Screenshot of the Kate Spade NY Pinterest

I am delighted to congratulate one of our most successful clients, Kate Spade, on receiving two nominations in the Fashion 2.0 Awards. The awards honor the most innovative fashion brands for their leadership in developing online communities. It only takes one quick glance at Kate Spade’s Pinterest, Facebook, blog or Tumblr to see that this is a brand that truly loves sharing and receiving inspiration from their customers. I sat down with Johanna Murphy, VP eCommerce, and Marissa Kraxberger, Web Art Director, to learn more about Kate Spade’s social marketing strategy, which lead to their award nominations in the “Best Blog by a Fashion Brand” and “Top Innovator” categories.

Looking at the Kate Spade tumblr, I noticed a lot of content that extends beyond the things your brand actually makes, like this photo of a book cover, and this deco swimming pool. Why did you expand the scope?

Marissa Kraxberger: Well, because I think Tumblr is a different medium. I think Tumblr is a space where it’s about not just what our brand makes; it’s about our brand personality and our brand voice. It further tells the story of who we are and what our Kate Spade New York story is. You know, so, it’s not just about what’s happening inside the company, but what inspires what we do at the company and who inspires, and what artists, what books we’re reading. I see that you pointed out that book, and a lot of times we’re inspired by graphic design. We are such a graphic design focused company, and we’re inspired by old book covers, vintage magazines, and movies. We use Tumblr as a way to further communicate that this is how we function as a brand, by drawing on inspiration from all these sources.

Johanna Murphy: I think the thing that’s so great about our marketing team that really owns our social media is they really do understand the medium that they’re participating in. If you look across all of our social channels, that’s true. We don’t use social media just to push product. It’s really an extension of our brand personality. If you look at Facebook, if you look at Pinterest, the inspiration is such a part of our core DNA as a brand. If you walk into our stores, we have some rare art books sitting on the shelves, and if you walk into our 5^th Avenue store right now, we have the The Apartment playing on a reel in our store. It’s just a part of who we are; it’s a part of our brand. And I think a lot of brands still make the mistake of just using social media to push a product and push brand messages. People don’t engage in social media that way.

Marissa: Yeah, I think it’s really important to know the difference between the spaces you’re in. Like, Tumblr, if we were to push product here, I think it would bode poorly for us. It wouldn’t be the kind of conversation people are having via imagery in the Tumblr community.

Do you have any sense of how much of your readership is aspirational, versus how much is either prospective owners of your products or actual owners?

Johanna: Well, it’s kind of hard to track on social media, but we look at it this way: we’re okay with both. We are an aspirational brand, and we kind of look at social media as kind of the tinder, if you will, to start the fire to become a brand enthusiast. We’re okay if you’re not a customer and are engaged with us on social media. We’re hoping that you’ll love the brand, aspire to be part of the brand, and one day hop over to our ecom site or our stores and become a customer.

Marissa: We have weekly log meetings that really cover all of our social media plans and communication. We do know that a good percentage of them shop. We don’t know exactly if it’s “repeat offenders” all the time that are shopping, but we do know where traffic is coming from. When we post things, we especially track it from our blog, and a lot of what we post on our blog ends up on Tumblr and our other channels. They are shopping. We don’t know what the percentage is, but they are shopping.

Johanna: If you look at our Facebook, you’ll see that there’s a really nice blend of brand content. We do use Facebook, for example, to announce our one-day private sales, and we’ll often release that to Facebook for our fans before we open it to the general public. Obviously we can track the results through that, and the amount of sales we get when we open those up early are actually staggering. And that’s actually the most commercial use we have for Facebook right now.

So what kind of people read Behind the Curtain, and how has readership changed over time?

Marissa: Kate Spade enthusiasts are the ones that are most likely reading Behind the Curtain. It’s funny, because we recently did some deep digging on this, because the Behind the Curtain blog is a labor of love for our team. It’s one of those things where we are fortunate to have a lot of compelling content at this company, and it’s not hard to take tidbits of what happens here and expand them into bigger stories. So we get pretty excited about the Behind the Curtain content. Our joke is that no one reads it but us, but that’s not true. A lot of people are reading it, and it has driven a lot of sales and traffic. So that makes me think that it’s a lot of our true and loyal followers.

Johanna: If you look at some of the things, it’s interesting. Some of the most read articles and some of the most commented-on stories are things that happened here in the office. So, you know, we had a Halloween party and everybody dressed up. Tons of feedback and comments on that. We did a hot chocolate crawl with our staff around holiday, and did a three-part series where we went to some of the yummiest hot chocolate places in the city with our staffers and basically gave you the inside scoop on where to go. Tons of feedback from people who aren’t in New York commented on it. So they really do love that Behind the Curtain peek of what it’s like to work at Kate Spade, and an inside look in the fashion industry. We get as many comments on that as we do products.

Marissa: We have such a loyal following of people who just love the brand, and I think those are the people reading the blog. They’re getting a deeper insight into the brand, and it’s also a huge source of inspiration. I mean, it’s not like we’re giving away secrets on there, but we are inspired by a lot of things and sharing that with a lot of people.

Johanna: One of our big brand tag lines is, “live colorfully,” and it’s part of our brand DNA: we’re women who aspire to live interesting lives. And we try to project that on all of our social media—the interesting things that Deborah Lloyd does, the interesting things we do in the office. We just blogged the other day about a visit to the Damien Hirst exhibit. I think there are a lot of women that aspire to live interesting lives, and they can experience that in a very authentic way through our blog.

I think the cool thing about Kate Spade is that we do walk the walk, and we do talk the talk. We live the brand. The women in this company, the men in this company, are pretty interesting people, and I think that shows through all of our customer touch points.

You feature content from Kate Spade fans pretty regularly—like these tweets about the hedgehog coin purse. What value do you see in doing this?

 Marissa: We kind of have recently started doing that. I think that social media is really important to communicate with and have conversations with your fans and followers. I don’t think it’s smart to just pump out content and not engage the consumers with conversation. So we thought, in that case, we’re always talking about things like resolutions. Why don’t we just put that out there to our followers? Like, what do you resolve to do? And highlight the ones that we felt most connected with the brand. It’s just about constantly communicating and engaging versus just putting out content.

Johanna: It used to be that brands could control everything. It was a one-way conversation. It was a print ad in a book, you know, it was a media buy on TV. It was a one-way push. But the advent of social media today is connected, and people talk to each other. If you’re going to participate in that forum, that’s the context. They expect you to talk to them and they expect you to listen them, too. So it’s like brands no longer really control the agenda, customers really do. And you just need to provide the appropriate forum for them to do that.

All of our fans and followers are potential ambassadors for our brand. And I think people like being recognized for having communication with us.

We are proud to nominate our client, Discover, for a 2011 Forrester Groundswell Award. View the official nomination here, and be sure to give it a quick rating or review and check out other entries! 

When it comes to listening to customers, the credit card industry has been slow to embrace customer conversations. Faced with stricter regulations and an industry image clouded by consumer distrust, financial service providers tend to be overly cautious in social, developing social strategies that do not directly address products or engage customers in dialogue. Instead, most use social as a one-way medium, limiting their social network brand pages to news of corporate responsibility projects and sports sponsorships. Discover, however, stands out from the crowd. Their social efforts began in 2009 with genuine, two-way engagement with cardmembers online. From empowering cardmembers to select the next ShopDiscover merchant partner, to crowd sourcing Discover card art, the brand has paved a bold path for using social media to innovate the member experience.

Discover continues to break the mold as one of the first direct banking and payment services company to actively encourage customer conversations on the brand site. Discover now offers cardmember ratings and reviews on seven different products on discover.com. “The fact that we’re now allowing our cardmembers to advocate on behalf of Discover represents a monumental shift for our company and our industry,” says Kelly Tufts, vice president of Cardmember Acquisition at Discover. “These customers’ feedback is helping us live our brand promise: being a trusted partner to cardmembers.”

In order to become even deeper partners in their customers’ financial decisions, Discover sought to better understand cardmembers, their credit card needs, and how they use their Discover products. The direct banking and payment services company launched reviews in February 2011 to listen to and connect with cardmembers in a scalable, product-specific fashion.

Customers become advocates when given a voice

Discover finds its satisfied customers are willing – even eager – to become advocates for the brand when given the opportunity. Since launch, cardmembers have now published over 2,300 reviews on discover.com. The average overall rating is 4.4 stars, and 88% of reviewers would recommend their card to a friend. Eighty-two percent of reviews are four stars or more. Reviews help evangelize Discover to consumers researching credit cards – in 2010, 50% of US consumers who applied for a credit card researched that card first online.

Beginning mid-August, Discover will feature review snippets on their homepage, calling on visitors to read more cardmember reviews. They plan to feature customer quotes on card application pages soon as well. “I called one customer personally to ask for permission to use her review on our homepage,” says Sanjay Gosalia, Director of Online Cardmember Acquisition at Discover. “She was so excited! Not just that we were using her review on our site, but that we’d actually read her feedback and taken it to heart.”

Customer-created content drives targeted segment intelligence and marketing

Discover ties product information gathered in reviews to their CRM database using the customer’s account number. This allows Discover to map the customer’s ratings and feedback to other aspects of their account profile such as age, location, rewards program enrollment, customer service history, etc. Using this information, Discover is able to cluster feedback around specific customer segments and draw conclusions about cardmembers in each segment’s shared needs.

For example, student-age cardmembers share many similar credit card needs – needs that can sometimes be unique to students. The student card team looks closely at student feedback to tailor their cards to how students would like to use them.

Discover also plans to target reviewers with specific marketing campaigns based on a previously unavailable dimension: sentiment. Reviewers posting high ratings will be targeted with a “refer a friend” email, encouraging them to recommend Discover to friends and earn cash back rewards. Customers who leave low-rated feedback could, for example, receive a contact from customer service teams for one-to-one assistance resolving any problems.

Feedback lets customers co-innovate with the brand

While the vast majority of feedback is glowing – 92% of Discover reviews are rated three stars or higher – both the positive and critical feedback provide the brand with constructive advice. “Cardmembers will write to say they love their card, and it’d be even better if we’d add this feature or that benefit,” says Gosalia. Discover plans to use this feedback to improve their products, and even launch new ones. In this way, reviews have fostered the partner relationship between Discover and their cardmembers even further by making the customer a collaborator in the Discover brand.

For example, Discover teams noticed one line of products wasn’t performing as well as expected. Among other information, cardmember reviews were used to understand why the line was underperforming and whether it could be improved to better serve customers. This direct feedback from customers contributed to Discover’s decision to pull away from the line, strengthening their product portfolio.

Customers promote positive brand associations

In the past, Discover market research has indicated that many consumers don’t think Discover cards will be widely accepted. Reviews from cardmembers, however, revealed the opposite. For the 200 reviews on discover.com that use the word “accept,” 88% are four stars or higher, and 92.5% of reviewers would recommend the card to a friend. Of all reviews that mention card acceptance, about half talk about card acceptance in a positive way, and many actively combat the false belief. “Discover is now accepted almost everywhere. I've never had problems in that area,” writes one reviewer. “I have used my Discover card since 1988,” writes another. “In the beginning [sic] not everyone took my card & I always had another card if that happened. I am happy to report that now it is accepted widely. I use it for everything.”

Discover merchant teams plan to use reviews to find the areas where the cards aren’t as widely accepted, and sign more merchants. The company has even launched a new advertising campaign promoting the message that Discover cards are widely accepted – a positive brand association backed by first-person card member experience. Discover plans to use customer reviews to continue to support this association.

Opening up to customer feedback has allowed Discover to engage directly with cardmembers in a scalable, product-centric way. Reviews bring customers to the center of Discover’s business, empowering them to advocate and co-innovate the Discover brand. Authentic customer conversations provide actionable insights, helping Discover better segment their cardmembers and deliver on their credit card needs. By understanding their customers, Discover deepens their cardmember partnerships to better live their brand promise.

How important is social media to USAA?

Tom Vaughn: Social media and community initiatives are critical for USAA’s continued success. We have been a word-of-mouth company since our inception in 1922, with much of our growth coming as a result of members sharing their experiences with friends and family.

Now, social media is transforming our relationships with members. Social tools allow us to better understand member needs so that we can stay engaged with our members. This ultimately results in strengthened relationships between each member and USAA.

As we improve upon these relationships, members will tell even more of their friends and family about how much they trust USAA – continuing our history of growth via word-of-mouth.

Our members want to hear from people like themselves, and user-generated content facilitates the sharing of these authentic customer stories. In addition to customer reviews on USAA.com, we’ve reached out to our members via Facebook, and even created an iPhone application that lets customers deposit checks. We’re constantly coming up with new ways to make our members’ lives easier and social media is a big part of that.

What objections did you have to overcome when creating a social strategy?

For USAA, and any financial services organization, the two main challenges lie in letting go of brand and messaging control and ensuring proper regulatory compliance. So convincing the early stakeholders of the value of encouraging authentic conversations – both positive and negative – is the first step.

No matter how excited we may get about the power of social media and communities, we will not sustain any program if we cannot figure out how to follow the regulations. Bazaarvoice’s content moderation and reporting capabilities helped us create a strategy that satisfies all the necessary compliance and reporting requirements, as well as helping key stakeholders understand the value. In fact, our legal partners trust the processes in place with Bazaarvoice so much, their first question – literally – for any proposed social project is “Is this using the Bazaarvoice platform?” If the answer is “No”, the project has a much harder time getting started and often goes back to the drawing board to figure out how to take advantage of the existing compliance procedures with Bazaarvoice.

How have member reviews helped improve the member experience at USAA.com?

Bazaarvoice categorizes every review so that it goes to the right department at USAA. Items that need customer service help are routed to the appropriate area for immediate assistance.

Our financial services department saw there was desire for members to service their CDs online. Based on the direct feedback from our members, a new online functionality was put in place and members can now change their renewal options online.

Members also tell us that these authentic stories and testimonials help them make a more informed decision before opening a new account or service.

How has Bazaarvoice helped you roll out your new social initiatives?

As one of the first financial services firms to dive into social media, we were excited about the opportunity to really explore what our members were saying about us. The Bazaarvoice team offered great suggestions and guidance to help with the introduction of the new social initiatives.

It was important to us that the posted reviews accurately reflected how members rated our products. You gave us great advice and suggested that we compile reviews for two weeks before publishing them. This approach ensured we had sufficient volume to stabilize the ratings so that a single review didn’t drastically change things.

The Bazaarvoice team also shared examples of how other companies used reviews to improve all areas of their business. By doing so, you helped us determine how to get the right reviews to the right people to address USAA member concerns.

What’s next for USAA in the social realm?

We’ll continue to innovate across all channels – social, mobile, online and more. The case study with Forrester gives some good examples of how members and USAA are seeing mutual benefit from reviews and online Q&A. You’ll see us continue to lead how financial services firms use social media to reach their clients – through collaborative and engaging communities, mobile capabilities that make members’ lives easier and online tools to help with all facets of members’ financial world.

Congratulations to Tom and the entire USAA team.

To learn more about USAA's success with Social, read the Forrester case study.

In our recent webinar, two industry thought leaders shared their perspective on social in the CPG industry. Bert DuMars, VP of E-Business & Interactive Marketing at Newell Rubbermaid, and Carole Irgang, President of Red Shoes Marketing & former SVP of Integrated Marketing Communications at Kraft Foods, offered their thoughts on the importance of social media in the industry, and shared examples of brands who have seen success in the space.

Here are three big ways CPG uses social commerce.

Tear down the wall between consumers and your brand.

Manufacturing brands can have a tendency to focus on their immediate customer – the retailers who carry their products – focusing on share of shelf when it comes to reaching consumers. But as more retailers leverage UGC to improve online and offline sales, they’re making active distribution decisions based on product review data. Connecting end users – both with your brand and with each other – to drive demand creates demand among retailers. Capture share of shelf among retailers and share of voice among consumers.

Consumers’ words breathe life into traditional advertising. Carole Irgang spoke to how user-generated content makes marketing more interesting, allowing CPG brands to “become part of the consumer conversation without interrupting it.” Don’t think about user-generated content a “silo” in certain media channels or marketing efforts. If used properly, consumers’ words are impactful everywhere throughout the marketing mix.

Rubbermaid recently ran a print campaign for their Easy Find Lids product. The ad included a coupon and a snippet of real review content, with the products’ star rating featured. Rubbermaid saw a 10% lift in coupon redemption over a similar ad for the same product that didn’t include UGC.

User-generated content is the new focus group. Many brands hesitate to embrace UGC out of a fear of negative reviews, but 1-star reviews offer valuable information brand teams can use to improve products.

Rubbermaid did market research and found that consumers were worried about swine flu and germs. They reformulated a popular sink mat to be bacteria resistant, but the new design gave up some stain-resisting power and started getting negative reviews – including negative feedback from a customer who had been buying the product for more than 45 years!

Rubbermaid reached out to the customers who wrote negative reviews, and found that bacteria resistance was less important  to their customers than stain resistance. They reformulated the mat back to stain resistance, and gave these negative reviewers the first new products off the line.

The customers were thrilled with this level of service. “If you can make a positive person a little more positive, that’s nice but they won’t be very verbose about it,” said Bert. “But if you can take a negative experience and make it positive, it’s a home run. These people were out on Facebook and Twitter talking about how we were responding to them – that’s the best response you can have.”

Have a question that wasn’t answered in the webinar? Share it in our comments section.

Learn how to create your own CPG social strategy.

Our full webinar with Bert and Carole is available for free download.

In the interview, Bert discusses Newell’s shift in corporate strategy to be more customer-centric. In the past, retailers were always considered the “customer,” but recently the brand’s focus has moved to their end users, the consumer. This shift has created a need for communication between the brand and consumers, as Newell looks for ways to listen to end users and identify ways to better satisfy their needs and wants.

Bert DuMars, VP E-Business & Interactive Marketing, Rubbermaid

The brand opens this communication on Rubbermaid.com through customer reviews. As we saw in a recent case study, Rubbermaid has successfully leveraged UGC to increase conversion, average order value and revenue. Additionally, the brand uses this real-time feedback to identify issues they can respond to or fix, bringing customer oxygen into their manufacturing processes.

Bert points to Rubbermaid’s “Produce Saver” product as a specific example of how the brand is getting closer to consumers through digital technology. As Jim Deitzel, Manager of e-Marketing for Rubbermaid, shared in an earlier blog interview, Rubbermaid identified an information gap with this flagship product after noticing it was receiving several 1-star reviews. After reading the reviews, it became clear that consumers weren’t using the product properly, and were understandably disappointed with its performance.

Rubbermaid immediately put additional usage information on the product page, and wrote on a blog post on how to use the Produce Saver for best results. Today, the Produce Saver has an average rating of 4.6 stars, and 92% of customers would recommend it to a friend! Bert told Fast Company, “Previous to having online customer reviews, we might not have known about this issue, and negative word-of-mouth buzz could have caused our retailers to return the product. Instead, we quickly identified the issue and created a solution.”

We’re excited to partner with such an innovative and customer-centric manufacturer. Our upcoming webinar with Bert and Carole Irgang, President of Red Shoes Marketing and previous SVP of Integrated Marketing Communications at Kraft Foods, will share real-world insights how CPG brands can capitalize on this digital era.

Tune in to learn:

• Successful social strategies for CPGs
• Real returns and metrics for CPG brands
• How to create your own CPG social strategy
• How to get buy-in for "social" inside your organization

Tuesday, April 13, 2010
1:00pm – 2:00pm

Setting measurable business goals for UGC

Once Nationwide decided to move forward with a social strategy, their first step was to identify goals for their UGC. At a high level, Shawn and Sue wanted to build trust and confidence in the Nationwide brand among current and potential policy holders. Consumers want to hear from their peers before making a purchase decision. Recognizing this, Nationwide wanted to give customers the opportunity to share their experiences, helping prospects find the information they need at the point of purchase.

At a more specific level, Nationwide needed to show real, direct business benefits from UGC. To do this, the brand aligned its social commerce efforts with three key business goals: increasing policy conversion rate, driving SEO traffic, and improving marketing effectiveness.

Meeting these goals with social commerce

Nationwide has leveraged Ratings & Reviews in a number of ways to meet their corporate goals and grow their business.

Enabling customer reviews on auto insurance. Customer reviews on insurance policies provide relevant content that consumers trust, helping them determine the right policy for their needs and take the next step towards a purchase decision.

Pushing content to customers’ social networks. Using Social Network Accelerators, Nationwide customers are invited to share reviews with their Facebook network, helping Nationwide reach new audiences and bringing traffic back to the brand site.

Driving SEO with fresh content. Enabling UGC provides the site with rich, relevant content that is continually updated, driving organic search traffic to Nationwide.com.

Improving paid search ads. Keywords pulled from customer reviews make for compelling paid search ads, bringing new traffic to the brand site by reaching customers in their own words.

Measuring the results

Nationwide segments site visitors who interact with UGC from those who don’t, and compares their behavior against the goals above.  Specifically, they look at the quote start rate, quote completion rate, and policy bind rate for both audiences, and measure the difference in performance. They also track “intent to buy” metrics, like finding an Agent’s office or contacting Nationwide directly. Additionally, they look at click-through and conversion rates for homepage ads and paid search landing pages with UGC, benchmarking the performance of both segments over time.

Spreading these results to the entire organization

The impact of UGC doesn’t end on Nationwide’s website. Since launching Ratings & Reviews, they have embraced customer oxygen across the organization, transforming the brand’s culture and the way they talk to customers.  “As much as we can bring the voice of the customer to every employee in this company,” says Sue, “the more effective we’re going to be.”

Any Nationwide employee can read customer reviews online, giving everyone from claims representatives to executives tremendous insight into how the brand is doing and what their customers value. This translates into recommendations and improvements, helping pinpoint what the brand is doing well and where they can invest more to better serve customers.

There’s also a strong motivational effect, Sue says. Many reviews praise claims reps that went out of their way to help customers. “We are in the business of putting people back to normal after something bad happens,” says Sue. “When you see that we’re doing that every day, over and over again, and you see the emotions that our customers share in a very positive light, it really helps drive and prioritize our behavior as an organization. It’s very inspirational content internally.”

Want to hear more about Nationwide’s use of social commerce?  The full webinar, “Overcoming Your Fear of User-Generated Content: A Webinar for Highly-Regulated Industries,” is available to download for free, here:

Sue McManus, VP of Direct and Customer Solutions Marketing at Nationwide

As a Client Success Director for Bazaarvoice’s Financial Services team, I’ve worked with several financial services brands to build social commerce strategies that increase online conversion and search, as well as improve customer service and client retention. But sometimes it’s daunting to make headway with new media in such highly-regulated industries.

When we started collaborating with Nationwide Insurance, they faced questions from Legal, Compliance, PR and Customer Service about the risks of participating in social. Nationwide created a strategy for overcoming objections to UGC and now embrace “customer oxygen” across all aspects of the organization, and have seen measurable business results from doing so.

Shawn Morton, Director of Mobile, Social & Emerging Media at Nationwide

In our recent webinar with Nationwide, Sue McManus, VP of Direct and Customer Solutions Marketing, and Shawn Morton, Director of Mobile, Social & Emerging Media, shared how they were able to overcome organizational concerns about adopting Social Media.

Facing the fear of UGC

One of Nationwide’s brand tenets is “we listen,” and they saw social commerce as a new opportunity to listen to the needs of their customers. Before moving forward, Sue and Shawn faced the fear that many companies face in embracing UGC: the fear of the unknown. What would happen, and how would they deal with it? What teams needed to be involved? Who would run it, and who would make sure it complied with industry regulations? Even with evidence like the J-curve indicating reviews would likely be positive, Nationwide wanted to see the results for themselves.

Strategy for overcoming objections

The key to Sue and Shawn’s success in gaining company-wide buy-in was to garner executive support across the organization. Gaining this support required a four part strategy.

1. Reinforce importance of participating in the conversation. Nationwide looked for best practices outside the insurance industry, taking inspiration from Dell’s IdeaStorm and Best Buy’s Blue Shirt Nation. They realized that participating – and being transparent in doing so – was important. “Our executives realized the time had come to stop watching and start doing,” Sue said.
2. Ensure brand protection through content moderation. Moderation was Nationwide’s golden ticket to social commerce. It allowed the brand to limit their risk while staying authentic.
3. Demonstrate the business value of investing in Social. Sue and Shawn showed execs the business impact of the investment, examining how UGC would impact Nationwide’s advertising, reputation management, PR, and SEO to provide better, more relevant content on the brand site. Tying social to real business objectives created a compelling case for moving forward.
4. Create a process for testing and measuring results. Nationwide tested the strategy first, sending review solicitation emails to a subset of customers to see what type of content they would get. As expected, customer feedback was extremely positive.

Using this strategy, Sue and Shawn were able to gain the executive level buy-in they needed to bring the customer voice to the center of the Nationwide brand.

Their biggest piece of advice to help position social commerce to senior management? Tie it to clear business objectives, says Shawn. It isn’t enough to say something is a “fun, new trend.” Make the business case the old-fashioned way, just as you would for any other investment. Demonstrate the value behind social in numbers; show how reviews impact decisions. From there it’s easy to gain the executive advocates you need to make a case for social across your organization.

Want more? The full webinar is available to download for free, here:

This is the first of two posts from our webcast for highly regulated industries. Stay tuned to our blog to see how Nationwide is using social commerce today, and how it’s transforming their corporate culture. You can also read more about Nationwide's use of social on Shawn Morton's blog, here.

This webcast gets to the heart of these concerns, explaining how Nationwide Insurance tackled these issues – and won big with consumers.

Join us and see how Nationwide partnered with Bazaarvoice and Rosetta to:

• Overcome organizational concerns about posting user-generated content on their website
• Assess the issues and find the right solutions
• Measure the results of user-generated content across the entire business

Thursday, February 11, 2010
11:30 to 12:30 EST

Speakers

Sue McManus
Leader of Nationwide Direct and Customer Solutions
Nationwide Insurance

Shawn Morton
Director of Social Media
Nationwide Insurance

Adam Cohen
Partner, Social Media Lead
Rosetta

Marc Ostryniec
Vice President of Financial Services Division
Bazaarvoice