Archive for the ‘Social Commerce Summit’ Category

Customer Centricity, Social Commerce Summit

Heather Brunner Nominations open for the third annual Social Commerce Awards

February 23rd, 2010 by Heather Brunner Chief Operations Officer

How has UGC improved your business? Is your brand a “social commerce rock star”? Nominations are now open for the 2010 Social Commerce Awards, and we want your brand’s story!

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.

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Customer Centricity, Interviews, Social Commerce Summit

Sam Decker Douglas Rushkoff: How New Media (Unlike Marketing) Forces You to be Competent Again

December 21st, 2009 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer

Douglas Rushkoff is an author, teacher, and documentarian who focuses on the ways people, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other’s values. He lectures around the world, and will keynote the 2010 Social Commerce Summit. He has a unique view of brands and how new media changes the game (or takes it back to its core) for brands.

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

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

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

Social Commerce Summit

Sam Decker Social Commerce Pays Off: Real Stories of ROI

October 21st, 2009 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer

This blog post is part of the Social Commerce Summit Quarterly series.

According to analysts, the top question from CMOs who engage with social media is, “How do I measure results?” A recent study by Forrester found that less than half of interactive marketers measure the ROI of their social applications, and a recent study by Bazaarvoice and The CMO Club suggests it’s even less than that.

While measuring conversations’ ROI seems as elusive as capturing a chat between two friends at a cafe, word of mouth on your site can uncover critical insights and real metrics. In this two-part webinar, you’ll get specifics on how 1-800-flowers.com increased engagement and sales through a tailored campaign that encourages consumer stories to be shared on site. You’ll also gain insights from automotive parts giant JC Whitney on how to execute and measure social strategies – and exactly how they pay off.

In this webinar, you’ll learn:

  • The social commerce metrics that matter most to your business
  • The right strategy, tools, and techniques to measure success
  • How to use metrics to gain buy-in throughout your organization
  • Social strategies that pay off for all brands

Guest speakers:

October 29, 1:00 – 2:00 CST

Register and attend for a chance to win a free pass to the U.S. Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Summit and gift certificates to 1-800-Flowers.com and JC Whitney.

Register Now

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Community, Social Commerce Summit

Sam Decker Summit Up: Bazaarvoice wraps UK Social Commerce Summit

October 13th, 2009 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer

UKSCSPeople are still buzzing about last week’s Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Summit in London; the event sold out quickly, with more than 250 attendees at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. This year brought a ton of new insights from existing Bazaarvoice clients and global thought leaders.

Client speakers from Argos, QVC-UK, Epson Europe, Immobilien Scout 24, DRL Limited, eSpares, and B&Q shared real-world examples of the impact UGC has had on their businesses. The agenda also included keynotes from:

  • Ze Frank, who spoke about why consumers participate in the social web
  • David Rowan, editor of Wired magazine UK, who spoke about the future of ecommerce
  • James Caan of BBC’s “Dragon’s Den,” with an interesting perspective on customer centricity and his investments
  • Ian Jindal, of Internet Retailing, who delivered the day’s most talked-about line: the real metric of social commerce is “profit per engagement-second”

UK and European companies have quickly adopted best practices around social commerce, and we were excited to recognize several Bazaarvoice clients for their forward-thinking efforts. Award winners include:

  • Body Shop UK, Best Use of UGC in Email: they feature real product reviews in their customer newsletters, with great response
  • Halfords, Best Proof of Social Commerce ROI: they recently saw that review readers and writers convert up to 82% higher than those who do not participate
  • QVC-UK, Best Multi-Channel Use of Reviews: they use reviews on-air, create specialty shops on their site with reviews, and let customers vote for top beauty products awards
  • eSpares, Best Use of UGC throughout the Organisation: they performed an A/B test showing that reviews drive higher conversion, and they used customer insights to improve products
  • Argos, Social Commerce Achievement Award: they fully embraced user-generated content, driving huge volumes of reviews and quickly integrating customer feedback throughout their huge organization

Check out what people are saying on Twitter, and read this event review from web manager at ASICS. You can also see photos from the event on Flickr. Keep an eye on this blog for specific insights from Summit presentations in the coming weeks.

Customer Centricity, Marketing Strategy, Research, Social Commerce Summit

Brant Barton UK Takes Lead in Online Advertising

October 12th, 2009 by Brant Barton Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer

eMarketer reported last week that in the first half of 2009, the UK became the first major economy to see online advertising spending surpass TV ad spending. According to the report, the Internet accounted for 23.5% of UK advertising revenue vs. 21.9% for television. This is big news and not without controversy, as the UK TV lobby is protesting the aggregate number reported for Internet ad revenue, which includes paid search (the largest category by nearly 3X), online classifieds, display media, and other formats.

While the experts argue over the math, I think that UK (and US) advertisers and consumers should celebrate this milestone. While the US Internet-TV ad spending gap is still sizable, the steady migration of dollars over the coming years will drive Internet industry growth and evolution, yes, but also a more customer-centric experience for consumers faced with hard decisions in an increasingly complex economic and marketing environment. Advertiser spending on social marketing/commerce applications is still significantly smaller than the leading categories of Internet ad spending mentioned above. However, as we have witnessed firsthand over the last 4+ years of building Bazaarvoice (and shared on many occasions on Bazaarblog), the social category offers perhaps the greatest opportunity for advertisers to think bigger than clickthroughs and conversion rates and instead focus on wholesale cultural and operational transformation of their businesses using the voice of the customer as a muse.

This news from the UK is timely, as we just wrapped up our second annual Social Commerce Summit in London, the European complement to our US Social Commerce Summit held in Austin every year. We now serve over 120+ customers across Europe, and the London Summit was a sold out event. In the coming days, we will share highlights from the Summit here on Bazaarblog!

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Social Commerce Summit

Sam Decker London Social Commerce Summit Sold Out

September 28th, 2009 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer

Next week, I will be flying to London along with the rest of our executive team for our second-annual Social Commerce Summit in London. Our Austin and London Social Commerce Summits are our largest and most educational events of the year for our hundreds of clients and partners around the world, and I’m excited to announce that we have sold out every single one of them!

Last November, we hosted our first London Social Commerce Summit at The Magic Circle Headquarters, followed by an after-party at ABSOLUT ICEBAR. It was a magical event (no pun intended), and we decided to go even bigger this year (200% bigger) following the incredible success of our US Summit in Austin in April.

On October 7th, brands from the UK and continental Europe will congregate at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre for an intense, day-long conference covering the state of the social web, the Bazaarvoice Product Roadmap (including BrandAnswers and Social Network Accelerators), measuring Social Commerce ROI, leveraging user-generated throughout the organization, and more.

We have an incredible line-up of speakers including James Caan of BBC’s Dragons’ Den, David Rowan, the Editor or WIRED Magazine UK, our long-time friend and advisor, Ze Frank, the infamous Ian Jindal of Internet Retailing Magazine, and Joanna Perry of Retail Week. We also have client speakers joining us from Argos, QVC-UK, B&Q, Immobilien Scout 24, EPSON Europe, eSpares, and DRL Limited.

And I can’t leave out the “social” in Social Commerce. After the conference, we will be setting sail across the River Thames toward the world-famous Buddha Bar for our official after-party. With plenty of free champagne, Bazaarvoice blue cocktails, beer and wine, exotic canapés, fresh sushi, and decadent desserts, this will be another fantastic opportunity to network in style. Plus we’ll have an Indian head masseuse, an astrologer/fortune teller, and tons of fun giveaways for everyone – including mini gongs, Zen gardens, fortune telling fish, pocket Buddha figurines, and Buddha Bar CD’s!

With plenty of networking time, interactive sessions, demos, giveaways, and keynote presentations, this is bound to be our most exciting and successful Social Commerce Summit yet. This year, Bazaarvoice will literally and metaphorically be “around the Globe.”

Social Commerce Summit, eCommerce

Sam Decker Webinar: Can Social Media Help your Business?

July 21st, 2009 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer

Is your social commerce strategy ready for a shot in the arm? We’re excited to bring you the first installment in our complimentary webinar series previewing the 2010 Social Commerce Summit. Each of the four webinars will focus on applying winning social commerce practices to your own brand, brought to you by industry thought leaders and featuring real world examples.

As brands struggle to understand how to put the social commerce phenomenon to work for them, one question is on everyone’s mind: What tools will help my company drive business results?

Speakers

The webinar will feature Summit speaker Mitch Joel, President of Twist Image and “Rock Star of Digital Marketing,” plus Bazaarvoice’s own Mike Svatek, VP of Product Strategy. Together they’ll explain:

•    How to select the right social tools for your marketing strategy
•    How to interact in communities and conversations to drive real results for your business
•    What’s next in social commerce – a look inside future products and services

Details and Registration

Thursday, July 30, 2009
1pm – 2pm, CST

Click here to register now. All attendees will be entered to win complimentary registration to the Social Commerce Summit, and a few other surprises along the way!

You can direct any questions about the Social Commerce Summit and the webinar series to summit@bazaarvoice.com. Stay tuned to our blog for details on upcoming webinars in this series in October, January, and April.

Click here to register now

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Social Commerce Summit

Sam Decker 2009 Social Commerce Summit London

June 25th, 2009 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer

Building on the explosive success of last year’s first Social Commerce Summit in London hosted at The Magic Circle Headquarters and world-famous ABSOLUT ICEBAR, Bazaarvoice is excited to announce the launch of our second-annual UK Social Commerce Summit. The 2009 Social Commerce Summit London event will be hosted on 7 October at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, followed by a champagne boat ride down the River Thames to our illustrious after-party at Buddha Bar London.

We’re bringing the best in Social Commerce! From notable keynotes and client presentations, to real-world training and roundtable discussions, Bazaarvoice’s Social Commerce Summit London is the definitive event for driving social commerce strategy and ROI.

Our keynote speakers include:jamescaan-01

You’ll also experience engaging seminars on customer-centricity, measuring ROI, breathing “Customer Oxygen,” and the Bazaarvoice product roadmap. View the full agenda online.

The Bard once asked: “Can one desire too much of a good thing?” We hope not. With a day full of informative and entertaining keynotes, real-world training and sessions, and plenty of time to network with peers, this year’s Social Commerce Summit in London is sure to be a hit. Brush up on your Shakespeare, because the social commerce event of the year doth cometh in October!

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Marketing Strategy, Ratings & Reviews, Social Commerce Summit, Word of Mouth

Sam Decker 2009 Summit Cliffnotes #4: Maximizing Impact from the Four Phases of Social Commerce

June 4th, 2009 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer

This series of blogs summarizes key takeaways from some of the presentations and panel discussions offered at the 2009 Social Commerce Summit.

This post recaps my session from the 2009 Social Commerce Summit, “Maximizing Impact from the Four Phases of Social Commerce.”

It was Christmas 2004, and the “it”-toy of the year for my four-year-old son Kyle was a volcano racetrack playset.

The playset was nearly impossible to assemble. My father, Bert, went online to look for feedback from fellow purchasers, and found that the toy had a 1.5-star rating on the retailer’s website with very critical reviews. Bert wrote a similarly critical product review detailing our experience with assembly.

That’s when my family decided never to buy a product again without first researching customer reviews.

“Just say the word”

Reviewers want to enhance others’ experiences by sharing their own. These days, social networking technology amplifies the voice – and impact – of anyone with an opinion.

Successful social commerce follows a maturity cycle that repeats itself over and over again. Each phase offers unique opportunities for businesses to get ahead.

Phase 1: Find influencers

In a marketplace where everyone wields influencer potential, companies must dramatically change the way they market their brands. Forward-thinking businesses actively court customer opinions, knowing that the most effective quality assurance comes from the people ultimately using the products.

The best way to attract influencers is to offer multiple channels that empower them to make their voice heard. Bazaarvoice found a 29% overlap in customers utilizing Ask & Answer and Ratings & Reviews. This demonstrates the opportunity to tap into reviewers for answers, but also illustrates the opportunity to unearth new contributors with different channels.

Phase 2: Get contribution

Once you’ve provided a forum for customers to raise their hands, the next step is to encourage customers to contribute.

There are various ways to accomplish this goal. Bazaarvoice client Canadian Tire asked their customers for product usage tips. Bath and Body Works solicited reviews and Q&A feedback via email, on in-store receipts, and upon completion of online purchases.

Action chains are an important part of maximizing influencers’ voices. If a customer submits a review for a product, he or she is already engaged with the brand and is open to further contribution. Why not direct them to contribute again?

Thank you pages for review submission are a great way to link reviews to questions and answers. Bazaarvoice clients have found that their thank you pages linking to open questions about the reviewed product drive answer volume by 139 percent, making these pages a huge opportunity increase influencers’ impact.

Phase 3: Get more from contribution

User-generated content isn’t just useful for driving Web traffic and e-commerce. Utilize your customer’s input on all types of advertising, from in-store ads and kiosks to email promotions and mobile devices. Razorgator’s “101 Reasons to Buy Your Tickets from Razorgator” is aggregated entirely from their customers’ opinions.

In addition, user-generated content can help improve an organization on every level. Customer feedback offers an outsider’s perspective on your company’s sales, customer service, and marketing techniques. Companies have returned to the drawing board based on negative user feedback, notifying dissatisfied customers how their input helped improve the original product. This step improves customer trust, and proclaims the company’s dedication to excellence.

Phase 4: Get more from influencers

The final phase of the social commerce cycle presents brands with questions that direct them back to phase 1. How can you bring your offline reviewers online? How can you engage them in new and creative ways?

The online retailer continued to carry the faulty and highly criticized volcano racetrack playset for a year after our bad experience. Neither the manufacturer nor the retailer ever responded to Bert’s toy review. As a result, my father didn’t write another online review for four years. The retailer and manufacturer’s neglect of the customer voice lost them an influencer and an opportunity.

Learn from our story. Use your customers’ input to maximize your impact.Social Commerce Summit: Opening Remarks

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Customer Centricity, Marketing Strategy, Research, Social Commerce Summit, User-Generated Content, Word of Mouth

Sam Decker 2009 Summit Cliffnotes #3: How the New York Times is Using WOM Insights to Build ROI

May 28th, 2009 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer

This series of blogs summarizes key takeaways from some of the presentations and panel discussions offered at the jeffreygraham2009 Social Commerce Summit.

“How the New York Times is using WOM to drive ROI” was the keynote given by Jeffrey Graham, Executive Director of Customer Insight for the New York Times, on April  29, 2009.

Readers tell the New York Times that they buy the paper or visit NYTimes.com because the content fuels their conversations. They like to be “in the know.” They want to be where the dialogue begins.

All media is social media – including newspapers, which are a forum for communicating issues of interest to the public. But the scope of media presentation has changed drastically within the past decade. The New York Times has pursued different ways to bring its content to a global audience.

Women Multipliers
Marketers have come to realize that women play a large role in decision-making, especially in non-traditionally female-targeted categories such as technology and automobiles. Further, there is a set of “multipliers” who spur and rely on word of mouth to extend trends.

In 2008, the Times conducted an online study of more than 3,000 affluent women with in-depth interviews in NYC and LA. The survey covered investments, fashion, travel, consumer electronics and automobiles and filtered for word of mouth factors:

  • Means of influence – personal communication with at least five people per day
  • Past recommendation behavior – looking for a history of word of mouth influence
  • Personality traits – a love for learning new things, sharing ideas, and offering advice

The results revealed that 92 percent of women multipliers mentioned preferred products or services in conversations, in contrast to 79 percent of average affluent women.

Multiplier word of mouth is more valuable because the multipliers consume in greater quantities, and speak up more often. Auto non-multipliers speak to two people, for instance; multipliers speak to 14 ppl. If you reach 40 percent of the multipliers within your media plan, you double the number of recommendations made. Media planners don’t analyze multiplier data yet, but they will.

Global Multipliers
Does this trend exist only in the US and Europe? Or is it a global phenomenon?

A 2008 Reuters study analyzed similar trends amongst 4300 affluent consumers from major global nations. Multipliers were recognized based on product engagement, purchasing power, and social influence in the areas of advocacy, finance, luxury, technology, and travel.

While affluent multipliers constitute only one percent of the population, they influence 20 percent of all travel expenditure – 241 million flights – as well as 26 percent of global technology and 18 percent of global luxury purchases.

The study found a shared group of traits that is consistent around the world. Seventy-two percent of multipliers stressed the importance of being the first to try something new. Early adopters drive profitability because they rapidly adopt new products and spread the word about them. Eighty-nine percent of multipliers feel a responsibility to share their experience, offering 2.5 times the number of average consumer recommendations. Technology multipliers are asked for product recommendations a whopping average of 8 times per week.

Hidden Business Decision Influencers (B2B)
In 2008, the Times spoke with several dozen B2B individuals from various fields about the people they influence, and the ones who influence them. An average of five other voices influence business decisions, with influence overlapping industries. Businesses are influenced by a wide network of people, with many chief decision makers heavily dependent upon multiple sources of information and early adaptation of new technology. Alumni networks are among the top second-degree influencers.

What Multipliers Represent
The return on investing in multipliers was Bazaarvoice clients’ success. The Times’s metrics showed that word of mouth is the new measure of effective advertising. The NYTimes.com has seen the following results:

  • #1 newspaper site on the Web
  • 20 million monthly unique users
  • Most blogged site on the internet – extends the NYT’s mission to inform people across the world
  • Numerous industry awards

How to Utilize the Multiplier Effect

  1. Multipliers like to spread the word – enable them to spread YOUR message
  2. Multipliers are info mavens – be their source for news and trends
  3. Multipliers like to be experts – target your media to bring them YOUR news
  4. Multipliers want to talk back – use online media to cultivate a dialogue
  5. Multipliers are very environmentally conscious – increasing sustainability is key
  6. Multipliers tend to be trendsetters for things to come

womroi

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