December 20th, 2007 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO
We recently had our holiday party at Speakeasy, a bar on famous 6th St. We rented out the whole joint, and it was a blast. We had our own stand-up comedian (I’m not joking – she is one of our Community Managers), and she gave a fantastic performance. We also had the karaoke machine going through the night, a great assortment of “adult beverages”, and catering from Cuba Libre.
There is no doubt that 2007 has been a banner year for Bazaarvoice. From winning Red Herring’s Global 100 award to launching clients like Wal-Mart, we have achieved one major milestone after another. And there is also no doubt that it is because of our amazing people that we have had such a year. I wake up every day with a smile on my face because I work with the best and the brightest.
Culture has been important to me and the executive team from day one. We regularly put initiatives and policies in place to shape our culture, and it works. One of them is that we never compromise on hiring. If we have the slightest reservation about a candidate, we’ll pass. This keeps our foundation incredibly strong. Some of the others can be seen if you click on the link at the beginning of this paragraph.
For our holiday party, I asked our team what they liked most about working at Bazaarvoice. I then presented the best of these at our holiday party. Here are some of my favorites:
- Delivering value to everyone [to businesses because we increase their revenues / to consumers because we help them make better decisions].
- Co-workers – it is such a relief to know that the people you work with are dynamic, smart, and capable. I also like how everyone is constantly striving and surpassing goals that the entire group is working towards.
- The vast opportunities here. There are always new things to learn, teach, improve, and create. It makes me really feel and see the personal and professional growth that I’m experiencing at Bazaarvoice.
- The opportunity to work with other people that are themselves jazzed about coming to work every day. There is a buzz here I’ve not felt in years in the work environment.
- The people – we rigidly guard our culture. When we decide to hire somebody, we’re as sure as you can be during an interview that the person will fit in at Bazaarvoice.
- We’re a very healthy company. Many of our employees are friends outside of work.
- Good work/life balance – this company is really good about having fun while working and organizing events to get us out of the office and have a change of pace to prevent burnout.
- The “winning team” feeling. Our company is kicking &*$, and it’s great to be on the winning team. Our competition is inferior to us and we enjoy the success that we have as a team.
- The people – everyone at Bazaarvoice is incredibly helpful. I feel like I don’t have to deal with any unnecessary red-tape when talking to anyone and we all work together to get things done. It is awesome to work on projects and know that everyone else at Bazaarvoice has your back and will be there to support you.
- Our client list. It is awesome to work on so many well-known companies/brands. I bet everyone related to a BV employee gets annoyed when we start pointing saying “they’re a client… they’re a client… they’re a client…” but it’s just so much fun.
- Complete trust of the proven leadership at our company. Our solutions are a perfect match for today’s market.
- Everyone I work with is a top performer, without exception. Because of this, I am constantly challenged by my teammates and have had faster growth here than anywhere else.
- Bazaarvoice People – there’s nothing more inspiring than being surrounded by people who like to dream big, always present the energy and excitement on how to improve things, and make things happen.
- There’s a fantastic mix of autonomy and teamwork, which brings out the wacky individualism of everyone as well as the accountability of being part of a team.
- I would actually pay money to see my colleagues’ responses to this question – they’re that creative, energetic, and bullish on Bazaarvoice.
- The products – our products work and our customers love them. It’s exciting to be on the cutting edge of word of mouth marketing.
- Our customers – we are working with some of the largest companies in the world and it is exciting to know that we are impacting their business.
2008 is going to be an even more amazing year for Bazaarvoice and our clients. With 7 products in 20 languages, referenceable clients across the world, a clear business opportunity, and a winning team, the sky is the limit. If you are thinking about joining us, now is the time. Click here to see our job listings, and please – spread the word to your friends!
December 18th, 2007 by Brant Barton Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer
In this third installment of the Bazaarblog partner interview series, Matt Eichner, VP Marketing & Strategic Development at Endeca, shares his views on where the field of information access is heading, specifically within the e-commerce domain. Endeca and Bazaarvoice share many customers in common and have partnered to bring social navigation functionality to market through out-of-the-box integration, so we were eager to pick Matt's brain about what the future has in store for Endeca.
1. Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information. As a B2B company that provides access to information, what is Endeca’s mission?
Endeca’s mission is to inform – and influence – daily decision making. This manifests itself in many ways across many different industries. But the idea is that businesses are sitting on a wealth of information in a wide variety of formats that lives in different places. If you can give people the ability to better explore, analyze and understand this information in a way that helps them make better decisions, the aggregate positive economic value of all these better decisions is mind-boggling.
Take e-commerce as an example. A consumer shows up on your website looking for a great digital camera for her 65 year old mother – they are at some stage of the buying decision process. They aren’t just looking for a list of all the cameras you have. They want information about those options that will help them figure out which one is the perfect match. They may care about common things like brand, price or resolution, but they also may care about what features matter most to less tech savvy people like their mom. This info may come from product catalogs, buyers guides and customer reviews. The challenge is pulling it all together in a way that supports this unique buying decision…and making sure you do the same for all users: The amateur photographer…or the person looking for the best kids games for the Wii…or the shopper who literally has no idea what to get her 10 year old nephew for Christmas. Influencing a unique decision is worth 10’s or hundreds of dollars. Influencing all of the unique decisions is worth 10s or even hundreds of millions of dollars when you think about the aggregate volume of commerce traffic.
2. I associate Endeca with search and “Guided Navigation”, but “discovery” has become a popular term in our industry over the last year. Endeca released its Discovery Suite very recently, which includes a social navigation module. How do you differentiate “discovery” from “guided search and navigation”?
Search can be an effective tool for fact finding, if you know what you are looking for and how to ask for it. Want to know how much a Wii costs…and if they actually have any in stock? No problem, type “Wii” in the search box and voila. But search is a poor tool for discovery, where you may not know exactly what is available and can’t ask for it precisely. Stores like Walmart.com have millions of SKUs. How could anyone possibly know even a fraction of what might be available in a catalog that size? Shopping for your nephew and you want to know what are the hot toys this holiday season for 10 year old boys? How would you describe that question? Search isn’t going to help.
(more…)
December 14th, 2007 by Brant Barton Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer
Have you seen the Whopper Freakout commercial by Burger King? I saw it tonight on TV and immediately visited the site to see the full 7 minutes and 49 seconds of hilarious footage. In summary, the commercial does an outstanding job of showing the passion that BK customers have for the flame-broiled goodness of the Whopper. BK makes cleverly makes this point by denying the customers of one store their favorite burger.
Andy Sernovitz, a Bazaarvoice advisor and founder of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), likes to say (I'm paraphrasing here) that advertising is the price brands have to pay for being uninteresting. But occasionally some interesting advertising comes along that makes you laugh hysterically, possibly cry, and swear to tell your friends. That's the goal.
I'm not really a customer of Burger King's (my parents were McDonald's franchisees for over 15 years, so that would be blasphemy!), but I do applaud their advertising creativity in recent years. Subservient Chicken was a word of mouth sensation and the NFL replays that feature a cameo by the King had me laughing aloud. Whopper Freakout extends the streak. Well done, Burger King, well done. Pun intended.
December 11th, 2007 by Brant Barton Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer
Yesterday's eMarketer Daily linked to a research article titled "Cashing In on Consumer Product Reviews" that summarized stats on the use and influence of user-generated product reviews from a few different research reports. Here are the highlights:
- Avenue A | Razorfish reports in their "Digital Consumer Behavior Study" that 55% of surveyed Internet users check other people's opinions online when researching products, topping product comparison charts (22%), expert reviews (21%), and shared shopping lists (1%). If you are currently evaluating site feature investments for 2008 and beyond, get your hands on this report and read more about why you should invest in ratings and reviews.
- Internet Retailer reports in "Web Site Design, Content and Rich Media" that consumers that read product reviews are likely to spend more online. The largest group of surveyed users, 27.1%, reported spending 5-10% more, while almost 7% reported spending 20%+ more! Need a business case for reviews? Do the back of the napkin math for your business. For a $25MM online retailer, if 7% of buyers spent 20% more, a reviews solution would pay for itself multiple times and easily fund investments in other site features.
- Deloitte & Touche USA reports on the influence of reviews on purchase decisions by category. Every listed category shows significant influence, from electronics (45% of respondents influenced) down to motor vehicles (13%, the lowest, but still significant).
December 6th, 2007 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer
We are thrilled that Austin Business Journal readers awarded Bazaarvoice the Most Innovative Software in their recent Tech Innovations awards for our Ask & Answer hosted application.
Here's the press release, and a snippet:
Bazaarvoice, the market and technology leader in hosted social commerce applications that drive sales, today announced that it has received an Austin Business Journal “Tech Innovation” award for its hosted Ask & Answer™ service. The award recognizes Bazaarvoice for pioneering an important new way for multichannel businesses to tap into the social nature of the shopping experience to drive sales, satisfaction, and loyalty. Bazaarvoice manages social commerce capabilities for more than 150 leading online businesses including Bass Pro Shops, Dell, Macy’s, Overstock.com, PETCO, QVC, Sears, and ZipRealty.
Bazaarvoice was presented with the award, sponsored by Eureka Software, on Thursday, November 29 at a ceremony held at the Sheraton Austin Hotel. Bazaarvoice was selected as a finalist for the award from among dozens of Austin-based software companies, and then chosen as a winner by the public.
Let us know if you want a demo. Email info@bazaarvoice.com. We already have conversion and call reduction case studies…very exciting!
December 5th, 2007 by Brant Barton Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer
eMarketer reported today that six in 10 surveyed US consumers share product advice with friends and family, a finding from Forrester Research's NACTAS Benchmark Study.
While the highly sought after "Influentials" segment garners much of the focus of word of mouth marketers, Forrester's findings provide ammunition for more broadly focused approaches to enabling and capturing word of mouth. Rather than thinking in campaign terms, brands should be seriously evaluating tools and technologies that can widely capture consumer opinions, enable deep analysis of what these opinions reveal about brand strengths and weaknesses, and facilitate the distribution of word of mouth to those who actively seek it, from the brand directly or from other sources.
Fortunately, marketing spending trends suggest that this is in fact happening. The eMarketer brief also states that spending on word of mouth marketing totaled $1 billion in 2006. Small by traditional marketing standards but quickly growing, with 2006 spending representing a 36% increase over 2005.
December 3rd, 2007 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer
I recently posted results from our study with Keller Fay, that 90% of product reviewers do so to help other shoppers. As evidence of the general 'goodness' of customers wanting to help other customers, Andrew Chen (our Ask & Answer product manager) took this iPhone picture of the note someone left behind at the ATM. "This machine is not issuing receipts.". Another small piece of evidence that customers want to help each other…you just need to invite them in!
December 1st, 2007 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO
This has been a busy week for Bazaarvoice Research. At 9:25pm EST on Thanksgiving Day, we witnessed a new traffic peak across our client base. As consumers read retailer circulars to prep for a busy "Black Friday", they also read reviews online. At that time (9:25pm EST), we peaked at 1,400 reviews read per second across our client base of over one hundred retailers. On Cyber Monday (November 26), we served 71 million reviews to holiday shoppers, up over 370% over last year's Cyber Monday figure. In the last 30 days, our systems have seen 7.4 billion hits and delivered 40 terabytes of traffic.
There have been many exciting research moments for our industry in the past two years:
And this new holiday tradition is another major finding. It shows just how much influence reviews online are having on offline shopping behavior. This especially hits home for me because when Brant and I started this company in May of 2005 only around 10 retailers in the U.S. (including online-only, like Amazon.com) had reviews. Now MarketingSherpa reported that 43% of retailers do (as of Feb-07). That is having a broad impact on consumer expectations – reviews are quickly become a must-have for retailers and a norm for online shopping.
Most of these are intuitive findings and could be easily dismissed as "obvious". But data informs strategy, as I learned so many times while working with clients as the founder of Coremetrics.
So, what do you do with this new data? Here are a few ideas:
- Promote reviews for the same products featured in your Thanksgiving circular on your home page the week of Thanksgiving – this will make it easy for the 70 to 77% that are seeking reviews (and the 82% that are influenced when they read them) to realize that you have them
- Send an email about reviews on Thanksgiving morning with a subject line like, "Read Thousands of Customers' Reviews Before You Go Shopping on Friday". In that email, feature the same products or categories of products that you have in your Thanksgiving circular
- Create distinct shopping paths linked for your home page such as "Our Best Friday Deals on Customer Top-Rated Holiday Gifts" and so on for all of your major categories featured in your in-store (and online) sale
- Push reviews again on Cyber Monday – both in email and on your home page – but with a distinct focus on online shopping
- Put top-rated circulars in your stores for greeters and category managers (like HD TV) to hand out to help in-store shoppers
- Feature reviews in your print circulars so that readers know that your site has reviews before they go online to research them
Want more? Watch the holiday webinar that our Community Management team recorded. And please don't forget to tell us your ideas as well!
And, finally, please support the Ray M. Greenly Scholarship Fund this holiday season by shopping at Shop.org's Cyber Monday portal. All proceeds go to honor a great man that I had the pleasure of working with. He helped grow Shop.org into the great organization that it is today. And you will be helping to fund the future visionaries of the eCommerce industry.
