Everyone’s finally realizing that consumer-generated product reviews are damn important. They’re the latest target for web-savvy startups, advertisers, and marketers.

Ad Age Digital talks about the importance of getting people talking about you. Part of their piece profiles BazaarVoice, an Austin-based startup that sets up the software needed to facilitate and track online reviews and feedback.

“Product reviews written by real people are perhaps the most underappreciated slice of the consumer-generated-media universe, the explosion of which has captivated the advertising and media worlds. But as marketers fixate on getting their virals on YouTube and making friends on MySpace, these relatively unsexy product write-ups have quietly become the most common form of consumer content — Forrester puts it as the most-used form of peer-generated content — not to mention the one with the most direct impact on purchase decisions.”

ClickZ also had a recent write-up on BazaarVoice’s approach.

“Retailers have full control of their consumer generated content to use as an advertising medium,” Sam Decker, VP of marketing and products for Bazaarvoice, told ClickZ News. “They can control which portals can leverage the content and where it will show up. It’s allowing retailers more inventory to do advertising.”

So what’s the bottom line? We’re back to the days of sticky websites. Except this time the self-publishing and syndication traits of Web 2.0 have brought the user to the forefront, not the companies.

 tags: RSS, syndication, product+reviews, user+generated+content, bazaarvoice, ecommerce, online+shopping, web+2.0