• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, April 15, 2010

Nielsen has struck a deal with Bazaarvoice to feed its consumer ratings and reviews into the research firm’s BuzzMetrics dashboard to provide marketers a better understanding of consumers’ online behavior.

The move essentially merges the brand conversations Nielsen’s BuzzMetrics service tracks across social networks, blogs, message boards and other sites, with the customer feedback Bazaarvoice collects from company product pages. What’s the benefit of bringing the two consumer data pools together?

Because marketers should stop looking at social media as a series of isolated channels, according to Forrester analyst Zach Hofer-Shall. “If you have ratings and reviews on your site, think about what you can achieve by integrating this data with other public social discussion,� he wrote in a post about the Nielsen-Bazaarvoice partnership Thursday.

So if you the people coming to your site love your new potato chip variety, cell phone or car model, and everyone else online hates it, then you know you've got a problem.