Recently the Wall Street Journal featured an article titled "The Wizards of Buzz". In it the authors cite how Web 2.0 is "turning ordinary people into hidden influencers, shaping what we read, watch, and buy." In today's connected and social media driven world, a twelve year old from Toronto is helping to define what "news" is on Reddit, a news site similar to Digg.

Here's a key excerpt from the article about the impact of these "ordinary people":
"The opinions of these key users have implications for advertisers shelling out money for Internet ads, trend watchers trying to understand what's cool among young people, and companies whose products or services get plucked for notice."

Earlier this year Brant posted a blog about Kevin Killian, who is writing a book solely about the 1,000s of reviews he's written on Amazon.com about books, movies, music, and other every day products. Killian is a prime example of an ordinary person who is influencing the market place. At Bazaarvoice we have found similar trends to support the WSJ's findings. Across all of our clients there are heavy reviewers that are influencing their respective communities. For example, take "jason7" from Cabela's, who has already written over 200 reviews since Cabela's launched ratings and reviews five months ago or "Kerri" from Macy*s, who has written 124 reviews since Macy's launched four months ago.

There's no question that reviewers made up of ordinary people like me and you are speaking their minds, and the masses are listening. Your customers are actively seeking these influential reviewers to help them make the best purchase decision possible. The clients that will be most successful in this Web 2.0 era are those that can listen and act upon what their customer communities are telling them.

The question is: What are you going to do to leverage the most influential members of your community?

Here are a few key recommendations on how to build and foster your own influential online community:

1. Identify your company's top reviewers and supporters based on the quantity and quality of their reviews. You may also want to factor in their Net Promoter response to seek out your company's most loyal customers.
2. Provide incentives for these top reviewers. Encourage them to return to your site and continue writing insightful reviews that will benefit the rest of your online community. It's important to reach out to these reviewers, thank them for their feedback, and give them an incentive to return to your site. Ideas for incentives include: discounts off of their next purchase, free shipping, gift certificates, exclusive membership to your company's rewards club, or even a free sample of a new product before it's released to the public. These are great ways to ignite positive word of mouth throughout your online and offline community!
3. Highlight your top reviewers and put a name, face, and identity to these ordinary people. Remember, these reviewers are leading by example by making great purchases and they're kind enough to share it with the rest of your online community – for free! Ideas for recognizing your best reviewers include featuring a "Reviewer of the Week" on your website or creating a "Meet Your Online Community" section featuring all of your top reviewers. You can also use their compelling review content in email marketing campaigns, newsletters, circulars, and even in-store signage!

I encourage you to let your creative juices flow and comment on what your company can do to identify and harness your most influential reviewers (which, in our experience, are usually your "alpha shoppers")!

Last Week Manish Mehta, VP of Global eCommerce posted on the Direct2Dell blog announcing ratings and reviews on their site. Says Manish: "If the printer you ordered gets the job done, let us know. If you were disappointed with your monitor, share that too, and let us know what you didn’t like about it. You can rate both Dell and non-Dell products. As we build up more reviews, our hope is that it will help all our customers make more informed buying decisions based on customer feedback."

As many of you know, I was at Dell from '99 to '06. For the first four years I managed Dell.com consumer, which grew to a $3.5B online business. During that time (in 2003) I started my Decker Marketing blog, partly for experiential learning. I may have been one of the first bloggers inside of Dell, but largely unknown as I was blogging about marketing topics, not about Dell. The marketing paradigm shift of customer-created experiences, citizen marketing, and customer-centric strategies was crystallizing for me. It was part of the reason I joined Bazaarvoice and helped launch us out of stealth mode about a year ago.  Now, one year later, I'm pleased to see Dell (as well as all of our clients) take another step towards customer-centricity. Our clients realize the tremendous benefits of marketing WITH the customer. Coincidentally, the title of my first book in 1995 was "How to Market WITH Customer User Groups.  Computer User Groups were the computer and software industry’s influencers in the late 80s and 90s. 10 years later, with the spread of Web technologies and ability to write reviews, any ONE customer can be more influential than a User Group.

Dell not only represents one of the largest online electronics retailers, but is also a direct manufacturer of products they make. With Bazaarvoice, Dell currently has review functionality on all third party as well as their branded electronics, such as Dell projectors, printers, and LCD TVs. Many of our clients, such as Bass Pro, Cabelas, HP, Sears, Burpee, and Fair Indigo carry products under their own brand name. We often get the highest level of angst on hosting reviews from direct manufacturers for their own brand.

There are at least three reasons why branded manufacturers need ratings and reviews:

First, if you believe in your products, your company and your people, then customer feedback is an ACCELERATOR to growth. Word of mouth already occurs offline for your products, so enabling online word of mouth enables a few customers to amplify their voice to 95% of the online shoppers who would never meet the influencers face to face.  Burpee is a 120-year old company built on word of mouth. Online reviews are accelerating their growth beyond 'normal' word of mouth.

Second, most manufacturers should be more concerned about not carrying reviews than be afraid of negative reviews. While nearly all clients will receive some negative reviews, they will likely see a similar "J-curve" where positive far outweigh negative reviews 8 to 1. Despite Dell's word of mouth challenges over the past few years (mostly over service and support issues), their products are seeing balanced reviews.

Here's a TV that has rave reviews.

And one that doesn't (perhaps yet).

Third, and most importantly, this direct feedback represents an opportunity to bring customer oxygen into the company to change the culture, to improve products, and to leverage competitive advantages of a direct manufacturer by pushing the customer voice upstream for product development improvements.

Through today’s customer-created online experiences, branded manufacturers realize their competitiveness is largely determined by enabling customer participating, listening to the customer voice, and joining the conversation. More to the point, winning today means leveraging and amplifying the customer voice more strategically than the competition.