10. New “Participation Chain” White Paper – Tying contributions together to gain deeper customer engagement… and results! My white paper with Ze Frank explored the cycle of engagement brands should employ to keep the customer conversation going. You can download the full white paper here.

9. How one man got a whole mob dancing. A video from the Sasquatch Music Festival illustrated the ideal growth cycle of an online community.

8. Bazaarvoice Named #1 Place to Work. The Austin Business Journal recognized Bazaarvoice as the Best Place to Work.

7. “Bad” reviews are good for your brand. I addressed a common point of hesitation for brands considering embracing UGC – the fear of negative feedback.

6. Argos UK sets new Bazaarvoice record for number of submissions in one day! Our biggest European client doubled our previous submission record, thanks to an effective holiday review strategy.

5. The “Man Purse” in ‘The Hangover’. Our CEO Brett Hurt found humor in the very highly-rated “man purse” featured in Warner Brothers’ The Hangover.

4. Rubbermaid Improves Customer Experience through Ratings & Reviews. Manager of eMarketing & Brand Communications at Rubbermaid shared the brand’s strategy toward negative reviews.

3. Leadership Themes from My Talk at The Wharton School. Brett highlighted the key leadership themes from his talk at his alma mater.

2. Social media drives sales — if you know how to use it. I discussed the ways brands should use social media to drive real sales results – not just number of fans.

1. Netflix vs. Blockbuster: Round Four (Lights Out?). Brett analyzed the word-of-mouth lessons learned from Netflix’s (won?) battle with Blockbuster.

2010 promises to be a defining year for social commerce, so stay tuned to Bazaarblog. Happy New Year from all of us at Bazaarvoice!

Trendwatching’s December 2009 Trend Briefing covered the “10 Crucial Consumer Trends for 2010.” The entire report is worth the read, but we gave special attention to trend number three: real-time reviews.

With authentic, real-time, 24/7 customer opinions available to anyone and everyone via the internet, shoppers in 2010 will know exactly what others think of your brand at any point in time.

• Our inherent need for instant gratification – Trendwatching calls it “NOWism” – leads consumers to share, in real-time, everything they’re doing, buying, and experiencing.
• Universal online access through netbooks, laptops, and mobile allows consumers to broadcast these experiences immediately.
• The sheer mass of available online opinions makes this content real-time, as at any moment someone somewhere is sharing their authentic opinion on a topic or brand via the internet.
• Social media encourages the immediacy of this content, and search engines are shifting toward a similar model.
• These platforms make it increasingly easier for consumers to group the flood of real-time UGC into useable streams, to discover what’s being said about topics or brands right now.

So what’s a brand to do?

Feed the NOW

Give your customers what they’re hungry for: encourage real-time review of your products, services and brand by making UGC contribution and consumption as easy as possible.

• Make your content available everywhere potential customers may be researching your product. The reviews you gather on your e-commerce site are the most informative and helpful. Make these reviews available on mobile sites. Manufacturers, push this content to retailer sites.
• Push customer opinions into the conversational space of social media. Brands like Walmart and Best Buy are doing this very well, encouraging discussion of their products on Facebook and Twitter.
• Draw customers back into the purchase path through these conversations. Tools like Social Network Accelerators let your contributors push their opinions out of your e-commerce site and into their own networks, linking back to product pages to draw in new customers and contributors.

Your customers will be talking about your brand in real-time in 2010. Brands who act now to use this coming trend to their advantage will be the e-commerce leaders of the new year.

At the Social Commerce Summit, you’ll be speaking to hundreds of manufacturers, retailers, and service providers who want to open themselves up to learning from their own customers. How does “thinking inside the box” relate to them? How have brands responded thus far to your message?

Well, brands can't actually respond to anything. Maybe that's the whole point. Brands aren't alive. They're myths. The brand was invented in the earliest days of corporatism, as a way to recreate the experience of a human relationship with the person you used to buy from. You bought shoes from a cobbler, beer from the beermeister, and so on. You had relationships with those people.

The industrial age meant separating producers from consumers, so brands needed to be invented to bridge that gap. The Quaker on the box of oatmeal helped people feel as good about a long-distance, packaged product as they did about the one made by their friend. And mass media arose to broadcast those myths and images across the country, so that people would have relationships to brands before they ever even saw the products.

In an era of social media, mass media is no longer exclusively the province of brands. It is reconnecting people to one another. So traditional branding ends up being more of an obstacle than a vehicle.

Instead, companies need to learn to communicate. People inside the company need to communicate – socially- with consumers beyond the company's walls. And consumers need to be communicating – socially – with one another. All of this communication will end up being based on what actually happens inside the company.

I know it sounds absurd in a post-Jack Welch universe, but the very best way to create good, positive  communication about your products is to have people in your company who have at least some knowledge of how the products work, how they are made, and how to improve them.

This means that successful companies in an era of social and transparent communication actually have to have some involvement in the products they're making. They need to hire people who know about the industry. If they make clothes, for example, they need to have some clothing designers inside the company, working with them.

It may sound sarcastic, but to do well in the current brand universe, the company is actually going to have to focus on the thing it says it does. So the Gap becomes less about whether they can get Sarah Jessica Parker in an ad, and more about making good sexy jeans. Sarah can't do the communicating anymore. The jeans – and the people making and wearing them – must do that.

What’s the most important thing companies can do to continuously innovate?

Put the experts in the middle, not at the bottom. Create a culture dedicated to the industry they are in. Share secrets with the rest of the industry, which will make everyone realize you care more about your future than your past. If you are ready to share your past successes, it means you are the place that is innovating for the future.

Measure your success not just in quarterly reports, but in unconventional metrics – like how many unsolicited resumes from competent people are coming in?

What’s the best example of a company that’s innovating well and why?

There's no best example. Lots of companies are doing it in different ways. Some – like P&G – innovate well and poorly. Apple used to innovate well but now looks to be innovating less so. Google is innovating, but with no clear direction. It's a more complicated question than finding a best. But that's why we're going to get together to talk about all this.

We’re looking forward to hearing Douglas speak in April. Find out more about the Social Commerce Summit here.

This blog post is part of a series highlighting Bazaarvoice interns.

So, what’s it really like to work at Bazaarvoice? We’re asking interns for the real scoop. Manu Aggarwal joined Bazaarvoice three months ago as an intern in the Business Development department. He sat down with us to answer some questions about getting hired and making the most of an internship at Austin’s Best Place to Work.

How did you hear about Bazaarvoice? What made you want to work here?

I heard about Bazaarvoice through a professor and decided to do some more research.  The company impressed me because I believed in its value proposition both from a personal and professional perspective. Before I buy a product or service, I like to research online and see what others have to say about it. Bazaarvoice enables that kind of interaction. And being voted the best place to work in Austin definitely sparked my interest.

How did you apply for your position? What did you do to get hired?

I saw an opening on the AccessUT website and immediately applied. After I submitted my resume, that same afternoon I had a phone interview. The next day I came in for an on-site interview and met with each member of my team, but that was not all. I was given a final project, and came in one last time to present my findings a week later.

How was your Bazaarvoice internship different from other jobs you’ve had in the past?

My internship here has been different because I do not feel like an intern. I am given important, visible work that can help my team achieve its goals and drive value for the organization. I am expected to contribute ideas on how to improve Bazaarvoice and my team’s performance. I have never experienced that same level of trust and expectation in my other internships.

What was the most important thing you learned in your internship?

The most important thing I have learned so far is to ask questions. It is important that I understand the value of the tasks given to me and their impact. As a result, I not only understand the business better but also know where I fit in to help achieve our goals.

What advice would you give others who’d like to intern here?

Working at Bazaarvoice is unique because you have an opportunity to help shape the future direction of the company, even as an intern. When such an opportunity is given, it is also expected that you contribute, not just as an employee but to the overall community and culture. If you are curious, passionate, and willing to learn from some really smart people, you will excel here. If you just want to go through the motions, do not even bother applying.

If you’re qualified for a Bazaarvoice internship, we’re hiring! If you know a passionate, talented, creative individual looking for the right place to build a career, refer them here.

Stay tuned to our blog series for more on our interns and the cool opportunities at Bazaarvoice.

As a society, we benchmark everything. For example, is your baby the proper weight for his age? We compare that with the benchmark, or the typical average among similar babies, along with other factors. The same is true with businesses.

When we use benchmarks, we keep several things in mind.

• What are the goals? Specifically, what are the micro-goals and what is the main goal that your executives are going to care about?
• How are you measuring your goals? What are your Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s)? Do these provide enough information and context for your company to take action? (I found this slide deck helpful in differentiating between a metric and a KPI.)
• Who are you benchmarking against? Who does your company aspire to be? The best in the industry, the best overall, and/or your company’s personal best?
• What do you plan to do with the results? Do you have a project plan to take action? Who are the stakeholders in your company that can use this information?

All of these decisions have to be made by you as a company. One of Avinash’s blogs highlights BP’s presentation in which they measure their customer experience and website performance against some of the best companies. BP does not limit themselves to just their competitors, but compares themselves with companies who they can learn from and be challenged by.

At Bazaarvoice, our Community Managers urge our clients to set out a plan for success, including their business goals and KPIs. When a client is launching, the benchmarks help determine expected performance and initial goals. Once a client has been live, they can check how they are doing and adjust their UGC marketing campaigns and promotions accordingly. Whether it is highlighting their top contributors or sending out a post-purchase email, Bazaarvoice best practices with strategies from Community Managers have been proven to drive UGC volume.

Benchmark data is just another way that we provide value to our clients. For example, if one of our clients is lagging behind in Product Coverage (percent of active products with content) against their industry benchmark, then they may want to dig deeper into the data. One possibility may be that the client has new products that haven’t been reviewed yet, so they will need to consistently run a post-purchase email. Another possibility may be that only certain products are being reviewed, and you might want to target purchases on particular products. Another case may be that some products aren’t even being viewed online.

By viewing the Product Coverage in context with the metric Products Viewed with Reviews, you may see that your product coverage is 35% but your products viewed with reviews is 75%. You can interpret this to mean that although 65% of your products have reviews, only 25% of those products are actually being viewed on your website. Your action item may be to reevaluate your site usability and/or revisit your product catalog. All in all, benchmarks can help pinpoint your strengths and weaknesses, but it is ultimately up to you to take action!

Here are the major points our survey found.

Social must drive revenues, not just web metrics. 81% of respondents expect to link their annual revenues to their social media investment in 2010, up from just 44% of CMOs in 2009. Social marketing metrics that focus solely on web goals (traffic, page views, fans) are starting to be supplanted by metrics like conversion, revenue, and average order value that track to the bottom line.

CMOs unsure about the exact impact of current social tools. 53% of respondents are unsure about their return on Twitter; 50% are unsure about the direct value of LinkedIn; and 50% are not sure how to measure the impact of industry blogs on business metrics. Customer ratings and reviews is the best understood marketing activity from an ROI perspective.

As social spending grows, so do revenue expectations: More than 64% of CMOs reported that they plan to increase their social media budgets within the next year. Nearly three-fourths of respondents (72%) who did not attach revenue to social spend in 2009 reported they would create such a link in 2010. CMOs who are already seeing a strong link between social media and revenue in 2009 expect this impact to be even more profound in 2010, with the majority of respondents (81%) expecting to attribute up to 10% of their 2010 revenues to their social media investments.

Social initiatives must now track to the bottom line. In 2009, the top metrics tracked for social media initiatives included site traffic, number of page views, and number of fans. In 2010, CMOs expect top metrics to track more closely to P&L business goals – not just web-related goals. The fastest-growing metrics for 2010 include revenue, conversion, and average order value, which grew 333%, 174%, and 150% respectively.

CMOs tap more consumer-generated content to shape products or services: Today, 80% of CMOs use customer insights to shape decision-making at the executive level and 90% of those surveyed use customer stories and product suggestions to shape a brand’s product or services. By the end of 2010, almost all CMOs say they plan to incorporate a broader range of content sources including customer reviews (59% increase), pre-sales Q&A (24% increase) and Twitter (407% increase) to influence product decisions.

In short, social isn’t just for the “cool” factor anymore – now it must drive real sales results, just like any other media. Download the full study here for all the details.

Emotional stories help shoppers find heart-felt gifts

The holidays evoke all kinds of emotions, and retailers capture this with Stories campaigns. Beauty products brand Thymes asks consumers to “Share Your Holiday Tradition,” and Burt’s Bees asks shoppers, “Who Is Your Reason for Giving?” Each brand offers a chance to win a prize while honoring something or someone special for the season.   Philosophy links the holiday spirit directly with e-commerce by asking customers to ”Share your Holiday Magical Moment” and including a link to their favorite philosophy products. When a shopper reads a story they connect with, they can immediately link to the writer’s favorite products and buy them.

Urban Outfitters helps shoppers find the perfect gift

Urban Outfitters came up with the perfect way to solve any holiday gifting woe by launching Ask & Answer Holiday Edition to help UO fans give gift givers ideas for their favorite people. Customers can also link directly to the product they suggest, driving shoppers directly to purchase pages. My favorite question on the site was posted by a mom who  asked “What should I get for my 14 year old daughter?” adding that “she  likes to be a trend setter, she's always trying something new, and our sense of style really differs.” The answers submitted are sincere, varied, and fall into many different price categories – giving the mom a plethora of choices.

Customer feedback helps givers uncover gift options

Customer reviews definitely help gift shoppers. Home décor retailer Wrapables helped its customers with a holiday-themed email featuring top-rated gifts, along with discounts on these customer faves.  Urban Retreat’s online luxury hair and beauty store, Beautique.com, sent an email focusing on products that make a woman look great in her little black dress, which included top-rated products to show shoppers which products women love best.  Ice.com has a whole category dedicated to top-rated gifts for him, her, and the top-rated overall gifts. Segmenting top-rated lists adds an even richer experience for the consumer –  if Ice.com had only featured a top-rated gift guide, none of the men’s products would be featured!

These are just a few examples from hundreds of clients; we’d love to hear how user-generated content has helped you find the perfect gifts this season! And if you’d like to see more holiday promotional ideas, click here.

By seeing ratings and reviews for what they really are – an integral part of your entire business strategy, and not just a widget on your site – you’ll be well on your way to attaining maximum value from consumer-generated content. Check out the article here.