We don’t take the trust you have bestowed in us for granted. We are working tirelessly to partner with you to drive tangible, measureable business value, create insight and build deeper intimacy with your customers. Your organizations are evolving to embrace the voice of your customer and we are evolving along with you to bring new services and capabilities to bear. We are listening to your ongoing feedback on our products, services and roadmap… and we are innovating constantly!

We can’t wait to host you at our 2010 Social Commerce Summit April 19 – 21^st. The Summit will be a great opportunity to reflect & strategize on how to amplify the voice of your customer like never before on your brand site, your partner sites and across the socialsphere. There is even an Executive Boot Camp for more hands-on learning. It is shaping up to be the best client event in our history.

Thank you for the opportunity to be of service to you. Thank you for embracing us as part of your extended team. And thank you for sharing your insights and successes! Your success is our success. Here’s to the next 100 billion!

The Social Commerce Awards recognize the companies that are transforming their business with Bazaarvoice. Past winners include Helzberg Diamonds, Intuit/TurboTax, JC Whitney, and Sephora. This year's categories are:

• Rookie of the Year Award (2) – These two companies are new on the social scene and pioneering social strategy in their own ways.
• Social Commerce Play of the Year Award – This company ran a really interesting and innovative social campaign that made customers and the industry stand up and take notice.
• Social Commerce Rockstar Award – This company understood that success must be measured. Their campaign or strategy directly related to a bottom-line goal, and they nailed it.
• Social Commerce MVP Award – This company used the power of their most influential customers to create a bigger conversation that attracted a whole new group of people to engage with their brand. Success is defined as how many new customers they attracted and how they kept the conversation alive and kicking.
• Customer Oxygen Award – This company used the customer voice to make huge changes throughout the business. Leveraging user-generated content changed their day-to-day business habits, and produced measurable results across the organization.

Want more information? Think your company has the story to win an award? Talk to your Client Success Director to learn more and to nominate your brand! Nominations are open until March 25th, and winners will be announced April 21, 2010.

As Canada’s leading lifestyle brand, Roots offers clothing, leather goods and home furnishings with an eclectic, earth-friendly sense of style. Its global fans are fanatics, and Roots wanted to highlight them on their site.

In March 2009, Roots added customer reviews to its site, Roots.com, to help shoppers make easier purchase decisions. Just a few weeks later, they kicked off a massive promotion to encourage customers to write reviews on their purchases. For six weeks, they offered the chance to win a $500 Roots shopping spree, promoting it through every channel possible – online, offline, and even beyond their customers.

To promote this contest, they sent an announcement email to their customer database, linking to a splash page that showing customers how to submit reviews. Multiple banners throughout their site and a rolling banner on the home page also called out the contest.

Promotion beyond the site

Roots promoted the contest through their popular Roots blog. They also promoted the contest via social networks, posing it on their fan page on Facebook – which has more than 5,000 fans – and on Twitter.

Promotion beyond the web

Additionally, Roots promoted the contest within their more than 120 retail locations. They used table cappers and bag inserts to encourage in-store shoppers to go online and review their purchases for a chance to win.

Promotion beyond their customers

Not only did they reach out to their customers, but Roots also did an internal campaign to boost reviews among their employees as well. All Roots employees had a chance to win one of three $50 Roots gift cards if they wrote a review during the six-week promotional period.

Campaign results

In the six weeks of the campaign, Roots gathered saw massive increases in their review volume. They then used this content to drive email interest through word of mouth. In May, just after the campaign ended, Roots sent out an email featuring customer reviews of dresses and skirts, with positive results:

• Sales for the email were 29% higher than the monthly email average for May
• Open rate was 2.73% higher than the monthly email average for May
• Click-through rate was 2.3% higher than the monthly email average for May

Through touch points across channels, Roots drove review volume on their ecommerce site, building a database of rich information to benefit shoppers and fueling emails that drove new sales. This is just one of many instances of Bazaarvoice clients bringing the power word of mouth full circle for real results. Stay tuned to our blog for more client examples.

What’s more conversational than your holiday stories? We want to hear about your funniest gift, your worst travel experience, your favorite recipe, your most touching family moment – whatever story you feel like sharing with us.

But here’s the catch – you have to tell your story in 140 characters or less. Tweet us your stories on Twitter with the hashtag #bvhs between now and December 31^st. We’ll choose the best tweets and post one a day to our Holiday Card page, coming soon. Each winner will receive a $10 gift card to Starbucks and a chance at the grand prize – a $500 AMEX card.

Here are a few examples for inspiration:

• Wrapped all of our gifts before driving to Phoenix so the kids would be surprised. Left them under the tree at home. #bvhs
• Got Mom a parka for the awful winters in Michigan. Next morning she announced she's retiring to Florida. Always get gift receipts. #bvhs
• Spent our first holiday together in a wooded cabin, nothing but the snow surrounding us. Peaceful bliss after a hectic wedding. #bvhs
• Age 14: got a TV for my room… I had to share with my brother. The argument lasted well into the new year! #bvhs

For more inspiration (and a good laugh), see what others have already submitted by searching #bvhs. Be sure to follow @Bazaarvoice on Twitter so we can DM the winners!

Happy holidays from all of us on the Bazaarvoice team!

Our second "Take Action" webinar focused on utilizing top contributors and the content they provide to enhance and improve client marketing campaigns. Studies show that consumers look to reviews more than traditional marketing channels (such as print or TV). Companies are aware now that increasing reviews on their site is a standard part of a company’s social commerce strategy. So what else can you do with reviews and reviewers?

The topics covered included gaining additional top contributors, using top contributors in marketing campaigns, and reviewing a variety of alternate marketing channels where UGC can provide additional site visits and submitted reviews.

Most companies have loyal contributors that write more than one review on a site. These contributors tend to write detailed product specific reviews that are relevant to the buying process. A great way to increase the number of multi-review contributors is through simple contests. Bazaarvoice’s reporting tools make it easy to track the progress of these contests, and allow you to identify top 10, 20, or 50 contributors to your site.

Once you have garnered additional top contributors, what can you do with these individuals? A great example by Free People shows how you can make reviewers more ‘like me.’ This creates more relevance to the reviews when your community is able to relate to the reviewer. In a campaign highlighting their top six reviewers, Free People saw an increase in total review volume by 93%.

In addition to looking at top contributors and how to integrate them into marketing campaigns, there are other opportunities to use UGC in offline marketing channels. Some examples include in-store signage, invoices, packing slips, and even TV ads.

Take your UGC to the next level by turning your reviewers into real people and know that UGC should not be limited to your online marketing channels!

Our Take Action webinar series tackles a variety of ways UGC can help solve business problems, drive sales, and reduce costs. Look for future blogs recapping these informative sessions, created especially for Bazaarvoice clients. They’re just one more way we help our 600+ global clients maximize their UGC investment.

If you are a sport enthusiast, a bike nut, or an off-road junkie in the UK, you know about Wiggle. A bike emporium that sells top riding gear and quality bikes, Wiggle has been an innovator in the world of cycling, and an equally original UGC pioneer. From rich media video reviews by the dozen, to the review-specific blog, the most avid English cyclists come to connect on Wiggle. Not to mention that the community is built by the customers themselves – they contribute content, give product improvement recommendations and continue to ask for more Wiggle. Here are just a few ways that Wiggle optimizes UGC:

Video Reviews

Wiggle’s video reviews allow users to submit videos of products in action, illustrating what they like, dislike, and would change about the product. The result is a fresh way to review that engages both the reviewer and those shoppers who watch. Wiggle’s active use of new media results in interesting and entertaining review content, with reviews like the one below getting hundreds of views.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Bloggle

The Wiggle blog, dubbed “Bloggle,” has a category devoted entirely to customer reviews. Wiggle uses the voices of their customers to build a community around the brand and its use of UGC – check it out for yourself! Posts showcasing particularly helpful or funny reviews encourages Bloggle readers to become contributors.

Each month hosts a review contest to find the best review submissions, “Good, bad or indifferent.” Different suppliers co-sponsor the contests, offering reviewers the chance to win prizes ranging from £250 vouchers to a Focus mountain bike worth £749. The contest and prizes are displayed in banners all over the site, building awareness for both Wiggle reviews and the sponsoring brand – another way that Wiggle is building a community around its own image.

Winners’ stories give a face to the devoted Wiggle shopper. “I’m really happy about winning one of the three prizes Wiggle put up for their August customer review competition!” writes the most recent winner. “And the £250 is just what I need for my autumn run gear shopping @ Wiggle.” Real voices, real stories – a growing tribe of connections and innovations is brewing on wiggle.co.uk.

Product Improvements

Wiggle recently launched a brand of cycling gear, dhb. In a press release announcing the 2010 line, they cited how reviews have helped them make their products even better. “Feedback from wearers of the 2009 Merston Bibs suggested changes were needed to the ankle zipper, so the latest version now features an even sturdier lockdown ankle zipper.” This reactive attitude not only agrees with customers, but helps build superior quality in dhb products which furthers the Wiggle brand as a leader in the cycling space. Consider how UGC is changing your business – Bazaarvoice offers a multitude of advanced reporting tools to help you understand, at the product level, the quality and satisfaction your customers feel.

Email

As Community Managers, we drive home the need for a review-generating email that encourages customers to go back on the site and review the products. We have a myriad of best practices and examples of these emails, as well as showcase the clients that have seen it be successful. Wiggle has employed the best practice of using post-purchase emails to solicit review content from the very beginning, to excellent results.

• Open rate for review emails is 47%.
• Click-through rate to write a review is 24%, and the response rate stays fairly consistent around 10% reviews received to emails sent.
• Some reviewers even cite these emails in-review as their reason for reviewing.

Practices like these are helping Wiggle drive great customer loyalty among a very passionate customer base. UGC connects this passion to the Wiggle brand, creating brand loyalists who influence others on Wiggle’s site. Wiggle-on!

Free People is known for being one of our more innovative clients who consistently think outside of the box. They love their Top Reviewers, and have featured them in numerous blog posts. This time, they decided to feature six of them on their e-commerce site, to drive awareness of Ratings & Reviews and Customer Favorites.

What they did

Free People gathered their six Top Reviewers and into a new category on their site. The selected reviewers showcased different tastes and styles while still representing Free People’s brand and core demographic. Free People then announced the new category via Facebook, Twitter, their blog, and email.

Each of the reviewer pictures on the category page link to the reviewer’s profile page, allowing shoppers to see what the reviewer purchased and how they reviewed it. Any customer can build a profile page on the site, adding pictures and information about themselves. Posted reviews link back to the reviewer’s profile, helping shoppers connect with customers like them.

What happened

In the first week of launch, Free People saw a 93% increase in review volume. Additionally, reviews have become more detailed since the launch, providing more information to help customers make confident buying decisions.

“I have noticed that the reviews are a bit more creative,” said Megan Koons, Web Marketing Analyst at Free People. “Customers seem to be excited at the thought of possibly becoming a ‘Top Featured Reviewer’ in the future.”

Free People is excited by the success they’ve seen with this campaign, and this isn’t the first time we’ve seen results for clients that feature reviewers. Free People looks forward to running more Top Reviewer campaigns in the future.

PETCO continues to innovate with social initiatives – in this case, Bazaarvoice Stories – to increase interaction and drive sales on its site. PETCO knows its customers love their pets – and love showing them off at Halloween – so they introduced their “Howl-O-Ween” contest to not only highlight their consumers, but drive site traffic and sales as well.

This fun contest allows all types of pets to share why “they” chose their Halloween costumes, complete with photos and videos. PETCO promoted this on their home page and in emails.

PETCO partnered with Science Diet to give away prizes, which drives responses, and the responses were overwhelming (and adorable)!

First, contributors and readers can sort by their type of pet – no need to have gerbil-lovers comb through dog stories – creating a customized experience for each visitor. Readers can also vote on their favorite stories and costumes, which lets writers drive additional traffic to the site. Another fun twist? PETCO has changed their regular paw-print rating graphics into season-specific pumpkins.

As you can tell, photos are very important to this campaign – so far, 85% of the pet stories contributed also include at least one photo, and submitters can designate a “hero” image for each story as the main image, making the layout fun and easy to read for all visitors.

But what really sets this campaign apart is its potential impact on sales. With Social Recommendations, pets (and their “parents”) can link directly to their favorite products. So when a proud pug admires the Gene Simmons costume below, he (or she) can also see what makes the pug so beautiful and wild. We’ve seen about 25% of all entrants link to products, which helps influence other contributors and readers.

Of course, all this new content helps keep PETCO relevant for natural search – especially for pet Halloween costumes – while continuing to engage its already active online community.