The Bazaarvoice platform provides businesses
with the ability to collect and publish authentic feedback from their
customers, who can review products and services, ask questions, and post photos
and videos of their experiences with products. The vendor says that leveraging
user-generated content can increase sales and build brand loyalty. Within the platform, the vendor provides seven core modules: Ratings & Reviews Questions & Answers Sampling…
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Storify (discontinued)
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Storify was a social curation platform that collects updates from social networks, to create a new story format that is interactive, dynamic and social. It was acquired by Adobe, and has been retired (May 2018).
Bazaarvoice is overall a quite strong ratings and reviews platform. If you have a national brand and want to integrate ratings and reviews into your website, Bazaarvoice should be in your consideration set. If you have a small business or a tighter budget, you may find Bazaarvoice too robust or expensive of a platform. If your brand gets a lot of organic product reviews, Bazaarvoice will be a helpful tool to increase brand credibility and search engine rankings. If you need help getting consumers to review your products, Bazaarvoice offers sampling programs. These programs can get very pricy depending on how many SKUs you are looking for reviews on. Bazaarvoice also has a proprietary platform where they collect consumer reviews for many brands, and once you have the Bazaarvoice ratings and reviews platform, you may be able to purchase reviews of your products and have them sync to your website without having to run a sampling program.
I would advise that Storify is easy to use and includes many built-in resources, such as search tools, but that its application can be improved even more by combining it with other tools such as Google News (also accessible in Storify, but using standalone site is easy), Twitter (corporate and 3rd party) search tools and media management / "clipping" services like Vocus
Bazaarvoice Curations makes it incredibly easy to pull in content from multiple social media platforms for us to review.
Once the content is pulled into the Curations dashboard, our marketing team can very easily scroll through all the images and decide which ones we would like to feature on our site.
Curations also makes it very easy to tag any of our products in the images. We are able to do this manually, but Bazaarvoice also offers the option of letting their team tag the products they see in our images.
In today's world, some stories break or even take place on social media. Storify allows journalists to easily curate these conversations about news and shape them into stories.
Storify's interface is easy to use and can be taught in minutes. My college journalism students take to it quickly and love working with it.
Storify can employ any social media that I can think of. If a story is being discussed in the social media world, you can find it in words, photos, videos, etc.
Telling stories through Storify is a creative process that I see becoming more prominent in the future.
Products you create in Storify are easy to embed or use for other purposes.
Their login to their portal is awful. They are working on creating a single sign on experience but right now there are different usernames and passwords depending on what dashboard you are attempting to access.
They could probably spend more time optimizing the cost of their initialization script. The size of the JavaScript concerns me.
They could work on their deployment and preview tools. The time for our staged changes to show on the live site doesn't seem to be as quick as it should be and the preview tools don't take into account the site's CSS files for display.
We like to live-tweet academic conferences and events. We think of it as collaborative note-taking. Storify is a great place to "file" these notes for later reference, but it falls a bit short as a place to go during the live-tweeted event. This is due to the fact that it is slow to refresh, if I add a tweet to the story, it can take up to a few minutes for it to appear for other users viewing that story. So we definitely use Storify in these events, but it's an after thought rather than an integrated part of the live activity.
Storify is not as powerful as other social media platforms when it comes to driving new audiences to our content. Facebook, Twitter, and Google + help us expand our networks. Storify is more functional as an organization tool that we can use to engage our existing network.
Each Storify story seems to exist in a silo. It does not make natural connections between stories that might be emerging around the same interest or topic. In academics for example, we have created Storify stories around the value of a Liberal Arts Education. It turns out that others were doing the same, but we only discovered that by accident; Storify was not connecting the dots for us.
We are happy with the product and really just need to optimise our deployment of it on an ongoing basis. There is a lot of functionality prebuilt within Bazaarvoice which we want to have on our site, and to recreate this in our platform would take significant effort which is not practical for us.
Storify is worth it if you and your organization is creating a lot of social media buzz. If there are less than 15 people that are a part of the social media conversation, you really don't need to use this tool. It's most effective as an organizational storytelling tool, so you need to find a way to get people talking about you before you implement it.
I'm sure all processes and program can improve, however Bazaarvoice has reached a very easy usability level and hope this continues as the product improves over time.
From the day I first started using it, Storify has always made total sense. It's not the kind of product that forces you grit your teeth a lot or go into cumbersome customer support areas or fumble around forever only to be unhappy with the end result. I have been able to successfully use the product from the beginning
The Bazaarvoice team is always available via call, email, or any other platform to provide help, guidance, or to push or ask for the task we set earlier. They are talkative and easy to share information and discuss issues if there are any. Thay may have more out of box solutions for easy implementation, but as a whole, and regarding support I am satisfied.
Practice makes perfect. The more often any new tool is used, the more comfortable the implementer is with the tool. Also, there is a natural tendency with any new tool, to want to use it a great deal. Identifying proper uses as they relate to your overall marketing goals is key to any decision to use a tool.
Even though both PowerReviews and Bazaar Voice are capable of fulfilling the aforementioned needs, PowerReviews also provides free trials. PowerReview's style options aren't always user-friendly, but the app is worth checking out if aesthetic concerns aren't top of mind. Bazaar Voice, on the other hand, sounds really professional and is remarkably simple to use.
I addressed this in an earlier comment, but Storify is truly the best that I have found for displaying things in a narrative form. Other alternatives are more visually pleasing (like Tint, RebelMouse), but don't handle the narrative form so well. Those other platforms also do not display text only social posts quite as well.
This has had a positive impact on the way the company identifies user issues and complaints more easily/readily.
The negative impact is that departments seem to put a lot more expectations on our customers than this tool can provide (e.g., replies and follow-up), meaning that we aren't as able to provide additional information when requested.
It's uncertain whether responding to reviews adds a lot of value when all is said and done. Reviewers rarely adjust their ratings, even if/when we sufficiently address their concerns or resolve issues.
My Storify stories ran the gamut of thousands of readers to a few dozen. That was on me as far as how engaging the content was/interest in the topic I came up with, probably the length of the Storify stories as well, and how much my stories were shared by others. Those reader numbers were not unique by the way, and unfortunately counted when I looked at my own story (even though I was logged in and they could tell it was me).
My objectives were to let people in on a narrative story they may have missed and to cement a passing social conversation into something more long-lasting. These Storify stories are now a part of a Tumblr blog and thus can be more easily accessed. Those aren't hard and fast numbers, but Storify helped me reach my objectives nonetheless.
As somewhat of a disclaimer, my use of Storify was not conducted for a client but as a social media experiment so I could interact with some digital transmedia storytelling. Storify was simply one piece of an integrated online persona. That being said, it was easy to track how many people had seen my Storify stories to see which were the most popular.
