Author Archive

New at Bazaarvoice, User-Generated Content

Michael Osborne What are 100,000,000,000 impressions worth?

March 5th, 2010 by Michael Osborne Chief Revenue Officer

100 billion impressionsYou read it right. 100 billion impressions. At one a second that would be over 3,168 years. Or about 65% of recorded history. Incredible. But as you might have remembered from my last blog post about the net present value of user generated content, I like to think in terms of “what’s that worth?”

To put it simply, it’s a lot. Let’s consider a few assumptions:

Running a few simple calculations, this puts the value per impression at $0.56. Or in total, about $56 billion dollars of online value. If you use the stats published for offline influence, it goes up to $3.25 per impression, or $325 billion in value. Sounds incredible – and sure, there are some assumptions here, but when you think about the impressions we’ve served up in just under five years being worth $325 billion, it ranks as just above the 25th highest Gross Domestic Product. In another five years, it will eclipse the top 10.

Who’d have thought 100 billion user-generated content impressions would be worth more than the GDP of Austria?  ;-)

Awards

Michael Osborne Bazaarvoice named Retail Systems’ Technology Vendor of the Year

November 3rd, 2009 by Michael Osborne Chief Revenue Officer

We’re excited and humbled at the growth we’ve seen in trs_awards WINNER_09he UK, as we’ve only been there since 2007.

On Friday, October 30, Bazaarvoice was named the 2009 Technology Vendor of the Year by Retail Systems magazine. The competition was tough, with eight finalists vying for the title, including several huge, well-known UK providers.

This Award comes on the heels of rapidly accelerating company growth in Europe. Of the UK’s top 50 UK online retailers, 34 have reviews on site, and we’re happy to say that 19 of these are Bazaarvoice clients.

As our sales and implementation team grows in the UK and across Europe, awards like these – in addition to the positive results and feedback we get from these international clients – tell us we’re providing a service that is needed and appreciated by top international brands.

It’s been a banner year at the London office of Bazaarvoice, with the addition of Andy Leaver, Vice President of International Sales, in July, and another high-impact UK Social Commerce Summit in October.

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New at Bazaarvoice

Michael Osborne Andy Leaver joins Bazaarvoice as Vice President of International Sales

July 15th, 2009 by Michael Osborne Chief Revenue Officer

We’re proud to announce Andy Leaver, seasoned EMEA executive, as our new Vice President of International Sales. This is a huge turning point for Bazaarvoice and represents our absolute commitment to deliver the benefits of Social Commerce to organizations around the world. While we’ve been quickly expanding in the UK, Europe and Asia over the past year, Andy’s addition will put our growth into overdrive for the next 18 months. I couldn’t be more excited, nor could Andy!

“There are rare times in your life when you know you’ve just discovered a company that combines talent, passion, energy, and product in an explosive way – Bazaarvoice has that elusive mix,” Andy said.

Andy comes to Bazaarvoice with nearly two decades of experience building out EMEA operations for technology leaders. Most recently he led the EMEA team for two years at SuccessFactors, where his team won over 350 customers. Prior to SuccessFactors, Andy was the EMEA VP for Ariba, founded the European consulting team for Microsoft, and worked directly with the board and Jack Welch at General Electric.  You know, just a few challenges here and there. ;)

From London, Andy has ready access to our European and APAC sales teams, which are growing exponentially – we’ve doubled our APAC team just in the past month. With his experience growing sales teams and acquiring great customers, we expect our European teams to outshine our US teams in short order. And yes, that’s a public challenge to everyone on the teams!

Andy was ready to take a break from a high-paced career when we found him, but once he saw the opportunity and how well we meet global clients’ needs, he decided to jump in with both feet. It’ll be an amazing ride, and I can’t wait. And don’t forget to ask him for his “go-to karaoke song” when you meet him.

Read more about Andy Leaver in our press release, and stay tuned to our blog for updates on our APAC and European expansion. With many new client announcements coming very soon. ;)

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Ask & Answer, Bazaarvoice Stories, Marketing Strategy, New at Bazaarvoice, User-Generated Content

Michael Osborne Bazaarvoice Talks Multi-Channel Marketing Over Lunch

March 5th, 2009 by Michael Osborne Chief Revenue Officer

Bazaarvoice not only has the best solutions in the social commerce industry – it presents them in style.

A couple of weeks ago, Bazaarvoice hosted a business luncheon for 40 attendees from companies such as M and M Direct, Hamleys, and Lands’ End at the Century Club, an exclusive central London media club in the Soho district. Opening speaker Justin Crandall, Managing Director of Bazaarvoice, emphasized the importance of optimizing user-generated content through four phases of maturity:

  • Content Generation
  • Online Amplification
  • Multi-Channel Diversification
  • Business Transformation

Ashley Friedlein, CEO and co-founder of Econsultancy, elaborated further on multi-channel marketing and business structure transformation in his keynote presentation. 

“The battle [for credibility] has already been won,” Friedlein said. Consumer feedback has become the norm, not a novelty. Seventy-eight percent of consumers believe that customer recommendations – whether in review, Q&A, or story form – are the most credible form of advertising, according to a 2007 study conducted by Nielsen Media Research. Products with 20+ reviews lead to nearly 84 percent higher conversion rates, on average. Bazaarvoice Ask & Answer clients saw a 22 percent increase in conversion for products with more than two answered questions, as well as a 28-81 percent decrease in call center volume. 

Yet with 92 percent of the UK’s Top 25 online retailers implementing ratings and reviews for their products, forward-thinking companies must set their content apart by innovative means. 

“Most interactions with your brand online aren’t on your main site,” Friedlein said. “Can you take your shop to them?” After retailers have maximized their online usage of their consumers’ feedback, the next step is to take that content offline and into stores to deliver further value. The implications for marketing, positioning, and packaging are endless. Friedlein cited Sephora’s sales spikes in its most reviewed beauty products as an example; other companies are using reviews in direct advertising, call centers, public relations, catalogues, in-store displays and mobile media. 

Some brands have gone one step further to collaborate with other companies for user-generated designs. H&M allowed Sims 2 players to design their own H&M-inspired outfits; the winner’s creation was made available for purchase in nearly 1,000 H&M retail locations for $14.90. Other retail sites have implemented federated commerce, linking up products to social networks, allowing customers access to their products from anywhere – Facebook to Paypal, eBay to widgets customizable for different Web sites, Dell to Twitter. 

The key to the final phase of social commerce lies in brands utilizing their content for business insight —what’s known as “operationalizing user-generated content.” Smart companies use their product feedback not only to drive sales, but also to make merchandising decisions, improve product functionality, and drive business intelligence. 

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Culture

Michael Osborne Bazaarvoice Is Inspired to Livestrong

February 6th, 2009 by Michael Osborne Chief Revenue Officer

This post was guest-written by Tony Capasso, Bazaarvoice Sales Director.

When a company like Bazaarvoice assembles the best and brightest to shape an industry, in our case Social Commerce, it becomes clear that those individuals have much to offer not only to the company but also to the community at large. The Bazaarvoice Foundation was created to give our employees the opportunity to make that impact and every quarter we choose a cause and go out to do our part. Unfortunately due to limited time we cannot impact as many causes as we’d like together as a group.

The Bazaarvoice Speaker Series was started to bring community leaders into our four walls so that we could expose all of our talented, motivated and passionate employees to as many causes as possible with the hope that along the way an individual might connect with a particular cause and be inspired to make their own contribution in their spare time. We were fortunate enough to host Doug Ulman, CEO of the Lance Armstrong Foundation, at our offices last week to kick off this series. You can see the video he presented here: http://www.bazaarvoice.com/video/livestrong_video.html.

The LAF is a national organization headquartered in our backyard, right here in Austin. Their mission is to inspire and empower people affected by cancer and by Doug’s admission don’t strive to be the biggest organization or raise the most money, they strive to make the biggest impact. They do this by creating experiences for people and their goal is to create social change and lead a movement. This is a movement to facilitate the dialogue around what it means to be an active citizen, what it means to be healthy and what it means to take control of your life. At the end of Doug’s talk we asked if anyone had questions and the entire room was silent. It was difficult to formulate words while holding back the tears and putting into perspective how so many people are inspiring each other to Livestrong.

If you can spare 30 minutes to watch this video you will be overwhelmed at the story behind how the organization was founded, how the LAF is building community, the genesis of that little piece of yellow silicone and the explosion of a truly global movement to fight an epidemic. Did you know that Livestrong is one of the fastest-growing apparel brands in the world? There is also a very personal story about Doug himself who is a cancer survivor and he personifies Livestrong every day. Doug is a good friend and one of my favorite stories I like to tell about Doug is how on his 28th birthday he woke up and ran 28 miles. I am not sure what you were doing on your 28th, but that sure made me think.

I’m excited that we’re already planning our next speaker at a great charity we are already involved with. These talks show us all how we can get involved, in our own way.

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Ratings & Reviews, User-Generated Content

Michael Osborne Why Waiting Hurts – Net Present Value of Reviews

January 21st, 2009 by Michael Osborne Chief Revenue Officer

Net Present Value (NPV) calculations are common in financial circles, but something I discuss with prospects all the time is how investments on their sites and in their customer communities can also follow this concept.  The longer you wait, the more you’ll miss out on.  Let’s take a look at the time value of reviews…

 

 

 Assume a few things:

  1. You’ve got $10m in online sales annually.
  2. You’ve got $2m in returns from online sales, resulting in $8m total in net sales.  This makes your return rate 20% of annual sales.
  3. You’ve got a conversion rate per session of 3% – meaning 3% of each session actually buys something.
  4. You’ve got an average order value of $100.
  5. You’re processing 100,000 orders per year, or on average 8,333 per month.  Let’s smooth out the holiday spikes for now.
  6. With 3% conversion resulting in 100,000 purchasing sessions, you’ve got roughly 3.3million total sessions a year.

Assume a few more things that we’ve learned at Bazaarvoice:

  1. Reviews can raise conversion by 20% to 30%.  Let’s assume 20%, so your new conversion rate would be 3.6% instead of 3%.
  2. Reviews can reduce returns by 10% to 20%.  Let’s assume 10%, so your new return rate would be 18% instead of 20%.
  3. Conservatively it takes your organization 90 days after going live with reviews to promote and make your customers aware.  Most organizations hit this 90 day window easily, and some start day one with lots of content pre-collected.
  4. For now, we’ll ignore the other benefits of having user generated content on your site.

Now to the benefits…

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Community, Culture

Michael Osborne A Different Gift from Bazaarvoice Sales

December 31st, 2008 by Michael Osborne Chief Revenue Officer

Every year I give my team something small at holiday time as a token of my personal appreciation for great work done all year long – a gift card or something like that. This year, keeping with the same idea, I loaded up excel and after hours of formulae, realized the team’s total gift would be about $1,000 – nothing to sneeze at.

$1,000 split among everyone was little. $1,000 by itself was large. So I decided this year we would do something different. I called one of our investors, Julie Constantin, and asked her for a recommendation of where to donate the money. Julie and her husband are very involved with charities – helping the V foundation and many others. She immediately suggested The Grace Family Vineyard Foundation, and gave me Dick Grace’s phone number. What happened next was unbelievable.
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Community, User-Generated Content, Word of Mouth

Michael Osborne Reviews of the Ridiculous

July 14th, 2008 by Michael Osborne Chief Revenue Officer

One of the Market Developers, Jeff Shoemaker, on our US Retail team sent me a link to something he knew I’d love.  He knows I’m a gadget guy and truly enjoy the insane cutting edge technology that gets released daily.  He knew I read Engadget, Joystiq, Dvice, Uncrate, XBOX360 Fanboy, PS3 Fanboy, and a few others religiously.  He knew I’d spend some hard earned cash on things that others might find to be a bit much.  So he knew I’d love a new product from Denon, the AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable. 

What is it?  For a cable you’d expect $500 to get you something amazing.  This is a five foot long Ethernet cable.  Generally available for free from your IT guy or maybe $2 on numerous sites.  Now your true audiophile friends will weigh in here and say “$500 for a cable isn’t that much, I spent $14,000 on bi-wiring my one ton Kharma Exquisites.”  Oxygen-free copper and multi-layer wrapping is just the beginning – Wikipedia says that exotic materials like silver and “long crystal” or high-purity copper will get the best possible frequency response.  Right.  Of course that same article will go on to say that digital signals get an even hotter debate because of the “its on or off” argument around digital signals.  Yes, the Wikipedia article also says that SP/DIF signals transmit just the same over a coat hanger as they do ultra-high end cables.  Wild. (more…)

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Word of Mouth

Michael Osborne Do Believe the Hype – iPhone’s Buzz is Real

July 1st, 2007 by Michael Osborne Chief Revenue Officer

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As the Bazaarvoice gadget guy it was a moral imperative that I got an iPhone on Friday – so we could ALL share in its wonder. When I left the office at 3:30 on Friday I thought FOR SURE I’d be too late. I was wrong. When I waited in line and I was #200 or so I thought FOR SURE they’d come out and tell us they only had 100 units in stock. I was wrong. When the line finally started moving I figured they’d only have a few counters going and it would take forever, or they’d only let you get one, or they’d only have the 4gb iPhones, not the 8gb. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Apple did it right, exactly right, from the hype to the experience of getting one to the device itself. And their buzz couldn’t be hotter right now.

Steve Jobs set the blogs ablaze in January by announcing the iPhone and continued causing a word of mouth stir all the way through the interview with the Wall Street Journal. Looking back to my post in January, from day one the iPhone was a hit. The expectations were overwhelming and the dissenters numerous, but Apple adhered to one key rule in marketing – live up to the hype. Apple called their shot and told consumers EXACTLY what to expect, with demos and details metered out carefully, then simply released exactly that. Creating the buzz is easy, but nailing it on launch day is where some products have missed the mark. Not the iPhone.
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Marketing Strategy, Word of Mouth

Michael Osborne Nintendo Wii – Everybody Votes!

February 18th, 2007 by Michael Osborne Chief Revenue Officer

Nintendo Wii

Nintendo just released a channel on their Wii platform called “Everybody Votes.”  For those that aren’t current Wii users, the content that the device can display is grouped into units called Channels.  These display in the dashboard of the device and up to now have been focused on mostly one-way communications like news updates or weather forecasts.  This is different – and has just turned on a two-way hotline into opinions of all of their users.

Why would anyone want to interact with this content?

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