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News Analysis: Reviews Roll In As Sites Add Video

Amazon, Orvis, PetCo jump on next wave of customer feedback.
January 14, 2008
By Kenneth Hein

The written word may be powerful, but video is mightier still, and there’s the rub for marketers.

As Amazon, Orvis and PetCo encourage consumers to upload video reviews, the marketers give the public a dynamic tool to tout or trash products.

Before a fan plunks down $69.95 for the Hasbro Star Wars Darth Vader Voice Changer, for example, they may want to watch the video review posted by Gregory J. Daniel on Amazon.com. “This is an example of what the Darth Vader helmet will sound like when you make the mistake of buying it. Don’t I sound just like Darth? Can you even hear his voice, or is it just like a droning in the background.”

Amazon has no issue with such reviews. “Written reviews have been tremendously successful, but when you can actually see the item in action all the writing in the world [can’t compare],” said Colin Bodell, vp, Amazon.com, Seattle, which added video in November. “We want to deliver a richer shopping experience and give them as much information as possible so it will lead to a more satisfying shopping experience.”

While a video review for a book may not be necessary, Bodell said they were particularly helpful for new toys like the latest Tickle Me Elmo or complicated consumer electronics devices.

For Orvis, a video of a customer catching a trophy fish using its Zero G Saltwater 909-4 fly rod speaks volumes. “It’s another reason for people to come to our site,” says Brad Wolansky, vp-eCommerce for the Sunderland, Vt., firm. “They want to engage with us and brag about their fish. Of course, we like to see them stay on our site longer—we like video for all those reasons. We also like the fact that it can make a customer feel good about their purchase decision. That’s the root of customer reviews, making them feel more secure.” Orvis added video in August.

Video consumer reviews are still new, very new. They make up only a small fraction of Amazon and Orvis reviews. But, this is expected to change quickly as more consumers embrace video and more marketers offer reviews on their sites (See “New Ideas,” page 10). Video phones and the simplicity of some of today’s desktop applications make creating video “less of an event,” said Marc Karasu, president of MeasuredUp.com, New York. Karasu left his post as vp-marketing of Hotjobs.com to quarterback MeasuredUp.com. The site encourages consumers to sound off about good and bad products and customer service. Next month, the site is relaunching with video capabilities.

Video is a natural for consumers under 30, as they are heavy users of such sites as YouTube, he said. Video can be powerful “if you are shooting secret footage of an outrageous customer service experience,” Karasu said. However, “if it’s someone standing front of a store talking about what happened,” not so much.

Video is currently only about 1% of all reviews, according to Sam Decker, CMO of Bazaarvoice, the ratings and reviews service that created Orvis and PetCo’s consumer review section, based in Austin, Texas. However, Web sites can leverage this small pool of video reviews for a larger impact. Sections can be created showing the top-10 video reviews. Consumers can also be connected directly to the videos via e-mail links and RSS feeds.

In this respect videos not only offer a valuable opinion, but also entertainment value. “We’ve had other people linking to our site to watch the videos, there is always that entertainment opportunity,” said Bodell. “We look forward to more content as it gets easier to put video up there. It will also be better produced once the technology gets better and high-speed connections continue to become more prevalent. People will find creative ways of using it that we haven’t even envisioned yet.” Authors reading chapters of their books and explanations behind their writing is starting to appear on Amazon. Brands are also invited to post product demonstrations, as well, said Bodell. However, “they can’t be blatant advertisements,” he said. “They can buy ad placements.” Amazon weighs each submission based on its value to buyers in aiding their purchase decision.

Does this start to blur the lines of marketing? Probably, said Seth Godin, author of the new book Meatball Sundae. “If it is clearly labeled as to who is producing the video, call them what you want. ‘What is advertising?’ is a question we ask every day.”

Regardless, video is “a logical, predictable next step in the evolution of consumer reviews,” said Godin. Still, there are benefits to the written word. “Video is a lot less casual. You can spend 30 seconds writing a few sentences, video is more of a commitment,” he said. “Plus you can scan a whole page of written reviews, but you’re not going to watch a whole page of videos.”

khein@brandweek.com

Welcome Companies and Business owners.

Take the Measuredup Pledge.  This is a program we have developed to help forward thinking companies demonstrate their commitment to improving Customer Service and making customers happy.

If you are interested in promoting the Pledge to your customers then please download the Measuredup logo and Pledge from Measuredup.com.

It is free to companies and makes a powerful statement that might just differentiate you from your no good competitors.

In this world of fragmenting media and online marketing its harder then ever to market to your audience and Customer Service is more important then ever in building your brand.  Show your consumers you care about them, are not afraid to put your brand where your mouth is and are committed to improving your Customer Service.

The Customer Service Pledge:

This company cares about our customers.

We want them to be happy and understand that without them we are not in business.

We know we can’t always be perfect and that some consumers will be angry sometimes, but we are committed to improving our Customer Service and making sure our employees always respect the customer.  In this way we will increase brand loyalty, word of mouth and repeat business.

By placing the Measuredup.com logo on our website we are supporting the Measuredup.com Customer Service Pledge to focus on making the consumer happy and to improving our customer service.

We believe the customer is always right.

We are so committed to Customer Service that we want to hear from you if your problem has not been addressed and we encourage you to submit customer service reviews to our company or to www.Measuredup.com

We look forward to making you a happy customer.

Download the free Measuredup.com logo and company pledge from Measuredup.

We have all tried calling companies to complain or ask questions only to be put into endless electronic prompts or messages that lead nowhere as we get more and more frustrated.

All we want is to speak to someone and then the issue would eaily and quickly be resolved.

But how do you get a real person on the phone.

Here are the best ways to do it:

- Do not answer the prompts.  Simply wait for a person to get on the line.  Many times these electronic systems do not know what to do when no one presses any keys and then they transfer you to a person.

- Simply keep pressing the number zero while at the same time saying Customer Service over and over again.  This will often transfer you to a person.

If neither of these works then keep along with the electronic system looking for an opportunity to connect to a real person.

Once you get a real person, right away ask them their name and extension and give them your number in case you get disconnected.  This creates a dialog and makes it more accountable forcing the rep to pay attention and be professional.  They do not want to get into trouble.

One other thing you can do with companies that really try to give you the runaround and avoid putting on a real customer service person is to write a review about them on www.Measuredup.com  It is free and easy to do.

When you do this you are telling other Measuredup users and consumers about the issue and your review is indexed on Measuredup and on search engines where other people will find them when searching for a company.  Doing this forces companies to pay more attention to you, revise their customer service and do a better job of interaction with consumers. Measuredup is a great way to complain or praise a company and their customer service in a public forum where others can read about the issue and make their own comments.

If you are entering the job market or thinking about ways to see what other opportunities are out there then you need to do 5 things.  These 5 things are free or cost very little and are the most important things you can do to get things going. You should spend 2 hours a week on these and in no time you will see that you are starting to generate some traction.

5 free things to do to start a job search

1. Get your resume together, refresh it, make sure your contact info is up to date and revise any objectives or skills.  You would be surprised how many people have an outdated resume.

2. Get your resume posted on as many job boards as you can.  This is free and it not only allows you to search for opportunities by city or industry but recruiters can find your resume when they search for people.  You can type “job boards” into Google to get the names.

3. Open a LinkedIn account on www.Linkedin.com  This site is amazing and by searching for past colleagues and coworkers you will in no time build a network that will help you find new opportunities and get you references.  Go on to the site and play around with it and you will see the power of it.

4. Ask your friends and family for help and to tell you if they hear of anything.  Sometimes people just need to be asked for their help and do not want to be presumptious by offering.

5. Find the best trade magazine in your industry and start reading is regulalry.  Not only will you be up to date on new industry news and language but you will see who is growing, merging and hiring. Best of all you will sound up to date in an interview.

If you do these 5 things you will see that in no time you will start to get traction in your search and the momentum will open up new opportunities.

December 17, 2007
By Brian Morrissey

NEW YORK In November, Facebook’s 23-year-old founder, Mark Zuckerberg, stood on a low stage in Manhattan and made a boast to hundreds of advertisers and agencies that caused more than a few snickers afterwards: “Once every 100 years, the way that media works fundamentally changes.”

In the subsequent weeks, Zuckerberg’s hubris was slammed, particularly when Facebook was forced to backtrack on its plan to pipe product purchases to users’ friends, a system known as Beacon. One writer, former Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner, even went so far as to title an article, “RIP Facebook?”

Yet despite the hyperbole and inevitable backlash from once-fawning admirers, Zuckerberg’s proclamation has the ring of truth to it when looked at in the wider view. More than ever in the modern era, media and advertising are changing, as epitomized by the rush of middle-aged users to social nets like Facebook. The Internet is finally beginning to live up to its promise to change media and advertising from a one-to-many, passive proposition to a many-to-many experience premised on social connectivity. For media companies and advertisers, this could make Zuckerberg’s irrational exuberance seem not so irrational in retrospect. In fact, the fundamental changes he was referring to are already under way.

“I believe the media business has changed more in the last five years than in the 500 years before that,” Peter Horan, CEO of IAC’s media and advertising unit, told a gathering of publishing, advertiser and agency executives earlier this month.

What’s most changed is how people access information. The Internet has thus far been a search-dominated medium, using faceless algorithms to sort through masses of information for the right link. Google’s role as the starting point of the many users’ Web experience gave rise to what The Search author John Battelle calls “the database of intentions”: people express themselves directly to Google, which can then match up a limitless supply of information to satisfy any need, from a word definition to a retailer selling cashmere sweaters. That’s been a sweet business for Google, which is on pace to rack up over $15 billion in revenue for 2007.

Peer recommendation comes of age

But what comes next? Search, for all its benefits, doesn’t do a great job of helping people separate the wheat from the chaff. The top result for my search is the same as yours.

Many observers see social connections as a credible alternative to search in how we find information, consume media and make product decisions—all premised on the power of peer recommendation. “Social networking is as significant a behavioral shift as search,” says Sarah Fay, CEO of Carat, part of Aegis Group. “The way search has infiltrated our lives, social networking [has become] the fabric of our lives.”

Study after study, not to mention common sense, suggests that when friends recommend a movie, product or event, it has more weight than hearing from a commercial message. Beacon was supposed to morph this premise into an ad vehicle, only to fall flat on privacy concerns. Still, the $15 billion valuation pinned to Facebook is a direct result of the belief it will turn its 58 million-plus users into a formidable advertising opportunity. And other companies are fast at work making this a reality. Archetype Media, for instance, has begun Social Vibe, a marketplace for consumers to get sponsorships (rewards) from brands they endorse within their social networks. Izea, formerly PayPerPost, is building a similar marketplace for bloggers.

The Tay Zonday DIY media model

For months, a Minneapolis graduate student had posted quirky videos to YouTube of himself singing covers and original songs in a remarkably deep voice that didn’t seem to fit his small, youthful appearance. Zonday’s “Chocolate Rain,” first posted in April, generated a tsunami of attention, racking up more than 12 million views.

By the end of the year, Dr Pepper had approached Zonday to record a follow-up version called “Cherry Chocolate Rain” in advance of next year’s introduction of Cherry Chocolate Dr Pepper. Creative merits aside, Zonday brought something else to the table: his own network. Dr Pepper relied on Zonday’s YouTube network of 20,000 subscribers to spread the Dr Pepper video. Within two weeks, it gained more than 1.5 million views. By that time, Zonday had turned himself into a mini-media property, joining a YouTube program that will show ads on his videos and give him a cut.

While the rise of a quirky personality like Tay Zonday is undeniably amusing, the story also points to how social connections on open platforms like YouTube are feeding the process of distributed media. Take Tila Tequila. At the start of the year, she was merely a wannabe model who had an inordinate number of MySpace friends, over 1 million. She was able to parlay her social networking base into a record deal and a top-rated reality show, A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila, on MTV.

Social media is not just about becoming famous. Within their own, much smaller networks, people are becoming media distributors via widgets, tiny Web applications that can be embedded on blogs and social-network profile pages. MySpace has long let users embed photo slide shows, video clips and other tools of self-expression into their pages. Having watched YouTube grow into a force on the back of distribution through the site, it sought earlier this year to exert more control, blocking some widget makers that included advertising. It eventually backed down. Rival Facebook opened its site to outside developers to build widgets that used social data, and now over 10,000 have been created, with the most popular spread friend to friend. By the end of the year, more than 50 percent of Web users encountered a widget monthly, according to comScore, typically through a slide show or video posted to a social network or blog.

In this regard, social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Bebo are likely to spawn millions of mini-networks where content is shared among a trusted circle. “MySpace isn’t a social network with 120 million people,” says Greg Verdino, chief strategy officer at new marketing shop Crayon. “It’s 120 million social networks. There’s a lot of focus on consumer-generated media when there’s more impact on consumer-recommended content.”

Brands have nowhere to hide

As consumers take control of the spreading of media, they invariably have a say over how brands are perceived. Old notions of planning a brand image through commercial messages are running up against consumers actively voicing their opinions to each other in venues as diverse as message boards, consumer reviews, blogs and social networks. Problems can occur when there’s a disconnect between the rosy image dreamed up by marketers and the everyday reality expressed by consumers.

The crossroads the advertising industry stands at was on full display this year in Cannes. Dove won the Film category for “Evolution,” a touching short film by WPP Group’s Ogilvy & Mather that looked at the beauty industry’s false and manipulative notions of beauty. Buoyed by the ad’s impact—”Evolution” has been viewed more than 5.5 million times on YouTube—Dove released a more pointed follow-up in October, “Onslaught,” which shows an angelic little girl deluged by the marketing industry’s messages about beauty. The video met with wide praise from critics and industry types. But then something else happened. A video response was posted to YouTube, pointing out the hypocrisy of Unilever, which owns not only Dove, but Axe—a product that peddles stereotypes of women as little more than sex objects.

Although the video response gathered only a fraction of the views that Dove’s ad did, it showed how brands can get called out on empty promises in an age when connections are paramount. Wal-Mart found that out this year, too. Eager to get involved with social media, it ran a back-to-school campaign on Facebook that fell flat after the brand page was flooded with young critics of the company’s labor practices.

Some brands have taken the criticisms to heart. Back in August 2005, Dell’s customer-service problems drew the ire of blogger Jeff Jarvis. His resulting “Dell Hell” tirade sparked similar stories of shoddy services from dozens of others. Dell responded, after initial fumbling, by forming its own blog and an outreach team to contact those posting negative experiences with its products. The company went even further last February by launching IdeaStorm, a section of its site that solicits ideas from customers and gives them a forum for feedback, positive and negative.

The lesson for brands: The days of papering over poor products with snazzy messages are faltering now that we’re connected. That means the once mundane area of customer service becomes an important definer of the brand experience, says Pete Blackshaw, CMO of Nielsen BuzzMetrics. “That’s unfamiliar terrain for anyone in the marketing business, but it’s low-hanging fruit.”

What’s a friend worth?

But in a year marked by brands’ experimentation in social media, including MySpace profile pages—what Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst with Forrester Research, describes as fishing “where the fish are”—agencies are left with a quandary: How can such voluntary interactions be measured?

It’s often noted that the Internet’s greatest strength is its measurability, but when brands move from counting clicks and site visits to connections, the system breaks down, says Troy Young, CMO of VideoEgg, a social media advertising network that embeds overlay “invitations” into a brand experience. “It’s a real challenge because true engagement cost doesn’t fit into a buyer spreadsheet,” he explains. “The whole media marketplace is priced around the cost of impressions to unengaged users.”

The solution is unclear. For now, the ad industry is left with familiar forms of measurement, mostly clicks and impressions, and what will follow is becoming an ever-important discussion.

The price of all this social connectivity is the inundation of the mundane, from Facebook updates on what groups people join to Twitter messages on what someone had for lunch. And as Beacon showed, the line between what is personal and public is blurring—and sometimes the decision is outside of our control. Yet no matter where the line is drawn, the social trend set in motion this year is likely to only continue.

“Once someone starts to use social networks,” Fay says, “they rarely go back.”

Sales ‘driven by reviews’

14 December 2007

Consumer reviews are driving web sales, according to new research.

A report from eMarketer claims that word-of-mouth advertising - always an important tool for marketers - is especially influential now the internet has made view-sharing so easy.

Social networking websites, blogs and videos mean that user-generated content is proliferating on the web, with recommendations from other consumers increasingly forming the basis of purchase decisions.

Research from eMarketer found that 17 per cent of adults use social networking websites in order to participate with their favourite brands - although most do so to gain a sense of community.

The Wispa campaign is said in the report to be one example of the influence that can be exerted by consumer-generated campaigns.

“From brands’ point of view, consumer word-of-mouth is extremely valuable,” the report states.

It emerged this week that Facebook is opening its development architecture to third-party developers, with Bebo the first rival website to take advantage of the new offering.