Third Time Lucky For Wal-Mart?
Wal-Mart is making yet another attempt to add social media to its web site according to Advertising Age. Wal-Mart which has failed miserably in its other social media attempts has decided that that consumer-generated content is the new way to go.
Wal-Mart’s previous social media attempts included a MySpace-like offering aimed at teens was a miserably failure and was shut down after less than three months. It failed mainly because Wal-Mart screened all the content, informed parents when their children joined and forbade users to e-mail one another. Wal-Mart tried again earlier this year with a travelogue “blog” that it was forced to stop when news got out that the blog was created and paid for by its PR firm.
So now Wal-Mart has decided that user-generated content is to way to go. It is consumer friendly and it will help with organic search engine rankings. Why is Wal-mart focusing on user-generated content, and specifically reviews, you might ask. Well:
Wal-Mart executives said reviews and ratings were the feature most requested by customers, bearing out other indications of the importance of peer-to-peer approval. A study by Bazaarvoice, the Austin, Texas, company hired to power Wal-Mart’s reviews, and the market-research company Vizu, found that 80% of shoppers have more trust in brands that feature reviews and that 75% of shoppers say it’s extremely or very important to read customer reviews before making a purchase. Peer reviews, the study found, are preferred over expert reviews by a margin of 6-to-1.
“It gives an aura of objectivity,” said Nielsen Buzzmetrics Chief Marketing Officer Pete Blackshaw. “It enhances the consumer experience, and it elevates the trust level as well. Plus, consumer-generated media is sticky content.”
Now I can applaud Wal-Mart for not giving up on social media and continuing to try new things. It’s two previous social media experiments have shown that Wal-Mart want to control the interaction with the customer. So how will Wal-Mart react to negative customer reviews? Based on there past behavior I expect that Wal-Mart will quietly scuttle this latest social media marketing campaign before the end of the year when negative reviews start to show up across their site.
Filed under Brand Marketing, SEO, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization, Social Retailing : Comments (2) : Jul 26th, 2007
July 26th, 2007 at 10:20 am
I suspect you’re right about who Wal-Mart will ultimately handle this latest foray into SMM. They just don’t seem to get that you can’t control the discussion.
Sure, you can be involved and help guide the discussion–that’s part of the idea behind SMO and SMM–but you can’t control it. Sadly, despite having two projects fail for this very reason, I think that Wal-Mart will still try and control the discussion, either by quietly deleting negative reviews, or by abandoning the project all together if too many negative reviews are submitted.
July 26th, 2007 at 10:28 pm
I agree Adam. Wal-Mart loves the idea of SMO. They just don’t want to give up control of the message or conversation.
David