How to build a business in the rise of social media

The subject of this post is the same as a presentation Sam Decker, CMO of Bazaarvoice, finished up at 1:00 today. The presentation was hosted by the Austin chapter of the American Marketing Association.

I was furisously typing on my iphone taking notes, I’m sure people thought I’m checking e-mail or text messaging so I thought I’d share some information. Sam focused primarily on B2C examples, I’ll highlight two topics:

1. How companies are taking advantage of their online efforts in their offline/physical efforts.
2. Negative comments, are they really an issue and how do you address them.

Bridging the Online and Offline Worlds

A number of compaines including Walmart and Bestbuy are now using the information collected on their web-sites in reviews as part of their physical marketing efforts. One way this has happend is with the flyers we all get every week in our mailbox (yes I wish I didn’t get them and wasn’t contributing to killing more trees but this is an interesting example). These companies include the ratings and comments of products to do things like highlighting the three most popular TV models. He also cited an examples where retailers are using what their customers are saying about a product to literarly define the message and positioning of that product.

Negative Comments

We might tend to think that most people want to share negatives, not positivies. Sam shared a slide with showing a distribution of ratings that showed that ratings average at 4.3 This makes sense for the most part, if you try and buy someting on Amazon the ratings do tend to cross the spectrum and we all tend to be able to pick out a post that is “fake” in either being too negative or positive; this seems to serve as a good self policing mechanism. This fear of negative feedback tends to be a point of resistance for some people to becoming more open, weather it’s about the webinar they’re hosting or about product features. This data could help you in some of your discussions (I’m not sure what the source of the data was but you can always visit Sam’s blog and ask him yourself).

The other thing he did highlight which is key is to take action on negative feedback. For some of their clients bazaarvoice forwards all negative comments to the support organization for follow-up. My thought is it’s always better to know what your customers are saying and address those concerns where you can rather than be the ostrich with it’s head stuck in the sand.

There were a number of other interesting things Sam shared and he was an engaging presenter in general. If you’re ever in a conference and he’s in a session I’d recommend attending. Also, if you want my raw notes from his presentation today just post a comment and I’ll e-mail them to you.