We have a mission statement at Bazaarvoice: “Changing the world, one authentic conversation at a time.” It’s not just a slogan on our website for me – it’s truly our mission and our cause. Authentic, aggregated feedback and conversations have the power to change so much more than commerce: education, government, workplace environment – things that carry personal importance to me, as well as to my company.  Think about this: this is the first time in human history that word of mouth, which has been with us since the dawn of humanity and the days of the earliest bartering and bazaars, is digitally archived – and it will undoubtedly change the world.

But if we don’t protect the integrity of these conversations – if they aren’t truly authentic – their power to change the world is weakened. That’s why, when I read in Slate that Zappos and other retailers have begun editing their customer reviews for spelling and grammar, I knew I had to respond.

As the market leader, we at Bazaarvoice consider ourselves stewards of our industry – and as such, we have a duty to protect it. I wrote the piece below for Forbes’s CIO Central blog, where it was originally published. I’m excited to discuss this with you on the original post, or here on our blog. I look forward to hearing your perspective.

From Forbes CIO Central blog:

Do customer reviews peppered with grammar mistakes and typos hurt your brand and dampen sales? Zappos – and a growing number of online brands – think so. The world’s largest online shoe retailer angered some “creative spellers” last month after a Slate article described how the company uses hundreds of freelancers to doctor online customer reviews, correcting grammar and typos.

Companies “clean up” customer reviews based on the rationale, supported by recent research, that well-written reviews, whether positive or negative, sell more products. So a gushing review claiming to “luv the thin straps on this sandale” will actually turn off potential buyers, whereas a well-crafted critique of the same shoe – “I appreciated the workmanship of this sandal, but found the straps too narrow” – will lure more buyers.

According to Panos Ipeirotis, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business who studies consumer reviews on the Internet, “A well-written review tends to inspire confidence about the product, even if the review is negative. Typically, such reviews are perceived as objective and thorough.”

The problem is that a New Yorker reader skimming reviews of a jazz CD has a very different view of “well-written” than a tween shopping for a cute Katy Perry tee. Both want the review to be authentic, informative and useful – but the tone and word choice couldn’t be more foreign to the other. By trying to impose a uniform standard on a very diverse audience, companies that “correct” customer reviews are making a big mistake.

Why? Because tampering with customer reviews erodes the authenticity of reviews and ultimately destroys customer trust in your brand. It’s human nature to trust authentic content, and people have an uncanny way of sniffing out false and fraudulent content. The reason that customer reviews have been so effective at driving sales is precisely because the content doesn’t sound like marketing copy. It’s real, unlike the “perfect” world of marketing.

Think about it this way. Would you correct a friend’s tweet or Facebook post? Interrupt someone explaining why they love a certain restaurant to point out a clumsy turn-of-phrase? Nitpick a colleague for using shorthand in emails sent from his iPhone? This level of social intrusion is almost unthinkable. Yet companies do this to their customers when they “correct” their reviews. By doctoring authentic customer content to make it more uniform, a brand dismisses the tremendous diversity of people, tones, life phases, geographies, and preferences that make up the rich social web and the cultural differences between genders, generations, and geographies.

Zappos uses Amazon Mechanical Turk to “fix” customer reviews. Using the service, Zappos assigns HITs – human intelligence tasks – to freelancers, providing strict copyediting guidelines modeled on bug-fixing routines in computer programming. But even if you’re editing reviews in a subtle way – just fixing a typo here and there or correcting the spelling for all mentions of your brand – you’re still imposing your voice on your customers.

The future of e-commerce is about engaging customers in an open dialogue, not shutting down authentic, real feedback by “correcting” users. If you look at an assortment of reviews across some our client sites, you find a tremendous diversity of tone, jargon, and slang. Sure, there are a few spelling mistakes, but what comes across in successful review programs is an authentic open forum where customers’ opinions are valued.

So why do some companies insist on fixing spelling mistakes in reviews? The answer lies in “classic” marketer thinking. For decades, marketers were used to the unidirectional communication mode – pushing messages at consumers in hopes they’d get people to notice the brand and buy its products. But social media has changed the company-customer equation faster than anyone could have predicted even five years ago.

Even highly innovative and creative companies like Zappos sometimes get caught in the net (no pun intended) of trying to maintain control over their brand experience. Zappos is a hyper-modern company that has written the textbook on passionate customer service and incredible corporate culture and for that, I admire them very much. It was also among the first to really understand and use the power of social networks like Twitter to drive brand and business growth – but among the last you’d expect to behave in an “old-school” way when it comes to social. The Zappos experience shows how incredibly hard it can be to turn control over to your customers. But the new marketing relationship demands it. As explained by James Gilmore in Authenticity, humans crave authenticity from each other and from brands.

Today, customers expect brands to engage in a multi-directional and experiential conversation with them. The highest-performing businesses regularly use consumer insights in 80% of sales and merchandising decisions, according to an article in GOOD Magazine. In other words, smart brands understand the power of authentic word of mouth to drive sales – but it has to be “authentic” to work. Doctored reviews are not authentic, and they can even be insulting to the original author. Early on in our business, we learned that people who submit reviews return three times on average just to see if they posted. Can you imagine their reaction where they see that someone edited their voice?

Understandably, many companies struggle with leaving reviews untouched. What if someone posts a flaming review that’s also riddled with grammar mistakes and typos? It’s never a great moment to read a review like that, but unless it includes profanity or offensive content, let it stand – and reach out the disgruntled customer directly offering to remedy his problem. The fewer gag rules you place on your customers, the more authentic and valuable their feedback will be. After years of helping thousands of companies implement customer review programs, we’ve learned again and again that negative or “ugly” reviews are actually a gift. They open the door to a dialogue and enable brands to quickly address any problems that arise. Because reviews are written for altruistic reasons, they can be the best source of customer intelligence and marketing research for the brand – more trusted than the traditional survey or the focus group.

To correct a conversation is to corrupt it. Don’t make the mistake of “correcting” your customers’ reviews. Everyone, even the worst spellers, deserves to be heard. Who are you to judge what slang stays and goes? You wouldn’t judge them in the store (at least not out loud) by correcting their words, and you shouldn’t do so online. Let them be who they are, let them act altruistically to help each other with no specter of being monitored by a grammar coach, and people who are like them will be more influenced and help your sales even more long term.

]]> http://www.bazaarvoice.com/blog/2011/06/10/erasing-authenticity-when-correcting-is-corrupting/feed/ 14 http://www.bazaarvoice.com/blog/2011/03/02/friends-vs-strangers-pt-2-how-to-build-trust-in-your-customers%e2%80%99-words/ http://www.bazaarvoice.com/blog/2011/03/02/friends-vs-strangers-pt-2-how-to-build-trust-in-your-customers%e2%80%99-words/#comments Wed, 02 Mar 2011 15:32:16 +0000 Brett Hurt http://www.bazaarvoice.com/blog/?p=6275

In my last post, I addressed the issue of friends vs. strangers when it comes to delivering trusted opinions to shoppers online. Shoppers can’t always get the information they need from their friends, so brands should gather opinions from their customers – strangers to other shoppers – to help shoppers find the right products for them. In combination, brands should use the power of social networks to amplify the effects. To understand how to make strangers’ opinions more trustworthy for shoppers, first consider the question: Why do we trust our friends?

Ask brands which products to buy and they all say the same thing – their own. As consumers, we don’t trust brands to tell us which products are the best, because they are naturally biased. They want us to buy their products, the source of their livelihood.

This is a large part of what makes recommendations from friends trustworthy. I know the person recommending, so I trust their motives – they presumably aren’t benefitting if I buy the HTC Evo versus the iPhone4; they’re just in it to help me out. And while to a somewhat smaller degree, opinions from strangers online are trustworthy for the same reason. We learned a few years ago that the number one motivation for people writing reviews is altruism – a desire to help others. With the exception of astroturfing, reviewers don’t stand to gain if I follow their recommendation – they’re just writing to help others shop.

At the end of the day, shoppers just want trusted information to help them buy, leading to better experiences in their life free of buyer's remorse. It’s good news for brands: a relationship between the shopper and reviewer is just one important factor in a long list of factors that affect trust. As a brand, your job is to gather opinions, work to keep them positive (by embracing customer oxygen), and work to make those opinions more trustworthy to your shoppers.

So, how can brands build trust? Here are a few factors that contribute to the trustworthiness of opinions, and what you can do as a brand to boost these factors.

Volume

There is trust and safety in numbers. The average Facebook user has 130 friends in their network. For most brands, achieving a significant volume of advocates within each potential customer’s network is currently unrealistic.

By amassing a large collection of strangers’ opinions, however, brands can reach a trustworthy aggregate opinion – Gladwell might call it a tipping point of trust. If three strangers rate a washer-dryer set four stars, then no, maybe a shopper won’t take their word for it. But if 150 strangers give it a four-star average rating, their aggregate opinion is a lot more relevant, and often more accurate than an individual opinion – Surowiecki called this the “wisdom of crowds.”

Best practices for driving review volume could fill another blog post, but some of the most effective are also the simplest:

• Post-purchase emails. Send emails to your customers shortly after they purchase, inviting them to review the products.
• Leader boards. Display a running leader board of your most active reviewers, and recognize them in your marketing. It’s good ego capital for the leaders, and creates aspiration among other reviewers to be more active.
• Contests. Giveaways are one of the best ways to break through the noise of the inbox and drive review volume in the short term.

Relatability

“Is this reviewer like me? Are they using the product the way I want to use it?” If a shopper can relate to the reviewer or the way they’ve used the product, the review becomes more relevant. Among mothers, for example, 73% feel they find trustworthy information about products in online communities focused on parenting.

Take our client Golfsmith. In a sport like golf, there are a lot of factors specific to the individual golfer to consider when choosing a driver, for instance. Do your drives hook left or slice right? What’s your swing speed? To increase relatability, brands can employ:

• Profiles. Allow reviewers to create a profile, giving context to their reviews. Your friends all started out as strangers; getting to know someone better can make them more trustworthy. Golfsmith’s user profiles include information like skill level, frequency of play, handicap, and favorite brand. All of a user’s reviews, questions, answers, and even stories should be included in their profile.
• Filtering. Allow shoppers to filter reviews based on profile aspects to find reviewers like them. For example, a shopper may narrow a search for Wii games to games rated four stars or higher by mothers with children ages ten and under.

Expertise

For a shopper to trust a stranger, brands should answer their question, “Says who?” Turn your brand advocates into trusted experts to create your own influencers. You can do this using:

• Helpfulness voting. Crowdsource your trust-building by letting users decide which reviews are the most helpful, trustworthy, expert. If 18 people vote a review helpful, it means 18 people trusted the review enough to let it help them make a decision. Shoppers feel safer trusting a reviewer knowing others did too.
• Badging. Badge your most active advocates as “Top Contributors” or “Most Helpful” to denote experts.
• Profiles. Again, giving context to a reviewer can increase their trustworthiness, and even give them expert status (evoking the aspiring maven in many of us). If a user’s profile shows that they’ve reviewed dozens of products and received hundreds of helpfulness votes, the reviewer is more trustworthy to shoppers.

Notice the overlap between these factors of trust. Volume is a way to build expertise, expertise can boost relatability… There’s no concrete formula here, no magic equation for the ideal mix of opinions from friends and strangers, experts and average Joes. The right balance for your brand will depend on a number of factors – what you’re selling and who your shoppers are, to name a few.

The bottom line is, the world is a more enjoyable place (for brands and for their customers) when shoppers find the right products for them – through whatever combination of friends, strangers, advertising, and location leads them to purchase. There’s no one element that makes a recommendation trustworthy to every shopper – not even a real-life relationship. The best strategy for brands is to listen to customers, and drive a combination of these trust-building elements to make customers’ recommendations relevant to as many shoppers as possible.

New report: CMOs share top insights on the bottom line of social

We surveyed top CMOs to get the real story about how they use social media. 90% of CMOs participate in three or more social media marketing activities. Here's your chance to see what's most important — and most impactful.

I'm at TED this week, and I've been thinking about the extraordinary rise of and rush to Facebook. During the Executive Afternoon at last year's Shop.org Annual Summit, Josh Goldman of Norwest Venture Partners surprised the room when he downplayed the value of customer reviews, saying Facebook friends will matter far more than strangers. Shoppers know their friends, he said, so a friend’s opinion is more trustworthy than a stranger’s. I’m excited to discuss this idea with Josh next week – we’ll both be on the Shop.org Innovate keynote venture capital panel in San Francisco. For now, I’ll share my thoughts here.

I absolutely agree – as we all do at Bazaarvoice – that recommendations from friends (here meaning social network connections) are trusted among shoppers. That’s why we’ve enabled shoppers to filter content to find reviews from their Facebook friends. That’s also why we’ve integrated our products with Facebook, to collect reviews, answers, and stories from users on the social network. And that’s also one of the reasons Facebook is keynoting our Social Commerce Summit in April.

So yes, shoppers trust their friends’ opinions. That doesn’t make them the only trustworthy opinions shoppers seek. And all friends start out as strangers.

Word of whose mouth?

We may call our Facebook connections “friends,” but the social network is mostly powered by “strangers.” The average Facebook user has 130 friends, which for most is well above the number of truly trusted friends they consult with on a regular basis – Malcolm Gladwell documented this fact in The Tipping Point. The remainder are casual acquaintances whose input may be no more reliable or valuable than opinions from complete strangers.

The basic concept of word of mouth assumes that strangers’ opinions matter. How many times have you seen a movie because your friend “heard it was good”? Who did they hear it from – someone who saw the movie, or someone else who heard it was good? Recommendations flow through networks of people, influencing people the original recommender has never met.

Arguing that friends’ opinions are the only opinions future shoppers will seek ignores important context and age-old human behavior, dating back to the original tribes and bazaars. Consider the following shopping scenarios.

You need an expert. For some purchases, shoppers want more experienced recommendations than their friends may be able to provide. No one (I hope) signs a lease on a Honda Civic solely because a friend recommends it. For some buying decisions, especially highly-considered or highly-expensive purchases, a friend’s opinion alone won’t be enough to convince a shopper to buy – they need an expert.

Your needs or preferences are different than your friends’. If your friend uses their phone mostly for texting and checking social networks, but you need a phone for viewing business presentations while traveling, the same phone may not be best for both of you. Not all friends have the same needs, and shoppers won’t always have a friend who shares theirs. The Internet gives shoppers access to people like them, using a product the way the shopper hopes to use it.

You’re just browsing for something new. The wisdom of crowds is especially powerful in enabling the discovery of new needs and wants. Say, like me, you like Nine Inch Nails (lead singer Trent Reznor was behind the Oscar-winning score to The Social Network), and you’re looking for new music. According to Amazon, people who like NIN tend to like Modwheelmood. This recommendation is generated by the opinions and purchase behavior of complete strangers who happen to share your music tastes. Who cares if your friends haven’t heard of the new band?

You want to be different. Some shoppers may even prefer that their friends haven’t heard of a new band, product, or service. Many consumers get a sense of satisfaction from being the “first” in a group to like or buy something – look at the popularity of exclusive online shopping sites and secret sales, or the shared desire of men and women to be brand insiders online. There is a lot of social satisfaction for some in being the maven – the go-to source of knowledge about whatever brand, interest, or place suits you. Dmitri Siegel, VP of Marketing for Urban Outfitters, echoed this at our last Summit: many of UO’s target customers want to be the only person in their circle of friends wearing a certain garment. Reviews from strangers help them find clothes from people like them like, without replicating their friends’ closets.

Your privacy is a concern. Even among friends, privacy can be a concern. Shoppers don’t necessarily want their friends to know everything about their buying activity. This could be due to the sensitivity of what they’re purchasing – maybe you don’t want your friends to know you’re looking for the best dandruff shampoo – or it may come from a desire to be unique, as previously discussed. Opinions from strangers online help these shoppers find the right products for them, while maintaining the safety of anonymity.

Different decisions require different information, and shoppers can’t always get the information they need from their friends. Smart brands will gather as many customer opinions as they can to meet the needs of as many shoppers as possible, and work to make those opinions trustworthy – even though they’re from strangers. Incorporating Facebook can lead to greater influence (and therefore likelihood to buy) but it isn't the panacea – nothing is, including customer reviews.

Update: Part 2 of this series has been posted, and is available here.

New report: CMOs share top insights on the bottom line of social

We surveyed top CMOs to get the real story about how they use social media. 90% of CMOs participate in three or more social media marketing activities. Here's your chance to see what's most important — and most impactful.

The new Ford Focus lineup. Image courtesy of Automotive Rhythms

Last year, in May, I wrote about a dozen big trends and business model mash-ups. This was one of our more popular posts for the year, and I've had a lot on my mind since then.  One aspect of blogging I love is that it puts you on record, which brings you back to some of your previous posts, as you'll see below.

As an American, I often observe how we have a very short-term memory when it comes to the news.  So I personally try hard to kick this habit and look into stories long after the short-term drama wears off.  Then you really learn.  It’s like reading the last chapter of a novel that ties it all together for you.  So, with that in mind, I would like to share four things I've been thinking recently (and there are social commerce lessons in here too):

1. The rebound of the American car company

The WSJ had a fantastic opinion piece by Paul Ingrassia on Jan. 15th about this (tip: if you are not a subscriber to the WSJ, plug in the title of the article on Google and then click through and you’ll find the entire article).  After near death, Ford and GM most recently posted net income of $6.4 billion and $4.8 billion, respectively, on much lower sales units.  GM recently emerged from bankruptcy and pulled off a successful IPO; they had to shutter or sell many brands, including Pontiac, Mercury, Saturn, Hummer, Saab, Jaguar, and Range Rover.

In April of 2006, I wrote about General Motors consumer-generated ads and opened my post with the prediction that someday, people would recognize GM's decision to put their brand in the hands of their customers as the reason for their turnaround. I was wrong – their turnaround came from big financial restructuring, forcing them to right-size.  Or did it?  Could it be that GM's adoption of blogging, and therefore more transparency with themselves and customers, actually helped cause the sea change of behavior that they needed?  Julian Assange certainly believes that transparency leads to better outcomes, although he goes about it in a very disruptive way (note: we knew Wikileaks would be a powerful movement and I first wrote about it in March of 2008, theorizing that it could radically transform governments).  I know that blogging, and therefore going on the public record, causes a behavior change.  It is human nature.  And if you read GM's blog posts from their darkest hours, you will see what I mean.  Yes, they were transparent.  And I believe this helped them bring about the change they needed – to make the really tough decisions.  This is one of the most beautiful aspects of being social (including embracing social commerce) – it causes a shift in culture to more customer-centricity.  We've called this "customer oxygen."

Keep your eye on the electric car movement, by the way.  I initially wrote about it in December of 2006, citing Tesla (which is publically traded now and worth $2.4 billion).  Since then, the technology accelerations have been breathtaking for the historically-slow auto industry.  Everyone, from Audi to Porsche and from Ford to GM, is starting to embrace this movement.  And not necessarily just because of rising gasoline prices – it turns out you can actually create a better car this way, as Porsche proved with the launch of the 918 Spyder.

2. Netflix vs. Blockbuster

This was the most popular series I wrote as a blogger and it includes powerful lessons on the power of word of mouth as they pertain to "bad profits."  It is a four-part series that spanned three years, and I encourage you to read it from the beginning.  You can see the final post here, written in March of 2009.  Since that date, Netflix has transitioned to become a video-on-demand company and now carries 20% of all non-mobile U.S. Internet traffic during the evening.  Netflix could buy 385 Blockbusters with their market cap now, a staggering $10 billion, with Blockbuster worth $26 million and being traded on the pink sheets.  This chart tells the story well.

As I reflect on this, I believe that now is the time, more than ever before in history, to analyze your customers’ conversations online, your digital word of mouth, and understand the sentiment about your potential sources of bad profits.  Technology, and specifically the Internet, allows for faster evolutionary cycles.  We've seen this with Groupon's assumed valuation of $15 billion, Facebook's new valuation of $70 billion (congrats on the awards, by the way; we took everyone at Bazaarvoice to see the movie the day it came out and loved it), Amazon's public valuation of $84 billion, or Google's public valuation of $199 billion, worth more than Walmart in today's market.  These are very young companies – 2 years, 7 years, 16 years, and 12 years old, respectively.  As business historians look back on this period, they will say that the scale benefits, which were responsible for Walmart's incredible rise and many others, were dramatically accelerated by the rise of bits and the Internet.  Digital businesses, connected to a global, networked community, allow for faster scale achievement than ever before.  This is very disruptive to established players, as we've seen with Netflix vs. Blockbuster.  So analyze your negative word of mouth quickly and reinvent yourself quickly without bad profits at your core.

For the record, I believe that Walmart is very customer centric, I simply point to them as an example for valuation purposes because they have been so incredibly successful at leveraging scale.  Keep an eye on Amazon vs. Walmart and the rest of retail.  Amazon continues to build out distribution centers (now totaling 38 worldwide with new ones launching every quarter) and very successfully launched Prime (but it’s still only 3% of their customers although it drives up their lifetime value by 150% post adoption). We posted a call to action for retailers back in November of 2008 due to Mary Meeker's report, but there is still much for retailers to do to ward off the scale threat that Amazon poses.

3. The near demise of BP

The Gulf of Mexico oil spill was the worst in history, and I remember our Chief People Officer, Gillian Felix (who is British), telling me that this could be the demise of BP.  Today, BP has rebounded to a $154 billion valuation as Gulf microbes saved the day, cleaning up the Gulf far faster than expected (reminds me of the movie the War of the Worlds). I would say that BP has done a good job of highlighting positive word of mouth about their community actions in the damaged regions.  They started out as terrible in this regard, shunning counter PR efforts, but after a new CEO they embraced PR and highlighted the healing stories in a powerful way.

4. Apple's iPhone and iPad vs. Google Android's many phones and tablets

I touched on this in my dozen trends post last May, but this will be the year to watch this trend.  With Verizon launching the iPhone on Feb. 10 and Motorola winning Best of CES with the Atrix (see video below), this will be a tectonic battle.  The WSJ did a good job of covering this in James Stewart's opinion piece on Jan. 16.

Speaking of the news, we were proud to have this year kick off with a bang.  We were honored, along with the rest of Austin, to be featured on the CBS Evening News two Fridays ago.  It is sure to be an amazing year for Bazaarvoice and the social commerce trend, and we do not take your support for granted.  Thank you. We wish you much health, love, and prosperity this year.

Brant and I back then.

When I left Coremetrics and started Bazaarvoice with Brant on May 2, 2005, it was because we were striving to help the eCommerce industry increase conversion.  According to Shop.org’s annual study, conversion rates were still under 3%, meaning 97% of visitors to eCommerce sites didn’t buy.  Paid search was more expensive, and the pendulum had swung from customer acquisition to conversion to make those expensive acquisitions count.  But we also saw potential in how businesses could benefit from hearing directly from their customers; our thesis was that social commerce could turn into the next frontier for analytics. People had always relied on word of mouth to make buying decisions and were becoming more and more distrustful of "traditional" advertising.  Now word of mouth was becoming a digitally archived medium, enabling analysis of customer conversations that previously did not exist in the world.  The marketing and merchandising textbooks would need to be rewritten to take this authentic and pure data asset – the voice of those paying your bills – into account.

Fast forward to today.  This month marked a major milestone for our business.  We just surpassed our 1,000^th brand (press release), proving what Brant and I believed all along: the consumer voice is transformational to brands that listen and act.  Marketing to customers is no longer a guessing game – you now know exactly what customers say to each other.  I blogged about the potential to transform advertising more than three years ago, and it is even truer today now that consumers are generating and consuming “more than 500 billion impressions about products and services a year.” Merchandising is now quantified more than ever before – allowing for precise action to increase sales and reduce returns for those brave and adaptable enough to listen.  And customers are serviced better than ever before, with customer support agents at clients like PETCO reaching out to customers when they leave a one or two-star review to turn a negative experience into a positive one (my Netflix vs. BlockBuster four-part series explores one of the best examples of “bad profits” that I have ever seen, resulting in BlockBuster’s ultimate bankruptcy).

In the past five years, the social web has shifted power into the hands of consumers — and completely transformed the way companies do business in the process. And this goes far beyond retail: we've seen manufacturers such as Dell use customer input to design the next generation of products, and they have been dramatically improving their customer reviews as a result. USAA has improved customer service and created new product features based on what customers tell them online (and was featured as a pioneer by Forrester). And — against all expectations – we finally broke down barriers between social and luxury goods.

Our success reflects a bigger shift in the marketplace toward a connected world full of conversations. New trends in technology are creating an always-on world of communication. Today, five of the top ten most trafficked sites on the web are socially focused. When we started Bazaarvoice, Twitter didn’t even exist and Facebook was closed to the public.  Now, as consumers, we are never “alone”: Facebook has over 500 million users, Twitter continues to rise, and we carry our internet-enabled phones with us everywhere. As Wired magazine and the AlwaysOn community would suggest – we are now always wired.

Soon we'll share our opinions about everything — governments, employers, and people (see my blog post about transparency and leadership). This feedback won't just help individuals make decisions — it has the power to improve almost everything in our world. It’s going to happen faster than you think — our 1,000 diverse and global brands are proving that.  It will not take us nearly as long to win the next 1,000 brands – social commerce is accelerating now that most everyone knows it works (e.g., improving sales, reducing returns, decreasing call center volume, and increasing customer acquisition).

I believe that the world's best brands choose us because we always study new trends and innovate, launching new products and features every eight weeks since our inception.  But perhaps most importantly, we embrace that we are a Software as a Service business – providing not just a technology to use but the guidance to use it.  We help our clients continuously prove the real, bottom-line impact customer conversations have on their entire business.

And this milestone comes on the heels of several accolades:

• Our CMO, Erin Nelson, being named into the Hall of Achievement by the AAF
• Our CTO, Andy Maag, being named the Information Technologist of the Year by the AITP
• Our entire company being named the #1 midsize workplace by the Austin American-Statesman

We're ready for the next 1,000 brands to join us during this incredibly exciting time in the history of commerce, with social, mobile, and eCommerce colliding in a spectacular way.  We are more poised, professional, and confident than ever before, and our clients are counting on us to guide them through this time of amazing change.  We do not take that challenge or our success for granted, and we sincerely thank you for all of your support.

Click on the image below for a visual representation of the rise of social media, the growth of our company, and key milestones along this amazing journey.

Bazaarvoice CFO Stephen Collins

I’m excited to welcome our new Chief Financial Officer, Stephen Collins, to the Bazaarvoice team. Stephen joins Bazaarvoice with extensive leadership experience, particularly in developing and rapidly-growing markets. He entered the technology industry in 1997 as a member of the leadership team during the start-up and explosive growth phase at DoubleClick, Inc. (acquired by Google for $3.1 billion in 2007). During his career in technology, Stephen has held the titles of CFO, CIO, COO, and most recently CEO.

As CFO, Stephen is responsible for leading our finance and legal teams, as well as providing strategic and operational leadership as a member of our executive team. I recently interviewed Stephen to hear his thoughts on social commerce, Bazaarvoice, and his new role.

What trends do you see in the market around social and ecommerce?

The emergence of social media over the last few years has transformed how people manage their relationships. Our parents and grandparents had very few moments of their lives recorded as photographs, personal diaries or video. And to the extent they did have these moments recorded, they were stored in a dusty scrapbook.

Today, people record dozens if not hundreds of data points, documenting their lives on a daily basis. The typical social media user takes pictures, shares video, writes friends, posts blogs, marks their location, shares purchases, etc. The evolution of smart phones is making all experiences social. All of this data is now shared and stored in searchable databases. In many respects, we are now recording the lives of everyone in the world.

Obviously this raises some concerns, especially when it comes to privacy. But to the extent that people freely share information, such as customer reviews, we’re truly hearing the voice of the marketplace. This data is new in many ways, and it is vast. As a result, companies will be able to serve their customers much better to create more value and loyalty by working with companies like Bazaarvoice that help businesses leverage shared consumer conversations.

So, the nexus of social trends is creating a new paradigm not only for how we live our lives, but also for how businesses will relate to their customers. Truly, we are now finally moving from the broadcast advertising model to a real-time conversation between customers and business. In my view, this new paradigm will fundamentally change marketing and advertising, and do so quickly.

We are now seeing the first true leap in interactive marketing models since the internet emerged as a business force. Businesses that do not embrace social commerce will lag in performance to those that do, and significantly so.

How did these trends influence your decision to join the Bazaarvoice team?

I joined DoubleClick at the end of 1996 because I was fortunate enough to see and understand the shift that the internet was set to create in terms of how we live our lives. While sitting in an apartment in Bucharest, Romania, I could suddenly listen to an Alabama football game live online! The implications were enormous and obvious to me.

Now, I see my children living their lives tethered to others through social media, amplified by the power of iPhones and other smart devices. I believe I’m fortunate once again to see the implications of this incredible paradigm shift. And there it is: social commerce is here. Bazaarvoice, like DoubleClick, is one of the early leading pioneers in this space. Sold!

Do you have any tips on selling “social” to CFOs?

Embracing social and social commerce will help you add value to your customers, create value within your organization, and win market share. In other words, your customers will be happier, you’ll have more of them, and your company will be more profitable. And if you don’t embrace social commerce, your competitors certainly will.

How does what you see in the Bazaarvoice team compare to your previous work experience?

The Bazaarvoice team reminds me very much of the DoubleClick team. First and foremost, both companies see themselves not just as leaders, but as pioneers and world changers. That posture is bold, and one could argue that marketing companies aren’t changing the world. But the Internet is already changing how we live and work, and we’re still in the early stages as the internet goes. Being part of that evolution is special. It’s motivating and exciting. For me, the privilege of working with smart, motivated, generous, driven people in a pioneering company on the vanguard of technological innovation can’t be beat. And to be able to experience that environment twice in my career is truly amazing and humbling.

How will you add value to our clients as CFO?

Is this a trick question? Stump the CFO time, eh?

In all seriousness, Bazaarvoice is all about bringing businesses together with their customers. And by leveraging our solutions, our client partners derive significant ROI in the form of higher sales and increased market share. Beyond the transaction, we’re helping businesses better understand their customers’ needs, and these insights have a meaningful impact on our clients’ product development plans. Products are changing because of our solutions, and these changes create more value for our clients and our clients’ customers.

As CFO, I can help the Bazaarvoice organization understand how businesses think about and measure ROI. With that understanding, we can better meet our clients’ needs through innovation, not only with regard to our solutions, but also with regard to how we measure the impact and value we’re creating, and how we communicate this to our clients.

***

I’m thrilled and humbled to welcome Stephen to Bazaarvoice. Social commerce is revolutionizing the way business is done, and with the team we’ve built, I’m confident that Bazaarvoice will continue to lead this exciting space.

Read our feature in today's Wall Street Journal Digits: Bazaarvoice Ramps Up For Social Shopping

Tom spoke to our entire company last week during a special gong ceremony, giving us a preview of the leadership course he'll be teaching at The University of Texas at Austin. Here are Tom’s “five H’s” of leadership.

• Honesty – Be open about your business, keep employees informed, and always act with integrity. It’s your reputation. It’s our reputation.
• Humility – Don’t ever be too proud to ask questions, to know you’re not above authority. The first sign of failure is hubris. Don’t be boastful and don’t be arrogant.
• Heart – Your business should stand for something, support a cause, and act with purpose. For example, at Bazaarvoice, we’re working to give consumers a voice that will change commerce – and potentially, government, healthcare, education, and more.
• Head – Use yours. The business plan should be clear; it should be easy to define success. Remember the dot-com days, when investors were trying to figure out how companies were actually supposed to make money? That’s not ideal. IQ matters – akin to scale.
• Holes – You won’t know everything. Find people who know more than you do about different subjects. Leaders push with curiosity and restlessness. These values drive change and keep an organization thinking and on the move. A leader’s job is to ask the questions. What if? Why not? How come? A leader must be comfortable asking the “dumb” questions.
• And when asked about Humor, Tom said he needed to add a 6th H, noting that great leaders always have humor in the palace.

Tom is the latest to join our list of more than 30 impressive advisors and mentors. Alan Feld, who also joined us (on our Advisory Board), has more than 40 years of experience in corporate finance and securities law. And new Advisory Board member Ted Strauss served on the boards of BBVA Compass Bank and Clear Channel Communications after enjoying a long career at Bear, Stearns. Like Tom, Alan and Ted are both Texas business icons. Each of our Advisory Board and Board of Directors members plays an important role in our continued success, helping us navigate the challenges of high growth while maintaining the best of what got us to this point in the first place.

Tom has become a great mentor to me and our Board, and actually asked me to consider him for our Board of Directors while we were brainstorming CFO candidates. That someone of his stature sees the huge potential in Bazaarvoice, in our cause of helping our global clients generate revenue through customer conversations and fundamentally transform their businesses as a result, speaks volumes about how far we have come over the last five years and, especially, the incredible team we've built here.

I’m thrilled that Scott Allen, noted social media thought leader, has blogged about us at the American Express OPEN Forum. He and I, along with several other Bazaarvoice team members, talked about how we “beat the odds” as a start-up. If you haven’t had a chance to read Scott’s book, The Virtual Handshake, it’s worth the time.

Thanks, Scott, for a really insightful piece.

Read it on OPEN Forum: How Bazaarvoice Beat the Odds