Archive for March, 2009

Customer Centricity, Ratings & Reviews, Search & SEO, Word of Mouth, eCommerce

Mike Svatek MarketingVOX: Multi-word search queries on the rise

March 31st, 2009 by Mike Svatek Chief Product Officer

Bazaarvoice often stresses the importance of long-tail search engine optimization – and with good reason. Our services are oriented around the concept that shoppers with a specific product in mind tend to use multi-word, need-specific search terms when looking up reviews and ratings.

MarketingVOX’s recent article on search query statistics further validates our perspective. Keyword searches eight or more words in length increased 20 percent between February 2008 and February 2009, while search queries averaging five to more than eight words increased nine percent, according to data from Hitwise, which reports an overall trend toward longer searches at the major search engines.

During the same period, shorter search queries – between one to four words in length – decreased two percent, according to a MarketingCharts report. Searches of two words comprised the majority of searches, amounting to 23.47 percent of all queries.

Quoting MarketingVOX: “The growing length of search queries was first reported last month, and appears to be a trend resulting from growing sophistication among web searchers and the need to use more specific terms to cut through Web clutter.”

Search engines continue to be the primary way Internet users navigate to key industry categories. During the last year, the following seach categories showed double-digit increases in traffic – Business and Finance, Sports, Online Video and Social Networking.

Long-tail search has never offered retailers better opportunities. Are you maximizing your customer potential?

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Social Commerce Summit

Sam Decker Summit Up: Palm

March 27th, 2009 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer

Bazaarvoice’s Social Commerce Summit is coming up next month, and last year’s attendees are eager to speak up about their favorite experiences. Here’s what Michael Roehricht, Palm’s Director of Corporate Web, has to share:

What was your key takeaway from the Social Commerce Summit? I really enjoyed last year’s Summit. I was able to network and learn new things from the sessions.

What was most memorable about the Social Commerce Summit? The bull ride and armadillo racing was personally the most memorable for me.

How has Bazaarvoice helped your company progress in social commerce? Our brand is no longer Palm’s brand [alone], and we all know that this holds true across the board. Companies naturally have to become more ‘open’ brands and social commerce is a natural extension of that fundamental belief.

What are you most looking forward to at the 2009 Summit? As for looking forward to this year, I think the overall agenda is going to be great. Lots of networking and learning. At Palm, we’ll be going full steam ahead with social marketing and there is a lot to learn. Bazaarvoice is a great partner that can help evangelizing the concept here at Palm across the large amount of stakeholders.

Thanks, Michael!

Visit www.socialcommercesummit.com for more information about the 2009 event.

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Culture

Heather Brunner Bazaarvoice Tribe Shows Team Spirit to Fund Cancer Research

March 23rd, 2009 by Heather Brunner Chief Operations Officer

This blog post was guest-written by Sherrie Nguyen, Bazaarvoice Community Manager.

When someone asks me what gets me most excited about working at Bazaarvoice, I have to talk about all the passion that I’ve found within this company. We have an amazing culture that fosters innovation and initiative. This message was reinforced when Brett asked us to read Tribes by Seth Godin and then utilize the principles we learned to take action.

One of our team members, Tony Capasso, decided to start a Tribe to raise our awareness of philanthropy. He started the Bazaarvoice Speaker Series and has brought in amazing speakers such as Doug Ulman, CEO of the Lance Armstrong Foundation. Most recently we had the privilege of hearing Nick Valvano, CEO of The V Foundation for Cancer Research, share his experiences in continuing his brother’s fight to battle cancer through research.

Nick showed us what differentiates The V Foundation amongst other organizations – the focus on showing people how they run their business and what they do with the donations to make it more personal for donors. This business model has proven great results: they have raised $80 million since 1994 and have 1100+ volunteers. However, my biggest take-away from his speech is that these results would not be possible without supporters. WE can truly make a difference. After hearing Nick mention a program called Show Your Spirit, an event encouraging supporters to engage in the cause, I was inspired. Shawn Gaide, another Bazaarvoice team member, and I decided to team up and start our own Tribe.

Show Your Spirit truly promotes Jim Valvano’s contagious motto: “Don’t Give Up…Don’t Ever Give Up!”. Each year at the start of March Madness, the V Foundation encourages companies, organizations, and schools to form teams to help raise funds for cancer research. Last year this campaign raised $300,000, and we want to help them surpass that goal.

In true Bazaarvoice style and Tribe fashion, we decided to execute! On Friday, March 20, Bazaarvoice participated in Show Your Spirit. People came to work sporting their favorite NCAA team gear and were encouraged to donate $5 to cancer research. We engaged the entire Austin office, UK team, and all of our partners as well.

We raised $410 in our Austin office and had a great time kicking off March Madness.

It was great to see everyone support a wonderful cause and know we are making a difference. The best part is seeing that, in a culture of openness and teamwork, Bazaarvoice employees are quick to offer support. This is the essence of our Tribe.

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Community, eCommerce

Heather Brunner Key Takeaways from SXSWi

March 19th, 2009 by Heather Brunner Chief Operations Officer

This post was guest-written by Melissa Lipscomb, Bazaarvoice Community Manager

Spring break in Austin means SXSW, an exciting celebration of music, film and web creativity. I spent the last few days at SXSW Interactive – the portion of the conference that’s dedicated to social media and web 2.0. Here are my top 10 takeaways:

  1. People expect conversations online. Regardless of the industry/type of site, end users expect to engage with brands and with other users on-line. It’s not enough to provide information to your customers, you have to allow them to interact with your site, with your brand, and with other customers. Of course, tools like Ratings & Reviews, Ask & Answer, and Bazaarvoice Stories build customer engagement and interaction.
  2. Customers expect brands to participate in the conversation. There was lots of discussion at SXSWi about the importance of building relationships with customers, rather than simply focusing on transactions. Responding to feedback (both positive and negative), answering questions and taking action on feedback are an important part of building credibility and trust with your customers.
  3. Customers want authenticity. Several panelists emphasized the value of brand representatives talking “like real people” not robots (or corporatebots), even (or maybe especially) in industries where we’ve come to expect corporate jargon and legalese (like financial services and insurance). 
  4. Online identities are converging. OpenID and Facebook Connect are enabling greater portability/sharing of online abilities between sites. Profiles are important – people are invested in their identities online and want to build their reputations and leverage what they’ve done in one community in the other places they hang out. The most social media savvy customers are aware of their personal brands and welcome opportunities to build their brands on the sites where they shop.
  5. Mobile and web are converging. Many people access the web primarily from their phones, others switch back and forth with the expectation the user experiences will be identical.
  6. Online and offline are converging. GPS technology brings the real world into the mix in a big way (for example, your phone alerting a social networking site of your physical location, which allows your online friends to join you in the real world). Users are less likely to draw a hard boundary between their on-line and off-line lives. MobileVoice brings online UGC into the brick and mortar store, allowing customers to view reviews on their phones.
  7. Filtering and aggregating the massive amounts of data online is critical. There are too many inputs and the most valuable technologies on the web are those that allow people to personalize what they see or provide rolled-up summaries. Filtering by tag or attribute and summarizing data in tag clouds or histograms allows customers to process large amounts of information and make a decision quickly.
  8. Twitter is everywhere. Some of the most compelling and interesting conversations were happening “back channel” via twitter during the panels. Panelists took questions and responded in real time to comments that were made on the twitter stream for each panel. Fast and pithy user-generated contentin real time is incredibly appealing to many people.
  9. Bazaarvoice is ahead of the pack. Admittedly, SXSW Interactive is a social media conference, not one focused specifically on e-commerce, but our ability to measure the success of user-generated content and deliver proven ROI for our clients stands out in an environment where many panelists were unsure about how to monetize UGC or how to measure results.
  10. Bazaarvoice has a great culture! Tony Hsieh (CEO of Zappos)  gave a fabulous speech about the culture at Zappos which was very reminiscent of the Bazaarvoice culture. In addition, Bazaarvoice CMO Sam Decker, hosted a core conversation on building a great corporate culture, which got lots of buzz and positive reactions.

This was a great conference; I look forward to seeing what next year brings!

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Marketing Strategy, MobileVoice, Ratings & Reviews, User-Generated Content, eCommerce

Greg Brown Putting Data to Work: Measuring the Impact of Merchandising Messaging on Your Web Site

March 17th, 2009 by Greg Brown Vice President of Retail and Travel, Americas

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of speaking about the impact of merchandising messaging at the EzRez Thought Leadership Summit, held in the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. With budgets being scrutinized today more than ever, it’s important that you not only measure your programs (your hypothesis), but continuously analyze and broadcast your results to help defend your budget (you don’t want to be the manager in the room that cannot defend your projects).

The focus of my presentation was on user-generated content (UGC), and how to measure social initiatives. As you are aware, Bazaarvoice provides social commerce solutions to a variety of organizations across many different industries. The hypothesis for engaging in social commerce is to get more visitors to the site, have them convert at a higher rate, spend more money, increase brand engagement, and return their products less frequently. But don’t stop there. It’s important to look beyond your hypothesis to determine the total impact of your assumptions (allowing you to both secure and defend your budget).

So where are the other areas of impact for UGC? Customer satisfaction is one. During his keynote at eTail in Phoenix last week, Larry Freed, President and CEO of Foresee Results, discussed the importance of measuring customer satisfaction. His hypothesis was that satisfaction drives conversion. This makes sense. Happy customers are more likely to buy your products. So how do you create a happy customer? By providing them the information they want, when they want it, and where they want it. According to Neilson Online, shoppers are demanding UGC as part of their shopping experience; 81 percent of online shoppers read online customer reviews over the holidays. If you give them the chance to read peer reviews, you have met their expectations. They will be happy. And, as Larry points out, if they are happy, they will be more likely to buy your products.

Let’s expand the hypothesis further. Are consumers in the store just as hungry for UGC as online shoppers? The answer is yes. The Web is a great mechanism for research and has a direct impact on in-store sales. According to BIGresearch, 92.5 percent of adults said they regularly or occasionally research products online before buying them in the store. Furthermore, eMarketer reports that for every $1 in online sales, the Internet influenced $3.45 of store sales.

So how do you marry the ease of research online and the demand for peer reviews with the comfort of purchasing in the store? Through mobile applications. Though in its infancy (according to ForeSee, only 29 percent of consumers have used their mobile device as part of their shopping experience), consumers are increasingly turning to their mobile phones to research products online while shopping in the store. ForeSee reports that 15 percent of surveyed shoppers used their mobile devices to go online to check product reviews. This is not insignificant, seeing that the number of smart phones is growing exponentially, and demand for UGC is over 80 percent. This is why Bazaarvoice recently launched MobileVoice; a solution that allows consumers to read peer reviews through their mobile devices.

But MobileVoice isn’t solely for the benefit of the consumer. As Joyce Hrinya, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Customer Service at Helzberg shared with me, Helzberg is excited to have their associates use MobileVoice in the store. The associate can share their expertise of a product and inject UGC from their mobile device to drive more sales for a better shopping experience, without the infrastructure costs associated with many POS terminals.

Helzberg is a great example of the proper way to continuously collect, measure, and analyze visitor behavioral data for the purpose of optimizing their business and their brand.

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Social Commerce Summit

Heather Brunner 4 Reasons to Put the Social Commerce Summit into your Training Budget

March 16th, 2009 by Heather Brunner Chief Operations Officer

Budgets are tight, and you’re trying to do the work of at least two people. So why should you plan to attend the Social Commerce Summit?

Because you’ll gain world-class training, learn from peers, meet leaders in the space, and get up-to-date, fast.

  1. Exposure to how the world’s largest brands do it. You’ll see real-world examples of success with Bazaarvoice solutions, from executives at some of the world’s largest companies. Speakers/instructors include CMOs, VPs, and more, from P&G, Dell, Best Buy, PETCO, and many more.
  2. Exclusive access to what works, what’s new, what’s next. This is the one place execs, experts, and product managers gather to frankly discuss what worked (and what didn’t). You’ll see the future of social commerce – and how it can impact your business – and how consumers react and interact with brands, today and tomorrow.
  3. Expand how user-generated content impacts your business. Learn to maximize the impact of programs to generate sales, improve the customer experience, and lower operational costs. Get user-generated content working for you.
  4. Engage even more deeply. Create face-to-face relationships with Bazaarvoice Community Managers, Bazaarvoice execs, and peers who face the same challenges you do. We’re all in this together; we’ll introduce you to those who can help.

Skip all those conferences that deliver fluff and flash. Make this part of your training budget, and the benefits will pay off the rest of the year – and longer. Register here. Now.

Austin in April is nothing less than delightful; see you there!

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Culture, Research

Brett Hurt OneSpot’s SXSWi News Widget

March 14th, 2009 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO

As part of my community focus in Austin, I advise four companies: Click Forensics, OneSpot, OtherInbox, and Socialware.  Companies like these, and of course Bazaarvoice, will lift us out of a bad economy because they create jobs.  For that among other reasons, I love being an entrepreneur.  I only do advisory work in Austin, because I believe you have to step up and serve your local community, especially in a small city like ours.

OneSpot recently raised their Series A, and I joined their Board of Directors.  SXSWi is a big show for them (as well as OtherInbox and Socialware), and they produced this shareable SXSWi news widget to show off their capabilities.  This is very addicting:

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New at Bazaarvoice

Sam Decker Q&A with Mike Maples, Jr. (new Bazaarvoice advisor & investor)

March 13th, 2009 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer

Behind a great company is a great board of directors, board of advisors, and investors. At Bazaarvoice, we count ourselves fortunate with advisors and investors who have chosen to put their time and resources behind our venture. Today, we’re pleased to continue the trend, and announce that Mike Maples, Jr. has joined as a Bazaarvoice advisor and investor!


Mike Maples, Jr. is the managing partner of Maples Investments, and was recently named as one of “8 Rising VC Stars” by Fortune Magazine for his investments in business and consumer technology companies. His background spans a variety of markets including consumer technology, small business, and the enterprise, and he has led various functions in product development, marketing, business development, and corporate strategy. Mike co-founded Motive and was responsible for worldwide product marketing at Tivoli. Now as an investor, he is behind investments such as Twitter, Digg, Spiceworks, Chegg, IMVU, and Aggregate Knowledge. See his investments here.

Mike shared some of his thoughts on joining Bazaarvoice as an investor and advisor, as well as his investment strategy and perspectives on the market:

Why did you invest in us when some investors are cautious of the “Web 2.0” space?  TechCrunch recently said that Web 2.0 is a bankrupt term.

I suppose it’s more accurate to consider the question in reverse.  I’ve been looking for the opportunity to invest in Bazaarvoice for quite some time and I am thrilled to be *permitted* to invest. I guess persistence does pay off sometimes!

In terms of the market space, and all of the talk of web 2.0, in my view the company’s success speaks for itself.  It’s customers read like a who’s-who of online commerce providers and the company has dared to be new and different in an environment characterized by a lot of me-too companies.  It has also discovered a very efficient business model that can reach scale without raising a lot of money.

What trends do you see in the marketplace that support the growth for our type of service?

The first generation of companies in the social web understood that user-generated content would be important for value creation and many of the companies I invested in earlier were the first to jump on this.  In my opinion, Bazaarvoice is the first company to marry user-generated content with user-generated *commerce*. Combining these two is very powerful because you have the architecture of participation characterized by communities, combined with a very straightforward and efficient way to monetize.

I believe that there will be several very interesting user-generated commerce plays (especially since eBay hasn’t moved quickly enough in recent years) and I think Bazaarvoice is the first in this new wave just as companies like Facebook, digg, and Twitter were pioneers of the user-generated content trend.

The other trend that is powerful is the shift from traditional “old media” style mass-marketing to peer-to-peer marketing enabled by relationships on the Internet.  Bazaarvoice is a leader in leveraging this and I am also working with 750 Industries, who plays firmly into this trend as well.

How does this investment align with your priorities and what you want to invest in?

At a high level, I believe that about 15 startups per year will set themselves apart in a fundamental way from the over 8,000 that will be funded.  If I had to reduce my strategy to one sentence, it would be “Find as many of the 15 as you can every year.”

Finding the 15 out of the 8,000 is a lot easier said than done!  My approach is to invest in companies that have a visionary founding team, a huge potential market, a fundamental advantage backed up with a network effect, modest capital requirements, and a unique value proposition for customers. I believe that Bazaarvoice has been a superperformer in these areas for some time.

As an investor in Digg, Twitter, and now Bazaarvoice, where do you see the “social space” going in the next five years?

The trends in technology innovation have switched from enterprise trickling down to consumer innovations scaling up.  The bellweather companies are now companies like LinkedIn, digg, Bazaarvoice, Twitter, and Facebook and they are the companies to watch to get a feel for what will happen with business solutions in the future.  There will be new types of companies in the business software and services arena that apply IT consumerization to solve problems that have in the past been solved by expensive and hard-to-use enterprise software.  Some of the companies I work with are already demonstrating this, such as Solarwinds, Spiceworks, Demandforce, Egnyte, and Hyper9.   Each of these firms leverage network effects, highly appealing user experiences, communities, and consumer internet sales and marketing methods to build their products and their businesses with great efficiency.

Five years from now the trend toward IT consumerization will be very pervasive and will impact small businesses and enterprises in a very fundmental way.  Traditional enterprise software companies will feel that this is very disruptive but the users of technology will be the big winners.

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Community, Customer Centricity, Marketing Strategy, Ratings & Reviews, Research, User-Generated Content, eCommerce

Sam Decker The New Rules of Engagement: Making Online Shopping Relevant to Consumers

March 12th, 2009 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer

The economy may be plummeting, but 61 percent of shoppers say their buying confidence can be boosted via online resources, according to recent study results from “Online Retail: Driving Relevant Experiences,” presented in New York on March 3 by Patti Freeman Evans of Jupiter Research, a Forrester Research company.

A panel discussion followed, featuring Patti Freeman Evans; Bryan Eisenberg, author of Call to Action, Waiting For Your Cat to Bark, and Always Be Testing; Mike Svatek, VP of Product Strategy for Bazaarvoice; and David Selinger, CEO and founder of richrelevance. The event was co-hosted by Bazaarvoice and richrelevance.

Forty-eight percent of online shoppers plan to reduce their expenditure over the next 12 months. With spending budgets thus lowered, customers are more anxious than ever to validate their purchases, sometimes after utilizing three or more sources. Consumers also make fewer in-store impulse buys and use online resources, such as ratings and reviews, earlier in the purchasing process, Evans said.

Evans challenged her audience to rethink the relationships they currently build with e-Commerce consumers. People return to familiar environments in difficult times, and savvy retailers will recognize their customers’ needs to create an atmosphere of trust and value.

Panelist Bryan Eisenberg encouraged companies to use review language gathered from their Web site to re-write their product copy. As he put it, “Do you ‘get’ your customer? Are you speaking the same language?”

If you missed this event, join us for another exclusive briefing by Patti Freeman Evans in San Francisco on March 26, 2009. The event is free, but registration is limited; register today.

The New Rules of Engagement: Make it Relevant
Online Retail: Driving Relevant Experiences

March 26, 2009
9:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.
The Palace Hotel
San Francisco, CA

Register now at www.bmmreg.com/Engaged. See you there!

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Customer Centricity, Marketing Strategy, Multichannel, Ratings & Reviews, User-Generated Content, eCommerce

Heather Brunner Optimizing Customer Voice: How Consumer Feedback Affects Your Entire Organization

March 11th, 2009 by Heather Brunner Chief Operations Officer

This post was guest-written by Heather Lippincott, Bazaarvoice Community Manager.

On March 4, Bazaarvoice hosted a webinar focused on the benefits of user-generated content (UGC) throughout the entire organization. Moderated by Bazaarvoice’s Heather Brunner, the webinar cited exemplary statistics from Bazaarvoice clients Skymall and Oriental Trading Company.

UGC provides intelligence and value throughout the organization, not just in marketing. Forward-thinking companies allow their feedback to improve their overall business structure. In addition to the obvious benefits to sales, UGC can lower operational costs such as reduced returns and support calls, as well as helping reliability departments pinpoint design flaws or manufacturing errors. However, successful permeation requires grassroots initiative within the company as well as from the top down.

Retailer Skymall has integrated UGC throughout all of their customer touch points – on their Web site, mobile site, through their catalog as well as on their CRM system. Many of their phone customers ask, “Is this a good product?” With reviews linked to the CRM system, customer service representatives can provide shoppers with real customer feedback, resulting in higher conversion, higher AOV, and shorter transaction time. The agents also have insight into every reviewer interaction, reaching out to those whose reviews are exceptional, either positive or negative. As a result, Skymall has successfully transformed annoyed customers into happy repeat purchasers.

Oriental Trading Company (OTC) pulled together an eight-person SWAT team, bridging the merchandising, marketing, and inventory departments, to break down review content by the action needed and the department responsible. Thanks to this system, the team were able to catch a design flaw based on reviewers’ comments. After investigation, they took the item off their Web site, replaced inventory, and publicly responded to customers about the flaw, creating additional processes to alert them to similar failures in future.

To date, OTC has responded to more than 700 products, updating product images on 10 percent; updating product copy on 19 percent; discontinuing 38 percent; and returning 32 percent to their vendors. As a result, OTC has seen a 16 percent increase in conversion of 4- and 5-star products.

The voice of consumers is powerful for your enterprise. Listen to your customers. Take action. Then close the loop. If you missed this webinar, ask your Bazaarvoice Community Manager to send you the link.

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