Bazaarvoice and Badgeville are teaming up to offer a social shopping experience that uses gamification techniques to boost user engagement.
"We're offering a seamless integration between the two that actually adds a lot more value than either one alone," said Jim Petty, vice president of strategic partnerships at Bazaarvoice, which supplies online retailers with social shopping widgets for activities like posting ratings and reviews.
The idea behind the partnership is to get customers to spend even more time on those activities by making them more fun. In pilot projects, customers contributed 20 to 40 percent more reviews and were 100 percent more active in question-and-answer sessions, Petty said. Besides making those customers more engaged with a website, those activities generate content that gets indexed in search engines and can in turn bring in more people.
"We want to cause the frequency and the volume of the content to increase," said Kevin Akeroyd, senior vice president of field operations at Badgeville.
[Why is gamification a big deal? See Enterprise Gamification Ready To Make The Collaborative Dream Real]
Badgeville offers a platform of gamification technologies that promise to deliver the mix of psychology and technology that make applications compelling, or even "addictive." Badgeville has also taken on broader ambitions to create a behavior graph that can be used to incentivize any sort of online behavior.
The two companies characterized the partnership as a deep technical integration, where the two products have been tested to work well together. "A lot of integrations are technically possible because of a rich API, but this one is specifically productized for our clients," Petty said.
There is no reseller relationship, however--online retailers still have to sign up for both products and then authorize them to share data.
Follow David F. Carr on Twitter @davidfcarr. The BrainYard is @thebyard
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