Established: We like hearing what other people think about stuff we’re currently considering or may someday be interested in buying. We know it, because we’ve all spent a lost hour or two browsing among the product, book and album reviews on Amazon.com. Marketers know it, because they’ve watched us spending that hour.

Think of it as word-of-mouth promotion with a time delay: I write a glowing paragraph now about a running shoe or digital camera, and you’re influenced by it a month or six later.

One problem for brands is that the retailers who sell their products online don’t all have a strong ability to generate and capture consumer reviews of the manufacturers’ products they’re selling. At the same time, they tend to feature products that have received a lot of reviews and ratings high up in their online and offline marketing. So it’s in a manufacturer’s interest to be able to generate those reviews on their own and then syndicate them out to the sites of the multi-brand retailers who sell their wares.

That’s exactly what a new platform from Bazaarvoice, the ratings-and-review tech company, allowed a handful of manufacturers to experience for themselves in beta test. Early users of the BrandVoice program were able to gin up customer reviews on their own Web sites and send those out to retailers’ e-commerce sites. The results, according to Bazaarvoice, were both increased visibility in those retailers’ marketing campaigns, higher sales conversions and improved brand loyalty among product advocates.

“For the last couple of years, we’ve been hosting reviews and other user-generated content for a growing number of manufacturers on their own Web sites,” says Sam Decker, CMO at Bazaarvoice. “That’s had an impact on people coming to their sites. But as we looked across our clients, we found that maybe only 20% of their products had reviews on retailer sites. It’s a problem of breadth of review coverage.”

Decker points out that retailers are also hip to the value of ratings and reviews and are skewing to merchandise those products that get the most ratings in their in-store and offline marketing too. So being able to garner reviews on manufacturer sites and then seed them out to retailers is a win-win for both sides.

One of those BrandVoice beta users was Kingston Technologies, a manufacturer of computer memory products and USB flash drives. Until this year, Kingston’s Web site had a rudimentary review feature, but it was more along the lines of “click here to e-mail us,” according to Kingston’s director of corporate marketing and business development Mark Leathem.

Additionally, since many of Kingston’s flagship products retail for around $8, the company’s wares weren’t drawing the same number of customer reviews on retailer sites that higher-consideration buys were gathering.

So Kingston agreed to test the BrandVoice platform on its Web site starting in February 2008, and Bazaarvoice arranged to send the customer reviews amassed out to the Web site for Office Depot, part of its review syndication network.

The result: Prior to trying BrandVoice, Kingston had an average of one review per product on the www.OfficeDepot.com site. But after pushing reviews from its own site to the Office Depot e-commerce pages, that average had risen by October of this year to an average of 10 reviews per product. That made Kingston stand out in a product category where its rival memory manufacturers still average 1.5 reviews.

At the same time, Kingston also saw a notable 92% spike in sales conversions from the Office Depot site. Even more, it was able to demonstrate that the more numerous the reviews on a merchant Web site, the better the conversion rate: Kingston products that racked up more than six reviews saw their sales increase 110%.

There was even a “halo effect,” says Leathem, as even the products that had no reviews on the Office Depot site saw a not-inconsiderable 35% increase in sales.

Kingston’s new reviews also won its products better visibility within Office Depot’s merchandising programs. “We’ve found that the more reviews we have for our products, the more likely e-tailers are to mention them when they’re choosing who to promote and market in their own merchandising,” Leathem says. “For obvious reasons. Reviews attract conversions, so if you’re a retailer deciding what to spend your merchandising budget on, you’re going to pick items that attract the most customer reviews.”