversation, not a campaign ...................................................... 8 Successful Facebook results combine social networks with consumer/brand interactions ........................................................ 9 Its key to be relevant, be everywhere consumers are, and be brand-consistent ................................................................... 10 Social media must scale across the organization ............................... 11 Social media starts with people and grows with collaboration ............ 12 The authentic consumer voice can have a huge impact on brands ..... 15 Social gives consumers direct input to brands, creating wins for brands and consumers .......................................................... 15 Social and its impact continues to evolve...................................... 17 Your next steps ................................................................................... 17 About the experts ............................................................................... 18 About Bazaarvoice .............................................................................. 19
Speakers at the Social Commerce Summit shared their views of the future of social.
Each year, thought leaders from major brands with expertise in social gather at the Social Commerce Summit, hosted by Bazaarvoice, to present the trends that shape best practices in social media. These four guiding principles represent the key drivers of successful social strategies: The immediacy of social gives brands consumer insights that drive business impact. With 24/7 feedback that social media provides, brands know how to improve products faster than ever before. These consumer insights, when acted upon, lead to bottom-line results across the organization. Its a conversation, not a campaign. Messages no longer happen simply between the brand and the consumer;
Social Commerce Trends Report 2011: Embracing Customer Centricity through Digital Democracy
The immediacy of social gives brands consumer insights that drive business impact.
When the needs of the brand and the consumer converge at the same time, perfect markets can emerge. Until now, brands developed products based on focus groups or a perceived need in the marketplace; however, with real-time feedback available via social media, brands can now understand exactly what consumers want, even before they create new products, rather than waiting for products to be returned or focus groups to give opinions. This eliminates much of the risk for brands that take advantage of this immediate feedback. With social, a brand can launch a product one day and, within hours, gather direct customer feedback that can reduce the product improvement cycle to weeks instead of months. Then brands can take that information and immediately make marketing and product adjustments to improve sales and bottom line results. Bazaarvoice research into millions of customer reviews shows that more than half of four-star product reviews tell brands how to make it a five-star product, and more than half of all one-star reviews suggest an alternative product. This proves the power of social conversations that brands can now access. For brands that listen and act on what they learn, real business impact follows. Keys to uncovering results
Bazaarvoice Social Analytics Director Chris Kerns gives three key recommendations for achieving measurable results.
1. Align social goals with business goals. Digital initiatives exist for a handful of reasons, which have already been determined for your business. Social initiatives should support these same goals. 2. Brands should create a technical infrastructure to measure these goals, building mechanisms such as A/B testing, Google analytics, or putting other tools in place to quantify results. 3. Consider and define measurement goals well before the launch, not at the last minute. When brands begin with the goal and metrics in mind, better programs generally result.
Social Commerce Trends Report 2011: Embracing Customer Centricity through Digital Democracy
Social initiatives based on core business goals help convince wary executives.
Many brands see major hesitation from executives when the marketing department initially proposes adding customer reviews to a public website. This was the case at Argos, one of the UKs largest multichannel retailers. David Tarbuck, Multi-Channel Program and Operations Manager for Argos Ltd., confirms, We thought about launching reviews for 18 months before we did it. The major points we had to overcome included, What will customers say?, Will we be in control?, What will we do with the information?, and How will we manage the content? Tarbuck and his team convinced management that adding reviews would provide additional information for customers, increase conversion, and allow customers to tell Argos what they think; it was time to start the conversation.
We now have 900,00 reviews, and each week over a million customers read reviews, says Argos David Tarbuck.
Social Commerce Trends Report 2011: Embracing Customer Centricity through Digital Democracy
The ability for Argos to know about product issues quickly has changed several areas of their business. For example, when the Argos team receives negative feedback, they amend product text and images, or give feedback directly to manufacturers to improve products. Today more than 70 people in the organization regularly read and act on reviews. We aim to remove lower-rated items, Tarbuck says. For example, the very first review of a three-piece furniture set was negative, so they immediately took action to improve the product, and now consumers rate it highly. Now we have 900,000 reviews, our average rating is 4.3, and each week over a million customers read reviews, Tarbuck says. We use reviews across channels to communicate, including print, emails, an iPhone application, and through social sharing. Shawn Morton, Director of Mobile, Social Media and Emerging Media for Nationwide Insurance, aligns Nationwides social media initiatives with the business core goal: sell more auto insurance. After launching reviews in 2009, they saw an average rating of 4.7 stars out of five, with 96% of customers recommending them. By focusing on the core goal, they have seen a 40% increase in quote starts and a 19% increase in quote completes, showing that customer reviews drive policy growth.
Theyve also seen a 103% increase in site visitors looking for an agent, indicating that reviews drive sales through Nationwides agent channel. For Morton, gaining executive buy-in began with finding one person on the executive team to act as a champion. He explained how customer input helped other industries improve online sales, and how he believed it could work to sell more auto insurance. Once he got the executive teams attention, he and his team focused on issues he knew were critical to the success of the program. Our plan focused on five core areas that were most important to our executives, Morton says, which include the following: 1. Governance. They worked out details around regulations in social media for their highly-regulated industry. 2. Monitoring. They explained how they would discover all social conversations about Nationwide. 3. Engagement. Mortons team set clear parameters for how they planned to respond, who they respond to, and who responds. 4. Commerce. It was important to see exactly how customer reviews on product pages would drive sales. 5. Measurement. No executive would buy in without understanding the results expected and how they would be measured.
Social Commerce Trends Report 2011: Embracing Customer Centricity through Digital Democracy
In short, Morton and his team aligned their social initiatives with a core business objective: sell more car insurance. This plan made executives comfortable by addressing their core needs and tying the program back to the main business goal.
Core metrics vary from company to company. For Adobe, conversion matters, but sentiment and the quality of participants are also important. Marketers are always worried about how to prove out the ROI of marketing campaigns and the predictability of these campaigns, says John Travis, Vice President Brand Marketing for Adobe. If I invest X, how much can I expect to get back? From a social perspective, we are putting a lot of effort into how to measure things like volume of conversations, sentiments, quality of followers and how they participate, reviews, and testing customer comments in a headline versus an agency-created headline.
Alex Tosolini, Vice President, Global e-Business for P&G, refers to business life as a Volatile Uncertain Complex Ambiguous (VUCA) World. He focuses on putting business ownership first to deal with these inherent issues. Before taking on the latest social endeavor, he recommends companies think about the business objectives and strategies first, and then how social can support them. He recommends asking, How well do I know the broad business challenges for this Brand? Tosolini works to keep common sense at the forefront of all activities. Everybodys speed of choice is one click away, Tosolini says. Consumers can make product decisions in a click. Retailers can change their product offerings online in an instant, manufacturers can provide new content in a click all this takes weeks or months in a store environment.
P&Gs Alex Tosolini focuses on putting business ownership first when dealing with ambiguity.
Social Commerce Trends Report 2011: Embracing Customer Centricity through Digital Democracy
Social Commerce Trends Report 2011: Embracing Customer Centricity through Digital Democracy
For every share that happens on Facebook via Ticketmaster, Ticketmaster generates more than five dollars in ticket revenue. Dan Rose, Vice President of
Partnerships and Platform Marketing for Facebook
Restaurant reservations site OpenTable added the like button for its restaurants and sees a 25% increase in reservations and a 200% increase in member registrations at OpenTable.com, once the Facebook user sees the restaurants on Facebook. To gather more product reviews, Benefit Cosmetics allows customers to add reviews on the Benefits Facebook page, then those reviews flow automatically into Benefits product pages. Within two weeks, through Facebook, they got fans to review 80% of their products.
Dan Rose, Vice President of Partnerships and Platform Marketing for Facebook, encourages brands to take the marketing funnel with awareness at top and action at bottom, and turn it into a circle where you have you and your friends at the middle. Make it faster and easier to find and share with friends. For example, Ticketmaster benefits from the friend-focus of Facebook because people tend to go to concerts with someone else. They added the capability for Ticketmaster customers to share the news about their recent ticket purchase with friends. For every share that happens on Facebook via Ticketmaster, Ticketmaster generates more than five dollars in ticket revenue, and they track these results daily.
Facebooks Dan Rose recommends turning marketing funnel into a circle, with the user and his friends at the center.
Social Commerce Trends Report 2011: Embracing Customer Centricity through Digital Democracy
You want to be able to recognize the brands voice its the hardest thing to get right, in my opinion. Marisa Thalberg, Vice President of
Global Digital Marketing for The Este Lauder Companies
You want to be able to recognize the brands voice its the hardest thing to get right, in my opinion, to make the voice consistent but make it relevant to social, Thalberg says. Social also enables an unprecedented intimate brand relationship, Thalberg says. Ultimately, communications are merging and uniting around our consumer. She expects us to come to her, so we need to foster a continuous, intimate, varied experience for her, depending on where she is and what she wants, when she wants it. Brands can validate the consumer, but now she also validates our brands, Thalberg says. Social media enables association with brands to literally act as badges. [Social users share] the brands they associate themselves with, such as the bag you carry. This is where brand equity is so powerful. Social is fundamental to Adobe, Travis says. We have always engaged with our customers Adobe labs and forums are part of our DNA. Digital for us is the backbone of our marketing; we spend greater than 70% of our total marketing spend on digital. Were trying not to think of social as a media type its a fundamental shift in our culture, customers want to engage with us. We continue to see how we can integrate it across everything we do.
At The Este Lauder Companies, many consider founder Este Lauder the original social networker; her motto was, Telephone, telegraph, tell a woman. This core company belief made the transition into social media a brand-building proposition, rather than just a sales campaign. The firm focuses on keeping communications consistent within each brand and personalized by the type of woman each brand attracts. To Marisa Thalberg, Vice President of Global Digital Marketing for The Este Lauder Companies, social media is the ultimate conduit to high-touch relationships, building on Lauders one-to-one selling in stores. Social media lets consumers feel a sense of connection with the brand and with each other. On Facebook, Este Lauder tries not to push a marketing message; rather, they want to be authentic in the brand voice and make it appropriate for social media.
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Social Commerce Trends Report 2011: Embracing Customer Centricity through Digital Democracy
Jeremiah Owyang has worked with top brands to develop the shares best ways to scale social organizations.
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Social Commerce Trends Report 2011: Embracing Customer Centricity through Digital Democracy
He also recommends: 1. Get ready internally. Focus first on governance and process, then on education to emerge as a center of excellence. 2. 1:1 will never scale. Leverage the crowd for the first response, then interact in escalation. 3. Integrate social to increase relevancy and reduce costs on creating content. Use other peoples content, such as customer reviews, to build credibility. 4. Standardize with social media management systems, which help you manage potentially thousands of accounts you have for all your brands. Invest in this now before your individual business units roll out their own sites. 5. Remember the future is more than social marketing; it cascades to support, product innovation, and then to the supply chain (with your partners).
consistency across these media. Im helping to drive that. What Ive learned is that you have to start with your people first and a commitment to the integrity of the brand, then give them some kind of guidelines so they can get started. Ive been fascinated looking at how the community evolved. When you let people go [ahead with social media], theyre excited, theyre smart have high aspirations where you can take social its really exciting to see this creative energy. Its unsettling for some people in our organization to feel empowered, she continues, because in the past weve said No, you only speak to the media if youre in PR, for example. Now were saying, Anyone can speak. We have our guidelines for developing Facebook pages, Twitter handles, and lines are blurring between personal and business online personas. We hope to empower our sales force more to use social. With Best Buys Twelpforce where more than 3,000 Best Buy in-store employees answer consumer questions via Twitter and other digital and social initiatives, Best Buy has made the most of its early-adopter clients to build multi-way conversations that support their core business goals.
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Social Commerce Trends Report 2011: Embracing Customer Centricity through Digital Democracy
[The evolution of our social strategies] is happening fast, from an organizational perspective, Adobes Travis says. Part of being a leader in social is being genuine. Weve reorganized our organization to be a hub and spoke, not to regulate but to provide shared learning, a lot of dialog between the hub and spokes. We have corporate communications, but we also have call centers and so many other touch points, Kimberly Kadlec, Worldwide Vice President, Global Marketing Group for Johnson & Johnson. We need to start to empower some of the areas beyond marketing
and advertising. Whatever touches your consumer needs to have a consistent tone and with a human voice; were focused on that. We try to get our marketing people into the call centers at least once a year so we stay connected, Steve Fuller, Senior Vice President and CMO for L.L.Bean, says. It humanizes our customers; when customers become numbers, bad things happen. It also simplifies marketing and promotion messages. Talking to your customers will often give you a very different perspective around a marketing efforts effectiveness.
Johnson & Johnsons Kimberly Kadlec, Xeroxs Christa Carone, and Adobes John Travis discuss how they put customers at the center of their brands.
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Social Commerce Trends Report 2011: Embracing Customer Centricity through Digital Democracy
to their concerns, he says. This will help both parties be ready. The earlier you bring in IT as a partner, the better. 4. Never stop innovating ever. When you think youre done, get paranoid, he says. Listening is fundamental to Dell and were building a system that lets every employee listen, for example. 5. There is business value in social. Its measurable in many forms; there is not just one number. You should instrument your involvement and engagement with external communities for business value, he says. The faster you start to measure, the better. 6. Campaigns are capital intensive. You cannot buy fans and followers for life. Mehta believes campaigns must align with the bigger relationship a brand wants to build with a customer. 7. Look across the entire customer lifecycle. Social can be used everywhere really. Human Resources was only using LinkedIn before now they are seeing how other parts of the social web can also benefit their part of the business, he says. We havent perfected social in all groups, but we have proven that it can drive value and be measured.
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Social Commerce Trends Report 2011: Embracing Customer Centricity through Digital Democracy
Social gives consumers direct input to brands, creating wins for brands and consumers.
Customer conversations are only a means to an end, L.L.Beans Fuller says. Theres value in these conversations, but if youre not acting upon them, youre missing it. The real power is in the action that you take and the change that they can facilitate. People have always had a lot of time, Shirky says. They now prefer to use their time creating and sharing not just consuming media, like television. As consumers, we are moving from the informational web to the social web, Facebooks Rose says. Your life online is starting to mirror your life offline. Today what we do online feels a lot like how we live. Over the last five years, the internet has started to be rebuilt around people, he says We are moving from the what to the who, moving from wisdom of crowds to wisdom of friends becoming more social. We get our news from friends and family. We find jobs from people around us. We trust our friends more than we trust the critics. When I go to my Facebook newsfeed, I see what my friends are doing and buying exactly what I see in my real life.
Our response changed the way customers interacted with us they saw we were listening and we cared. Bert DuMars, Vice President E-Business and
Interactive Marketing for Newell Rubbermaid
When brands join the conversations, major transformation occurs. Bert DuMars, Vice President E-Business and Interactive Marketing for Newell Rubbermaid, worked with the Rubbermaid E-Marketing team to create a cultural shift in this 100-yearold brand by adding customer reviews to its product pages. While brand team members initially balked, getting this customer input turned out to be the most important thing that has happened to the brand, because now Rubbermaid knows the why behind product returns and dissatisfaction, and can make changes immediately. Also, when reviewing positive reviews, brands can see how consumers
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Social Commerce Trends Report 2011: Embracing Customer Centricity through Digital Democracy
their sinks look better. We were able to fix the problem before thousands of them were returned to stores. These arent high-priced items, but our response changed the way customers interacted with us they saw we were listening and we cared he says. Once we reached out to them, we got amazing responses, such as, I am so happy to hear that my single voice may have made a difference. It was a big emotional hit and a big win to create brand advocates from this initially negative experience. At L.L.Bean, the customer has always been at the heart of the brand. Since 1912, the company has had a 100% satisfaction guarantee; they have always welcomed criticism of their merchandise or services. Online customer reviews were a natural progression when they were added in 2008. In 2010, we sent out over eight million outbound requests for feedback, says L.L.Beans Fuller. Its important to know what our customers are thinking. With more than 300,000 reviews in place on their site, the company fuels its marketing programs with customergenerated content. Our number one non-sale email had a customer-written headline: I am in love with this doormat, Fuller says.
Newell-Rubbermaids Bert DuMars proves that even low-priced products benefit from customer input.
articulate their product features and benefits, and reuse that insight in marketing campaigns. Rubbermaid looks for and reacts to one- and two-star product reviews, including a recent example involving a sink mat. Our Consumer Insights team determined, based on customer feedback and two flu outbreaks, that antibacterial products could be popular in the market. The team then created an antibacterial sink mat, DuMars says. However, they were less stain resistant, and consumers gave us negative feedback. We reached out to these consumers who told us that they did not want antibacterial sink mats they wanted the sink mats to make
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Social Commerce Trends Report 2011: Embracing Customer Centricity through Digital Democracy
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Social Commerce Trends Report 2011: Embracing Customer Centricity through Digital Democracy
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About Bazaarvoice
Bazaarvoices Software as a Service (SaaS) social commerce solutions have powered more than 200 billion customer conversations on more than 1200 brand web sites like Best Buy, Blue Shield of California, Costco, Dell, Macys, P&G, Panasonic, QVC, and USAA in 68 countries. The company connects organizations to their influencers through a unique network that reaches hundreds of millions of consumers around the globe, enabling authentic customer-powered marketing. Through syndication, analytics, partnerships, and consulting, Bazaarvoice brings the voice of the customer to the center of their clients business strategy, proving social can drive measured revenue growth and cost savings for manufacturing, retail, travel, and financial services companies. Headquartered in Austin, the company has offices in Amsterdam, Dusseldorf, London, Paris, and Sydney. For more information and access to client success stories, visit bazaarvoice.com, read the blog at bazaarvoice.com/blog, and follow on Twitter at twitter.com/bazaarvoice.