People Powered Stories - Moving Beyond the ‘Like’ with Social Advertising

Anonymous-en-US — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 19:13:47 GMT

Jennifer congrats to creating a solid partnership between MS and BazaarVoice.

Integrating social feedback directly into an ad will certainly ad interest to the creative, but a number of questions also arise.

BazaarVoice is an enterprise class solution, costing upwards of 6 figures U.S Annually for just their ratings and reviews. Customer stories and other features are extra. This price point is well beyond the reach of most small to mid-sized businesses. Does the advertiser have to use BV as their ratings and reviews engine to take advantage of this opportunity?

Will MS advertising expand to include any R and R platform to be the source for your ads?

Google's approach to this issue is very different. Through Google places they offer R and R with Stories that is free. At this point the advertiser has no control over the R and R - A huge advantage that BV brings to the table. However, as you know Google is integrating these reviews and other social feedback into everything that they do, soon enough that will include ads.

So how should a company view investing into BazaarVoice's technology and creating these complex ad campaigns through MS Advertising knowing that soon enough there will be a virtually free solution from You-Know-Who?

Search and conversion behaviors.

By moving the visitor's interaction with RR and PPS to the ad and away from the advertiser's website, the opportunity for us to engage the visitor with all of our offerings has been eliminated. How does this form of advertising change the conversion funnel in your view? More and more we are shifting the top end discovery portion of the funnel to offsite social interactions like this. Perhaps it is the right strategy? Perhaps it is a tragic mistake?

What is the cost per click model? Once for clicking the ad, again for clicking a review? Again for a story?

How are CTR and Quality scores calculated in this multi click interaction?

How does an advertiser control PPS content to keep attack or false reviews from appearing in their own paid display ads?

Integrating social data into advertising on a mass scale is a very challenging task and I commend for taking it on. Choosing a leader like BazaarVoice is also a very smart move. However, I feel that this is a high end offering that will benefit only national advertisers with digital marketing budgets in excess of a million dollars. Whereas Google is looking at solutions that are affordable for virtually any company.

Great to see you hitting the interviews out of the park Mel.