Starwood Hotels adds customer reviews to Facebook

Bazaarvoice, which offers brands technology to harness customer conversations, and Buddy Media, the Facebook page and campaign management company, have teamed up to create a tool called 'What's Popular Right Now'

The tool inserts customer-generated content gathered from Bazaarvoice into Buddy Media-powered Facebook brand pages and social media campaigns.

Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide is the first brand to use this tool, which powers the Discover section on its Westin Hotels & Resorts Facebook page.

Discover features Westin's most highly rated hotels and enables users to read reviews of them from within the page. Users can then click through to the main Westin site to place a booking for their chosen hotel.

Alyssa Waxenberg, director of emerging platforms at Starwood, said: "Starwood’s digital strategy is to make sure we have the most valuable content our guests need, in the channels they turn to most.

"We started with ratings and reviews on our own websites and loved the success metrics we saw. The natural progression for us is to take this content to our social media platforms like Facebook."

Michael Lazerow, chief executive of Buddy Media, said: "This app helps brands build their business and provide a better experience for their online communities. Creating the ability for people to communicate with each other at scale is what social media is all about."

Buddy Media launched in the US in 2007 and claims to manage social media for eight of the world's top 10 global advertisers, with clients including Nivea, Bacardi, All Saints and Mercedes Benz.

Buddy Media opened its London headquarters in London in July last year and in August it announced a $54m (£33.9m) investment for further expansion.

Bazaarvoice, which was founded in 2005 in Austin in the US, works with more than 1,200 brands, enabling them to connect with consumers across the internet.

Follow Sarah Shearman on Twitter @Shearmans

This article was first published on marketingmagazine.co.uk