The recent launch of Samsung’s new generation of tablet computer has been overshadowed by accusations of astroturfing.
The controversy centres around video testimonials of the "true-life stories" of average people who test drove the Galaxy Tab tablet PC. The video reviews struck a lot of watchers as wooden and, with very little digging, it was soon discovered that the people in the video are actors, not the journalists or CEOs they’re claimed to be.
The most talked about social media trend of 2011 is Question and Answer websites, with big names like Quora and TED Conversations getting huge amounts of attention. Google recently acquired Aadvark, a service which finds the perfect person from your social network to answer any question you could ask. The big question for marketers is how brands can make this newest aspect of the social web work for them.
You don’t have to look far to find consistent evidence that good quality images can improve the appearance, and ultimately the success, of your email campaigns. Many would say it’s just common sense. But here at Reevoo, we wanted to find out if including review scores in product images would boost consumer engagement with our email newsletters.
Shopping has become social and multi-channel. Consumers are more likely to be influenced by customer reviews or opinions on social networks than offline conversations with their friends and family. And they aren’t just looking on retailer or brand websites: a recent IBM study shows that nearly 50% of consumers now use multiple channels during the shopping process, up from 14% last year.
Marketing lore used to say that a happy customer would tell one friend, but an unhappy customer would tell ten. In the era of social media, that unhappy customer is more likely to tell everyone they know.
Agile commerce is the new ecommerce strategy being hailed as the successor to multi-channel. The term, agile commerce, was coined by Brian Walker, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, who defines it as
An approach to commerce that enables businesses to optimize their people, processes, and technology to serve customers across all touchpoints.
In all the discussion around the newest ASA code regulating the promotional use of social media and user generated content, we’ve been surprised that so few people have brought up the existing regulations in this area.
This chart should be familiar to anyone in retail. It’s well known that the most profitable time for a product is the first few weeks after it hits your shelves or your site. You want to be able to use every tool available to make the most of this golden window but, traditionally, one of the most powerful conversion drivers has been unavailable in this period.
We’ve seen brands getting their staff to write fake positive reviews of their products. We’ve seen people slating their competitors in reviews. We’ve seen people outsourcing their review faking via Mechanical Turk or similar sites.
But David Friedman of Ironic Sans seems to have discovered an entirely new kind of astroturfing.
Once you understand the social commerce benefits that reviews offer, the importance of having reviews across your entire product range is obvious. Why keep the conversion uplift, traffic boost, SEO benefits and other advantages restricted to just your top products?
So review breadth is a no-brainer. But what about review depth? Is there a ‘magic number’ of reviews that give the maximum benefit, after which extra reviews don’t make a significant difference?