As we celebrate this milestone, we are also close to celebrating our 5-year anniversary (Brant and I founded Bazaarvoice on May 2, 2005). With 80% of consumers now looking for customer reviews, it is hard to appreciate now just how few U.S. retailers offered customer reviews on their websites in May of 2005. Would you believe only four? Today we serve more than 50 of the top 100 U.S. retailers, more than 25 of the top 50 U.K. retailers, and similar numbers in Australia, France, and Germany. And we serve many clients outside of retail, from health care to manufacturing to financial services. We have rapidly grown into a company of 750 clients and 515 employees globally, operating across 25 international languages. I do not take our success for granted one bit and I'm very proud of and thankful for our partnerships with our clients. I'm also proud of the culture we have created here. We spend the majority of our waking time at work, and we strive to make that time as fun and meaningful as possible. Our passionate culture impacts the way we serve our clients and also give back to the community.

As I look back to my first Bazaarblog post, I think back to my analytical roots, spending seven years building Coremetrics, and reflect on how much we have achieved on the analytical front at Bazaarvoice. The "hidden" impact of 100 billion impressions is how we are writing the new marketing and merchandising textbook together with our clients. In a world of increasingly fragmented media, a dramatic shift to time spent in the online channel vs. other channels, and a rise in the prominence of the voice of the customer, the "hidden" impact is felt in how marketers and merchandisers adopt new practices based on user-generated content. And, to be totally frank, I underestimated the impact in how Bazaarvoice would change the world in this way. The Bazaarvoice School of C2C Marketing Seal to the left is from our first Social Commerce Summit in 2008, which quickly sold-out and was a magical event, full of clients speaking about writing the new textbook together (our fifth Summit is coming up in Austin April 19-21 and is almost sold-out already).

So this blog is dedicated to some of the most dramatic changes I have seen on the path to 100 billion. Here is a look back on just a few of them:

• Oriental Trading's CEO, Sam Taylor, leads a radical organizational change to reform merchandising based on user-generated content and wins the prestigious Gartner Group Customer Experience award (read the Bazaarblog post on the award, and another on specifics).
• The customer reviewer becomes the spotlight for campaigns (Free People example, and Urban Outfitters too). At that time, I believe this was an industry first. With 80% of reviews usually coming from the top 20% of your customers by lifetime value, this campaign technique will be adopted rapidly.
• Sephora uses in-store signs to get customers to read reviews via their mobile devices, and trains in-store associates to promote it. [Note: the sold-out Shop.org (NRF) and RAMA Retail Innovation & Marketing Conference in San Francisco this week will feature Julie Bornstein of Sephora - read her interview by NRF on the ROI of social media, a special Mobile Boot Camp, and me moderating a panel of rockstar venture capitalists.] Related to Sephora, Intuit's TurboTax did the same with their in-store displays, and made an impact at every Best Buy, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, and Walmart store in the U.S.
• The broad multichannel marketing implications of user-generated content, from print, to TV, to online. I'll never forget the first time this reviews were promoted on in-store receipts and by whom.
• The transformation of channel advertising with BrandVoice and BrandAnswers. With 80% of consumers searching for reviews, the implications for channel advertising are huge and user-generated content in the channel is quickly becoming a business imperative for a supplier. And it isn't just UGC. BrandAnswers and Ask & Answer now bring in supplier-generated content as well as retailer-generated content to answer user-generated content in the form of product pre-sell questions.
• TurboTax partners with us to launch the "Friendalyzer", where you can see TurboTax reviews written by your friends on social networks, including Facebook (which now has 400 million users). Seth Greenberg of Intuit will be presenting the great results on this live at our Social Commerce Summit this April 19-21 in Austin. The implication for technologies like Facebook Connect are profound for user-generated content at large and we are in Inning One for these innovations.

It has been an amazing 4 years, 10 months, and I want to take this opportunity to sincerely thank all of our clients, employees, partners, investors, and advisors. We promise not to take our success for granted, and we are ramping up R&D and Client Services like never before. This quarter alone, we are attempting to hire at least 80 people, but our very high bar makes this difficult indeed (we have 14 full-time recruiters working in our office at Bazaarvoice today and there is nothing more important for our culture than its foundation: our people). If you know of someone that may be interested in joining us, see the many jobs available here and note our referral incentives.

The next 100 billion impression milestone will no doubt be achieved much faster than the first, but I expect our impact to be no less profound than with the first (see our many case studies, webinars, or whitepapers for more). Thank you, thank you, and thank you again for your support. And stay tuned to this blog as we continue this exciting journey. As I said in my first-ever blog post on Feb. 3rd, 2006 (and remains just as true today):

Welcome to the age of customer empowerment in our hyper-connected global village! We look forward to being your tour guide in this wild, wild ride.

Is your website “stocked” with plenty of information for the holidays?

Sure, you can plan now to buy massive quantities of merchandise for the holiday shopping season, but have you thought about how to beef up your site with the right answers for holiday shoppers? You can add in-store sales associates as the holidays get closer, but they can’t have all the answers, at any time, for every customer.

And while you may have a stellar customer support line, you want those folks helping customers place orders – not answering product questions. With Ask & Answer, customers ask their question once, then you and/or the community answers it. The answers remain directly in the purchase path, where others can use this information to make purchasing decisions quickly. Customer service actually improves while the overall cost dramatically decreases. Retailer Canadian Tire decreased its support costs by up to 81% with Ask & Answer.

Manufacturers should get involved, too

According to research from Channel Intelligence and Forrester, 58% of online researchers start at the manufacturer’s site – more than any other source. And research across our client base has shown that questions about products answered by manufacturers are more helpful than any other type of answers, so it’s important for manufacturers to be proactive in answering customers’ questions. Bazaarvoice enables manufacturers to answer questions both on their own sites and on top retailer sites.

Add more answers in time for the holidays

We can help you get Ask & Answer up and running on your site quickly, and your Community Manager can help you maximize consumer, manufacturer, and your own staff’s involvement to increase sales (up to 22% for one retailer), reduce returns (a 23% decrease for JCWhitney), and give your customers a great shopping experience this holiday season.

The holiday shopping season could be make-or-break this year, and it’s coming up fast. User-generated content like customer reviews and community Q&A can help make your brand the preferred source for holiday research and shopping. Stay tuned to this blog for ideas about how to get customers engaged, and read our other holiday-ready blog: “It’s 100 degrees. Are you ready for Christmas?”

Ryan Thomas, Head of Direct Channels at Comet, says the decision was a natural progression in the evolution of the retailer’s UGC strategy. Comet noticed that customers in its online community were already using the reviews platform to ask each other questions; Thomas is confident that A&A will give the retailer clearer insight into customers’ needs. “The website has a vast product set with questions not always answered by product specifications, so we wanted to give customers their own platform to air product-related queries,” Thomas says. “As well as creating a new space for customer interaction, it will give us clearer insight into our customers and their product needs.”

Read more about Comet’s decision in our press release, and check out our related blog posts to see how other Bazaarvoice clients are using Ask & Answer to drive customer engagement in their own brand communities.

Flowers are in full bloom, and summer has officially begun. Whether you are gearing up for a barbecue, trying your green thumb at landscaping, or finally building your deck, Home Depot is the destination spot to find great products and expertise.

Home Depot Canada has truly found a way to provide just-in-time expertise with Ask & Answer. They branded the Answer Depot, “the product information tool at homedepot.ca,” where customers can expect to ask questions, receive answers from the community, and have their problems solved. Their efforts have launched them through the levels of maturity with Ask & Answer, putting them in Level 5 – the top tier of client success.

I had the opportunity to sit down with Sam Barnes, Manager of Online User Experience & Creative Services, to ask about some of the innovative programs he has tried with Answer Depot, ongoing challenges, and what’s in store next.

You’ve been live with Ask & Answer for a while now, and Home Depot Canada has really set the bar for other clients. What advice would you give new Ask & Answer clients before launch?

It’s key to have a specific resource dedicated to being a really engaged community manager. Rachel Paul, our community expert, does a great job ensuring we have a fast turnaround on triage with questions so they get to the right people to be answered and posted quickly.

You also have to let other departments know about the tool and create buzz internally. This should be specifically targeted to merchants, so they understand how it will work and the value it can provide. You really need to gain buy-in and acceptance to be truly transparent. We also found that custom badging for vendors is key for transparency, and the vendors have something to show within their organization. This small act makes the answer seem more like an official response to consumers, and that drives credibility. We value the expert response as well as community answers.

How did you engage manufacturers and help them see the value of participating in your community? What Bazaarvoice tools did you leverage?

It took a bit of work to initially get vendors sold on this idea. We conducted an internal study on several participating vendors to determine who was active in Answer Depot. We were able to show that active vendors saw more traffic and conversion for their category, and showcased this metric as a case study to get other vendors on board. The bottom line is more involvement leads to better metrics. We wanted to help them understand the benefit: this will help you reach potential customers and get answers to help them make a purchase, resulting in higher traffic and higher conversion.

We are able to leverage tools like the Workbench to make participation easier for vendors. Our Community Manager did an email blast first to vendors that had outstanding questions. She included a step-by-step guide on how to participate and the value of getting involved. Later she was able to organize the alerts for open questions by brand so that the vendors wouldn’t have to monitor incoming questions weekly.

It seems that having these best practices in place can really help companies kick off Ask & Answer on a strong note. What are some of the challenges you faced as your community grew?

Getting continual traffic is a big challenge. We try to include call outs for Answer Depot in our email marketing, and it lives permanently on the homepage. We also began leveraging social alerts, specifically “Your question has been answered,” to help drive customers back to the site. I believe hiring a Community Manager was key to organizing our efforts and showing the value of the solution. We want someone going in there frequently to answer questions or forward them to the appropriate merchants or vendors. She also clearly points out that it’s in the vendor’s best interest to participate because it’s free and valuable information, and it’s also great advertising for their brands. With her help, we were able to expand Answer Depot from the category to the product level.

What interesting initiatives have you launched recently?

We launched Garden Centre – a themed portion of Answer Depot (store within a store or a community within a community). This is a specific niche area that gets a great response and is growing. Q&A has more than doubled since last year (during gardening season), and the season is only halfway through. Our dedicated email subscription also doubled, which indicates Garden Centre is driving great engagement. We know it’s a concentrated number of people and may be a smaller segment, but their participation is really showing in the metrics. We have received more questions and answers, higher click-throughs, and overall better engagement. We are currently running a contest for Garden Centre, but all of these stats occurred beforehand. Themed Q&A is a great strategy for segmenting and appropriately messaging to a niche audience.

In terms of engagement, 3 of our top 5 emails for the entire HD Canada site were Garden Centre emails (measured by open rate and click-through rate). For Garden Club, having Ask & Answer helped to define and grow a cold segment into a warm community.

Another great initiative we launched is Ask the Scotts Expert, a campaign sponsored by Scotts. We were looking for more multi-channel alignment with the in-store experience. The Scotts Expert is an integral part of the store experience during gardening season, so we thought, why not offer this online? This is a very seasonal campaign since the timing is fast and intense. We want make information available to our customers no matter what medium or how they want it. This category also has a need for the expert opinion because of the detailed subject matter. Ask & Answer has made customers more receptive to the Scotts expert and the advice given in stores. It’s also easy to leverage email to drive engagement, and the key benefit is that the content lives forever online. It’s the perfect way to supplement online and offline conversations.

For more real world tips from clients who are getting the most out of Ask & Answer, check out our blog series on building and sustaining a healthy Q&A community, and request our white paper on harnessing the power of community Q&A. Stay tuned to our blog for examples of clients who are making the most of their online consumer-generated questions and answers.

This blog post is guest-written by Scott Koester, Product Manager for Bazaarvoice Search.

Our Summit buzzed with input from our clients, and search was a major topic. During our round table sessions, search was a hot topic; we put two full tables together.

At the round table, we went in-depth about our SearchVoice Inline solution, which enables clients to index content directly on their product detail pages. While this capability has been available for over a year, the round table gave us a platform to discuss our latest approach which offers clients an easier way to deploy this functionality and integrate it with the rest of our SearchVoice platform, including our incredibly effective SearchVoice Microsite.

In fact, a top retailer decided on the spot to use SearchVoice Inline on its upcoming Ask & Answer implementation, and pushed up the date of their deployment – a sure sign that online retailers understand the value of UGC in its ability to increase search results. In addition, we signed a new SearchVoice deal at the Summit, and I have meetings with eight more clients and prospects who want to know more about how Bazaarvoice can impact search for them.

Jason Burby, Chief Analytics and Optimization Officer for ZAAZ, speaker at our Summit, and a contributor to ClickZ, noted in his recent Summit recap, “Nearly everyone who talked about ratings and reviews saw huge impacts on their organic search listings. The content in reviews often helps companies with searchable content, doubling or tripling the helpful content that search engines see. You've probably started to see this more with the searches you do online in terms of landing on product review pages.”

And it’s true. As budgets shrink, companies are focusing on natural search as one of the best ways to impact top-line growth. They’re also getting savvy, reassessing the trade-offs of syndicating or sharing that content with other sites – they want to keep that valuable content (and all the search results) for themselves! For many retailers, search is key to their online survival, and several of our clients find that the search results they get from Bazaarvoice solutions more than pay for their overall investment. Our variety of flexible search-enhancing options and the personalized attention of each client’s Community Manager helps all types of clients maximize the impact of UGC on search results.

Tons of one-on-one conversations pointed to the fact that our clients in all industries – financial services, manufacturing, and retail – are all craving the “next generation” in search, and we’re delivering them a variety of flexible ways to drive results. Look to this blog in the coming weeks for more details on Bazaarvoice programs designed to help clients leverage UGC to turbo-charge their search results.

Spring is here, and every respectful Brit is heading into the country, armed with a bike, tent and Sat Nav in hand. Of course, the best place to go for all your spring gear needs is Halfords, the UK’s leading travel solutions and in car technology retailer, and one of Bazaarvoice’s most mature and successful retail clients. With both Ratings & Reviews and Ask & Answer, Halfords is optimizing UGC to give their customers the information they need to make the best purchase decision, from your first bike to your first Sat Nav.

Bazaarvoice teamed up with Halfords for some initial analysis to see the kinds of benefits Ask & Answer is driving for the business. Working with Coremetrics, Halfords showed an increase in Average Order Value, Buyer/Visitor Ratio, and a double-digit increase in page views per session for users that have interacted with Ask &Answer. Not surprising, since with over 12,000+ questions and answers on the site – most answered by the dedicated Halfords Web team — Halfords is off to a fantastic start and sees a great opportunity to get their community experts more involved in contributing answers.

This week I sat down with Jon Asbury, Channel Development Manager at Halfords, to talk about the value and need for user-generated content on the site.

1. What made you decide to add Ask & Answer to your site?

Halfords provide great expertise from colleagues in our stores and we wanted to provide a similar customer-focused experience online. Ask & Answer offered us a way to do that and harness the user community without significant investment in internal resource. Plus we were convinced that it would drive additional value in upsells and conversion.

2. What has surprised you the most about participation?

Very surprised at the volume of questions (Which begs the question what customers would have done if they couldn't ask the question!) and the range of products queried. I am happy to see that our teams are so engaged with this product – we are building a community online, and Ask & Answer is one of the best ways for us to get to know our customers, and their needs.

3. What internal changes have you seen with the introduction of user-generated content?

Questions quickly flagged deficiencies in product descriptions and data, which were quickly filled and informed plans for next season. Colleagues in category teams help with really technical questions that the community couldn't answer, which in turn informs POS and leaflet content.

The Product Quality team also help with technical questions and follow up issues raised (particularly from rejected questions) with suppliers. Going full circle on many of their processes is showing additional value for us and our suppliers. True win-win!

4. What can you recommend to other retailers who have A&A on the site to drive success? What are your top best practices?

Keep on top of questions — if it isn't answered within a few days by the community, make sure an official answer is given. Make sure there is a team able to pick up routine answers who are knowledgeable in their area and set up daily workbench alerts for them. We see that this initial investment is paying off greatly in sales!

When investing in Ask & Answer, it is important to consider having a comprehensive plan to drive the best results and highest community and internal participation. The accomplishments Halfords has seen, both in terms of volume and sales, is due to their wide-ranging approach to make this successful. A strong branding campaign as well as the implementation of our best practices makes for a success story, as well as plans to integrate A&A into their new Post Purchase email, and to add Social Alerts and additional top-rated email marketing to promote the feature.

From a general volume perspective, Halford’s answer-to-question ratio is 85%, with 82% of their questions showing at least one answer.  This ranks them among the most successful Ask & Answer clients.  They have strong cross-departmental participation and the whole business is plugged in.  In aggregate, this places them between a level 3 and a level 4 on the Ask & Answer maturity scale.   Engaging manufacturers and more of the community to answer questions would put them solidly in level 4 status.

For details of your nearest Halfords store telephone 08457 626625 or visit www.halfords.com.

Stay tuned for more real world tips from clients who are getting the most out of Ask & Answer, including our blog post about "How to Build and Sustain and Healthy Q&A Community."

For more information, request “Harnessing the Power of Community Q&A.” And stay tuned to our blog for examples of clients who are making the most of their online Q&A.

Every day, consumers are faced with frustrating barriers to purchasing. They come close to making a purchase decision, but get stuck trying to get critical questions answered in order to feel like they are making a well-informed, confident purchase.

With the pace of today’s consumer marketplace, product marketing, product documentation, customer support, and channel marketing frequently fall short of consumer needs and expectations. Filling these gaps is Ask & Answer’s sweet spot.

If you’re an Ask & Answer client, there is a great opportunity ahead of you – but you need to know how to make the most of it. Many clients like JCWhitney are reaping the rewards. The questions your customers ask are a clue toward what they care about prior to purchase. The frequency of particular types of questions will highlight areas of pent-up customer demand, whether business is successful or lacking.

Every unanswered question is a plea from the customer for help. If you can provide that help – and encourage the community to participate – then you not only solve that person’s problem, but you solve it for everyone else who has the same question for the life of the product. That’s powerful.

But how do you get from here to there? Over the next few weeks, these series of blog posts will show real client examples of evolution through the Ask & Answer stages of maturity, as well as the challenges faced, and the unique lessons learned along the way. By the end, you’ll be familiar with these stages and how to attain success at each level:

Level 0: Before You Deploy
Level 1: Deploying on Category Pages
Level 2: Deploying on Product Pages
Level 3: Cross-departmental Participation
Level 4: Engaging Manufacturers and Vendors
Level 5: Advanced Programs and Integrations

Creating a successful Q&A community isn't rocket science. But it does take commitment, an understanding of how to measure success, and the discipline to follow through. It demands commitment from the company, not just the Web team. Turbo-charging your Q&A community does take effort, but the payoff is huge – increased conversion rates, reduced product returns, decreased customer support volume, and brand loyalty.

Are you taking full advantage of your Q&A community?

For more information, request "Harnessing the Power of Community Q&A: A Practical Guide for Boosting Revenue and Increasing Customer Satisfaction." And stay tuned to our blog for examples of clients who are making the most of their online Q&A.

Two years ago, we were honored to win ClickZ's Marketing Excellence award for Ratings & Reviews, and last year we were recognized by Austin Business Journal for most innovative software award for Ask & Answer. And this morning I was greeted with a pleasant Google alert that Ask &  Answer just won ClickZ's 2008 Marketing Excellence Award for Social Media Marketing!

We pride ourselves on building innovative social software and services that drive measureable results, and are honored to receive recognition like this. The judge's comment reads: "User-generated content is the killer app for all Web sites, and Bazaarvoice is the hands-down leader in driving innovation in this space. Social networking is only viable for the few. Rating, reviews, and comments are there for all to capitalize on, and Bazaarvoice has made it easy for all to get in the game."

We've wrapped ourselves under the term "Social Commerce" because social media marketing programs should impact the P&L (now, more than ever). Whether through measurable client case studies or awards, we're thrilled to see Ask & Answer recognized for making a difference.