Based on a survey conducted last month of more than 250 companies for the benchmark report Social Media Monitoring and Analysis, the Aberdeen Group found that organizations are coming to view company-hosted blogs, discussion forums, and other Web 2.0 platforms as a critical prerequisite for their online content strategy.
In fact, according to the research findings, 62% of best-in-class companies already host such platforms (compared to 42% of laggards), with an additional 22% planning to do so in the next 12 months.
Yet, despite the proliferation of company-hosted blogs and discussion forums, most companies have yet to treat social media as an additional touch point, and one that can be integrated into their overall customer-facing activities. Retailers, in particular, have a golden opportunity to leverage consumer-generated content from their discussion forums to create cross-promotional campaigns and to even drive in-store sales.
It's an opportunity that Wal-Mart, the biggest retailer in the world but not always a paragon of online innovation, has been discovering since the launch last June of a website feature called Customer Reviews & Ratings. Similar to what Amazon.com and others have been doing for years, the feature allows customers to write reviews and give ratings about store merchandise items.
"We're seeking to connect our community of 130 million customers in an easy way, and one that's not solely geographical," says Cathy Halligan, chief marketing officer of Walmart.com. "Customer Reviews & Ratings speaks to the interest and need of our community of customers to share and talk with each other and help each other shop smarter and easier. We're continuing to evolve our community elements of the site as well as in the stores and connect the two together so there's online/offline activity."
That's the part that's groundbreaking. So far, the multi-channel integration points are three-fold: store merchandise receipts, store shelf fact tags, and newspaper circulars. Merchandise receipts point customers to the Walmart.com/ratings landing page and encourages them to write, read and shop by customer reviews. The store shelf fact tags encourage customers to read customer reviews before making their purchase decisions. Starting last month, in-store and newspaper circulars also began encouraging customers to write, read and shop by customer reviews.
Walmart.com is a good example of a company evolving toward what Aberdeen calls social media integration. The term is used to describe a scenario in which a social media platform combines with an existing property in a meaningful way so as to enhance the customer experience and drive increased value for the organization.
Since the launch of the national campaign, Walmart.com's customer review volume has continued to increase substantially. "It's been a tremendous success," says Halligan, noting that Wal-Mart pays close attention to what online customers are saying. "There's interest at every level of the organization to use this information in actionable ways," she says. "It's yet another point of commentary from our customers that we act upon. Sometimes we pull products off the site and send products back to vendors, all based on customer dialog."
Jeff Zabin is a research fellow at the Aberdeen Group, and author of the Social Media Monitoring and Analysis study. He can be reached at jeff.zabin@aberdeen.com.
