Retail Customer Experience: Four ways to get online shoppers to contribute reviews

Online reviews, which once gave brand managers and marketing executives stomachaches, is now pervasive, and becoming more important with each passing day. According to a recent Nielsen study, 70 percent of shoppers said they trust consumer opinions posted on retail websites.

With the help of Viewpoints Network, which operates the consumer-facing review aggregator Viewpoints.com, Sears launched two social networking community websites, MySears.com and MyKmart.com. The sites has since registered more than 400,000 users and see two million monthly visits.

Rob Harles, Sears' vice president of community, said that in the early days of the sites, motivation for shoppers to contribute reviews was simply the ability to be heard. Shortly thereafter, they implemented a reputation system that gives "badges" to users based on their level of involvement -- users that write a lot of reviews or get a lot of friends will receive corresponding kudos to display on their profile pages.

"And we're gradually experimenting with small incentives -- usually not monetary ones but soft benefits like sneak peeks and advance notice of things that are hard to get," he added.

Also key to the sites' success, Mr. Harles noted, is the ease with which users can go from casual user to active contributor. "We are one of the first major retailers to sign up for Open ID," he said. "We're going to intercept people where they are. You can use your Facebook or Twitter or Yahoo or Google account to log in, if you want."

Retail consultant Mike Wittenstein offers these four practical tips for retailers wanting to turn their browsers and buyers into generators of content:

Just ask. Go through product registration cards and invite people, especially those with multiple purchases in a single category and those who have shopped online in the last six months. Among that group, home in on store credit cardholders first, inviting them to join an "advisor's circle" to kick-start the community pages.
Offer an incentive. When review aggregator Kudzu launched, for instance, they paid for the first few entries under each company. Manufacturers and brands could potentially foot part of the bill for this.
Use data mining to determine which products already have online reviews (on the manufacturer, brand and/or distributor websites). With proper permission and attribution, port those reviews over to get the flow of content started.
Enhance contributor profile pages, without revealing personal information, so that browsers are attracted to reviewers with similar interests -- for instance, a review of a dishwasher might resonate with parents if the reviewer is designated as "Mother of three, two of whom are infants with lots of bottles to rinse."
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