Amazon sometimes attracts more reviews than customers want to read. So Amazon provides tools to filter reviews by star rating and displays the “most helpful” positive and negative review as determined by Amazon’s community.

Plus, you can also search reviews by keyword.

Which is helpful, because you don’t want to buy a product that sucks unless it’s a vacuum or a Flowbee.

After a customer has filled in his review, there is an option to blog the review, which is a simple process that takes about 30 seconds to port the review right to the blog.

I decided to do the bulk of my Christmas shopping for the family through Olympic Store last year. So I’m going to use an example of one of my own reviews to show you how this works:

After you complete your review you see this screen:

You enter your blog URL and then you’re prompted for your user name and password:

You receive confirmation your review is posted instantly:

And the review is published on my blog along with the product description used on the Olympic Store website:

The links to the product in the review are direct links, which means you get an SEO benefit too.

This can even improve the quality of review content. Customers who choose to post reviews on their blogs and have more items to review will likely put as much care and thought into the review as one of his or her own blog posts.

This feature comes out-of-the-box with Power Reviews. I’m not sure if other providers also offer this feature.

Web 2.0 – Intermediate
Brett Hurt, Founder & CEO of Bazaarvoice
Pinny Gniwisch, Founder and EVP of Marketing, Ice.com
Matt Corey, VP of Marketing, Golfsmith International

The first slide states that “shoppers are turning to each other” — meaning that faced with limitless choices for where to buy and what to buy which can cause “decision paralysis” and a general distrust of marketing messaging, people turn to each other for product testimonials and recommendations to make a purchase decision. And now this can be done on the Web instantly and on a larger scale than offline.

Enter the plethora of social networking (I’m avoiding the term Web 2.0 here) sites that users trust. Want some stats to support this idea?

Trust in “a person like me” has tripled from 20% to 68% in the last 24 months (Edelman)

95% of consumers trust their friends’ recommendations above other sources of information (Forrester)

77% of online shoppers consider reviews and ratings in their purchase decision (Jupiter)

80% of online shoppers trust brands that offer ratings and reviews more than brands that don’t (Vizu / Bazaarvoice)

My definition of “User-Generated Content” is that it refers to anything produced by an unsolicited voice. This could be a response to a call-to-contribution – like a product page with an “Add a Review” link, a video submission to a contest or a forum or blog post with comments enabled. OR it could appear as someone takes it upon themselves to start a forum thread, write a blog post or even create a fan site (or hate-this-company / product / service / brand site) or a parody video.

In terms of product ratings and reviews, what kind of results can you expect from user-generated content? (From the Shop.org session:)

Increased sales, satisfaction and loyalty

Reduction in returns

Analytical insight for marketers and merchandisers

Feedback for product improvements

The presenters also gave some killer examples of applying ratings and reviews to other channels:

Email Marketing – Golfsmith and PETCO experienced a 42% and 500% jump in click through to their websites respectively by including ratings and reviews in email messages. This was done by featuring products as “top-rated” complete with star (or paw) ratings.

Offline Ads and Flyers – Loblaw (grocery chain) will show a “rated by you” product with a testimonial, the item’s sale price and photo.

Catalogs – Cabela’s incorporates ratings and reviews in print catalogs.

In Store – Loblaw uses the “rated by you” messaging in POP signage, and other stores like Sears may use it on in-store product labels.

Television – Golfsmith ran ads on The Golf Channel highlighting customer reviews available on their web site.

It has been said that “Trust is the currency of the Web.” Incorporating user-contributed product feedback is effective and establishes trust because it communicates that “real people love these items, just thought you should know what people like best” rather than “these are our high margin items that we prefer you purchase.” We’re at the point right now where some marketers are applying this knowledge, others are beginning to understand it and explore using user-generated content in online and offline channels, and others are missing the opportunity completely. Which one are you?