One of the largest memes in social media and social business is the idea that silos are keeping organizations from truly reorganizing effectively around people.
According to a report released by Buddy Media and Booz and Co. last year, social media teams are spread across multiple teams within a business. While 81% of companies said their marketing department is responsible for leading social media, digital, PR and customer service teams are all tasked with social media responsibilities.
Most companies haven’t even eliminated the silos in just their marketing department, which holds much of the social media budget. Starting this year, Buddy Media is making it a core priority to help companies better coordinate all the ways in which they touch former, current and potential customers.
Late last year, we announced a groundbreaking analytics partnership with comScore to provide marketers the ability to bridge consumer insight inside Facebook and their larger marketing efforts.
And today, we’re announcing a breakthrough partnership with Bazaarvoice, which, for the first time, brings together online reviews and social media presences, two of the most effective social marketing tools available to marketers.
Bazaarvoice, whose solutions have powered more than 280 billion customer conversations on brand web sites, will now seamlessly integrate with the Buddy Media social marketing suite to syndicate these conversations, ratings and review to brands’ social media presences.
We’re very excited that Starwood Hotels & Resorts will be the first brand utilize the new integration.
So how does it work?
We’ve created a new “sapplet,” or social application, which will allow brands to easily integrate their Bazaarvoice customer-generated content into their brand pages and social media campaigns powered by Buddy Media.
The sapplet is already implemented on Westin Hotel Pages, and I encourage you to check out the power of our new partnership in action.
The features include:
- Ability for brands to define the category of products or services to feature in their social presences.
- The most popular products and services, based on ratings, reviews, comments and shares, are promoted within the application.
- Users can share their experiences and the Bazaarvoice content with their friends across their online networks. Imagine a well-written review that was the deciding factor in a purchase you made. With this integration, your friends will now see this review everywhere.
- Fans clicking through content in the application are directed to individual product pages, which increases traffic to the brand’s sites. There are no dead-ends in social media; instead, everything is sharable and interconnected.
As I said in our press release announcing the partnership, Buddy Media prides itself on helping brands build powerful connections with their customers via social media. The partnership with Bazaarvoice has allowed us to create a unique product that allows people to communicate in bigger and bolder ways than ever before.
Interested in our latest sapplet? Contact us to learn how Buddy Media can help power your connections.
