• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, April 15, 2010

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

The move merges the word-of-mouth tracking Nielsen does via BuzzMetrics 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. "Start planning out how to integrate social data with broader customer data, marketing data, and web data," he wrote in a post about the Nielsen-Bazaarvoice partnership Thursday. "If you have ratings and reviews on your site, think about what you can achieve by integrating this data with other public social discussion."

The idea is to get as complete a picture as possible of customer opinion, both prompted and otherwise. Product reviews have become especially important to brands because they are viewed as being more closely tied to the buying process.

"Reviews from consumers with real, hands-on experience with products and services tend to have the biggest impact in the purchase funnel," said Pete Blackshaw, executive vice president of digital strategy at Nielsen. "They have a high credibility factor, and can even shape the direction of a new product launch."

Clients can automatically feed all ratings and reviews from Bazaarvoice into Nielsen's BuzzMetrics dashboard or get custom analytic reports drawing on the Bazaarvoice and Nielsen data. Bazaarvoice says it has served more than 100 billion reviews, answers, and stories on 800 web sites worldwide.