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

Video Reviews

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

Click here to view the embedded video.

Bloggle

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

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

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

Product Improvements

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

Email

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

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

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

This blog was guest-written by Lisa Tu, Bazaarvoice Community Manager.

Free People is a contemporary clothing line based out of Philadelphia, PA whose apparel represents femininity, courage, and spirit. Not only is this retailer known for their artistic and beautiful apparel, but they also build their community around the FP Blog and, more recently, customer reviews.

A strong leader in the apparel industry, Free People really takes their customer’s feedback to heart.  They identified key influencers as Top Reviewers in their community. Out of this group, they reached out to their #1 Reviewer, ‘beachcat,’ for an extensive interview which they later used in an entire blog post dedicated to her. Free People dug deep and really spent time getting to know everything about ‘beachcat’—from her favorite article of FP clothing, to what her perfect Valentine’s Date would be. They also collected photos of her in FP products and then featured them in their Flickr Style Event set, a campaign where customers can send pictures of themselves styled in FP gear.

Engaging with your community is a key factor in building brand loyalty and trust with your customers. Free People realized their Top Reviewers weren’t just your average shoppers, but true advocates of the FP Brand, or what we call ‘The Influentials.’ Not only do they give constructive reviews, but they also help encourage potential customers to make confident buying decisions. This in turn helps the retailer build new relations and helps FP merchants gain insight for product enhancements as well.

Free People launched a similar campaign last year featuring Jaime's Faves, an FP Store Manager that they featured on their blog and website. The success of this campaign encouraged them to take it to the next level. This time around they realized that although store employees are great advocates for the brand, word of mouth is also extremely powerful when it comes from everyday people—your customers.

1. Three Reasons Why Photo Reviews Drive Impact
2. Google Snakes on a Starbucks' Plane @!*$&#
3. Bath and Body Works Interview
4. The Long Tail Opportunity of Consumer-Generated Content
5. Bazaarvoice Voted "Best Places to Work" in Austin 
6. Summary of Answers for "What about Negative Reviews?" 
7. The World's Largest Company Launches Ratings and Reviews
8. The NPV of Reviews (Why to Prioritize Before the Holidays) 
9. Bazaarblog » Blog Archive » How jetBlue is Turning Negative Word of Mouth into Positive 
10. 78% of online consumers have more trust for brands with reviews

Customer Centricity

Open Up or Shut Up, Part 1
Always On Network suggests that CEOs, marketing executives, and PR professionals who don't have the courage to deploy new open media tools will be left behind.

Rules of Engagement: Or Are We Still Dating? (MarketBlog)
Commentary on the New York Times rules of engagement article and tapping into the customer zeitgeist.

Always Recommend the Right Products (Sam Decker [me])
Thoughts on truly building the health of your business by incorporating custom-centric values.

Failure of the Last Mile (Ramit Sethi)
Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You to Be Rich blog features a prolific post about something we have all experienced as customers, and should pay attention to as marketers. Related to this, you can read my post on The Word of Mouth Company — spend more upstream and you spend less downstream.

The Customer-Centricity Dilemma (Chris Lawer)
Chris Lawer confronts the flaws in customer centricity and poses ways to perfect and use customer centricity effectively.

More on Customer Centricity (Brian McManus)
Brian McManus itemizes what it takes to create a customer centric enterprise.

Buyer-centric vs. customer-centric: Missing the point (Chris Lawer)
Author Chris Lawer explores the distinction between buyer centric and customer centric states of mind.

Are There Limits to Customer-Centricity? (Graham A. Jarvis)
Author Graham A. Jarvis discusses the motives and processes behind customer centricity. He also asks the question how are you going to become customer-centric?

Future of Advertising

Yell.com / Yellow Pages – are Google and local directories going to oust them?
My sense is that for all the value in the Yellow Pages / Yell.com brand, and for all the legacy value in the local sales relationships that someone like Yell have, they will be eaten away from above and below and that their real value is in being a (B2B) data provider and not a
consumer brand.

Who’s your PodDaddy? (Joseph Jaffe)
Jaffe gives Podshow props for their new foray into podcasting capabilities but questions total reach opportunity.

The Decline and Fall of Advertising (David Wolfe)
David Wolfe's blog about the end of Madison Avenue. The author encourages you to follow another link to an interview with Al Reis. This author does not suggest what replaces advertising…join the discussion and lets figure it out.

eCommerce

Business Communications Best Practices: Royal Caribbean Cruise Email Campaign (tessa)
Anne Holland of Marketing Sherpa gives us another best practice case study with the Royal Caribbean Cruise’s interactive email campaign launched in 2005.

Comparing Custom Search Boxes (The Browster Blog)
Lots of little start-ups are cropping up trying to provide niche-y, customized search experiences. But can they really beat Google at its game?

Visitor Traffic Logs: Put them to Work for You (Wayne Hurlbert)
Where do you find content ideas for improving your search results? The answer may be in your own visitor traffic logs.

Closing The Tactile Gap Between Offline and Online (Brett Hurt)
Brett Hurt, CEO of Bazaarvoice, outlines some of the current technologies supporting a more realistic online life while finding a way to incorporate the word smell-o-vision.

How Hispanic Clicks (Juan Guillermo Tornoe)
There are 14 million Hispanics online and if you're targeting them online you'll want to read Juan’s post on How Hispanics Click from Hispanic Trending.

New York recoups $34 million in unpaid sales tax for web/catalog purchases
About 20 states are recouping revenue lost to unpaid sales tax on web and catalog purchases by simply asking taxpayers to estimate it in their tax returns.

Blogging, Podcasts, and such

Edelman-Intelliseek Blog Report
Tips for corporate PR and communications folks on how to deal with bloggers

Jory on Outward-facing (Nancy White)
Nancy expounds on the value of blogging as an outward face to your company/community.

Social Capital in Markets (Johnnie Moore)
Johnnie Moore’s insightful quote on the sociological meaning of blogs

Small Businesses and Blogging (Ben McConnell)
Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba Champion the reasons as to why blogging helps small businesses.

Entrepreneurs Hope Podcasting Has Potential (Doug Kersten)
Blogger Doug Kersten on podcasting and the potential for small businesses.

Tagging (From SXSW)
Tagging, word-of-mouth’s new best friend. Someone’s personal highlights from a panel he attended at SXSW about tagging.

Analyzing the Content of Blogs (Regina M. Miller)
Regina M. Miller muses on the resources blogs can provide when looked at critically.

Smart advice for PRs engaging with bloggers (Neville Hobson)
Neville Hobson’s weblog discussing the proper use of blogs and how companies should interact with blogs.

A Blog is a Great CRM Tool (Guillaume du Gardier)
Guillaume du Gardier’s: entry on the use of blogs as a customer service tool.

Newspapers to Syndicate Blog Content (Marketing VOX)
A Marketing VOX blog about new movements in the blogging world.

Word of Mouth

Movies are not like pork chops. Really. (Jackie Huba)
Why are movie-theater revenues down three years in a row? It all adds up to bad word of mouth.

Edgy is Hot & Has Blogging 1.0 Souled Out?
Digging into the Beat mystique and the Apple mystique, this post digs into "Edgy is Hot" marketing and notes how tempting it is to succumb the smoothing the edges that give us differentiation.

Customer Service IS a Profit Center (Zane Safrit)
A solid blog about gaining customers and the power of WOM.

How to Buy Word of Mouth (Roy H. Williams)
This is an older post, but one that needs to be in here and worth reading for those who haven’t seen it. This comes from Roy William’s Monday Morning Memo.

Jack Trout Attacks Word of Mouth Marketing (George Silverman)
How do you know when Word of Mouth is getting attention? When branding guru Jack Trout posts a contrarian view. Here is author George Silverman's response to the Jack attack on word of mouth.

Bad Profits and the Incredible Power of Word of Mouth (Brett Hurt)
Do you have good profits or bad profits. Bazaarvoice CEO, Brett Hurt, explains how Blockbuster and GM lost their way with bad profits. Think about the decisions you are making today that effect word of mouth!

Survey: Marketers To Slash Ad Spending, Focus On Buzz (Sam Decker)
Sam Decker’s blog entry about companies trending away from traditional advertising, and the push towards embracing the word-of-mouth buzz.

Wharton: Bad WOM Gets Badder Over Time (Gary Stein)
As bad WOM stories get repeated, they get embellished. That is, the clerks get ruder, the line gets longer, the Muzak gets more annoying, each time the story is repeated. I have no idea how they quantified this, but by the time the story is repeated a few times, the negative effect is actually 5x the original damage.

Change Leadership

Thoughts on Speaking Out (Adrian Savage)
For leaders at every level, no news is decidedly bad news. They depend on others to let them know what's going on, preferably in time to take action. Fear of speaking openly means people look away, rather than confronting problems.

The Art of Sucking Down
Guy Kawasaki takes a contrarian view to sucking up to A-list people. Suck Down.

Creating a culture of winning
A New Dog Old Trick blog about corporate culture and what a winning culture is.

Five Biggest Mistakes CEOS Make in Public Speaking (and how to avoid them) (Bert Decker)
Bert, who has coached CEOs to communicate better for 25 years (including Charles Schwab) has completed mistake number one and number two

Entrepreneurship

How can you avoid being ‘The architect of your own demise?”
A reminder that where there is profit, there is competition.

David Bach Day at Free Money Finance, Interview Part 1

10 Ways to Delegate Without Hiring Staff
If you are "it" in the business, who can you delegate to? Here are some ideas.

Immigrants Can Fuel Entrepreneurship (Jeff Cornwall)
Immigration is fast becoming a major political issue in the US. And while illegal immigration is a valid concern, we need to be cautious not to restrict legal immigration.

DDO Book Review: TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald
TrumpNation is an entertaining and quick read that gives an interesting history of the Trump business "empire" and various shenanigans, from the best (Trump Tower on 5th Avenue) to the worst (everything else).

Entrepreneurial Proverbs (Seth Goldstein)
Seth Goldtein’s little nuggets of wisdom for bite-sized nutrition.

Best of Getting Things Done
43 Folders summarizes the best from David Allen’s book Getting Things Done.

To Be Smarter at Work, Slack Off
If you're in a startup, you know the challenge of multitasking. This Fortune commentary from Anne Fisher suggests to be smarter at work, and beat competition, you should do less. Looking for ideas of how to get some time back? Here are 12 Places to Say No.