Bazaarvoice Reviews: Another Good "Structured Collaboration" Example

A lot of marketers these days are asking themselves how they can take advantage of "consumer-generated media" ("CGM").  The knee-jerk association for the term is with bboards, and more recently blogs and wikis.  I've suggested in the past that providing such "unstructured" publishing vehicles as a starting point for productive interactions online is often not very helpful.  A more sophisticated approach offers means of contribution where what they're for and how to use them (both to contribute and consume information) are more self-evident.

Liveworld is an example of a firm taking an old-fashioned approach to CGM.  The firm offers hosted collaboration tools like blogs, bboards, and chat rooms that its customers can wrap their templates around to present as their own. After ten years, the firm has an impressive client list and reports ~$2.9 million in its latest quarter, representing healthy growth over the prior year.  Not bad.  But given the boom in CGM, why not better?

Contrast this with the success of a two-year-old firm called Bazaarvoice, which offers a hosted product review capability.  Revenues are not disclosed, but the claimed client list is impressive.  The claimed impact  on  their clients' economics (for example, CompUSA, Burpee, and PETCO) is even more significant.

Product reviews are a much better way to solicit "CGM".  The purpose of the contribution is clear.  There's often a simple rating one can provide if otherwise paralyzed by the prospect of writing free text into a blank space.  They're also a much better way to consume information.  You know what you're looking at in the first place, and you can sort for the low ratings quickly to see what the bad news is. Contrast all this with wading through a bboard for the same information.

One other factor to consider is how the two firms' offerings are syndicated into their customers' sites.  Liveworld appears to be a bolt-on that lives on a different URL (e.g., "community.clientdomain.com") while Bazaarvoice is very tightly integrated with each  client's individual product pages -- see for example how it works on  Overstock.com (take a look at the way reviews are associated with each product, rather than bolted on as a separate section of the whole site; then view the page source to see how the Bazaarvoice service is called into the page.)