How online communities have come of age … for catalogers

By Joe Dysart

Meanwhile, Improvement Direct, a marketer of home improvement products, also has a thriving online review community. The community is managed by online community services provider Bazaarvoice. “We started out early on with a freeware solution for ratings and reviews,” says Dieter Davis, Improvement Direct’s director of business intelligence. “After a year, it was clear that we weren’t generating many reviews from customers and had trouble integrating the content into our overall marketing strategies. So we started working with Bazaarvoice and were able to get live quickly, with little technical difficulty — even with Bazaarvoice adjusting its systems to accommodate a cross-Web site ratings and reviews solution.”