Posts Tagged ‘User-Generated Content’

Community, Marketing Strategy, User-Generated Content, Word of Mouth

Brett Hurt TechCrunch’s Post on Obama’s Use of Social Media

November 15th, 2008 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO

TechCrunch logoLast Sunday, I wrote a post on the Obama campaign’s use of social media.  I guess I’m less busy than TechCrunch (hard to believe), but they just posted a more comprehensive social-media analysis than me, including good detail of his win, voter turnout, and suggestions about how he uses social media going forward, and it is definitely worth reading.  This is an especially important read considering that Obama announced he will be employing the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer.

TechCrunch also wrote about Obama’s plan to host fireside chats on YouTube, reminding me of FDR’s fireside chats during another challenging time for our nation.

We live in a very historic time, and I’m trying to soak it all up to learn for the long-term.

Update 11/17: Just noticed Francois Gossieaux’s post on the subject of cause marketing in the Obama campaign in his Facebook status update.  A good read.  Let’s hope that Obama leverages the Millennials for civic causes, given his social momentum.  BTW, Francois does some good interviews, so it is worth following his blog.

Update 11/19: Twittermaven writes about Obama’s success on Twitter being copied by the G7.

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Customer Centricity, Ratings & Reviews, User-Generated Content

Brett Hurt How User-Generated Content Could Radically Transform Governments

March 2nd, 2008 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO

User-generated content is radically transforming retail.  Wal-Mart launching walmart.com/ratings as the new method of shopping, and promoting it via their in-store receipts and shelf fact tags is radically customer-centric.  Best Buy launching bestbuy.com/topratedcameras as the new call to action in their circulars, along with featured customer review excerpts, is just as radical.  Why "radical"?  Because if you are a supplier to Best Buy or Wal-Mart, you have to be accessible within these new shopping paths.  If you aren't?  You will be studying customer reviews to craft more top-rated products.  What Best Buy and Wal-Mart are doing will, undoubtedly, be the most popular methods of shopping in the future. 

Wikileaks.org logoMy co-founder, Brant Barton, told me about Wikileaks.org a year ago.  At the time, we discussed that it could be the new user-generated "Watergate".  I didn't write about it then because, frankly, I wanted to see if it had staying power.  And then I read an article today, one year later, about how they were shut down by a federal judge, only to quickly reopen under massive protest.  If you haven't checked out this NY Times article, or their site yet, it is worth doing so.  User-generated content, via a connected global experience (i.e., the Internet/Web), will radically transform governments, corporations, and journalism, just like it is already doing for retail and travel.  There is no way it won't.  Information can't be confined to small geographic spaces anymore.  And accountability will be enforced throughout the system.  Operating with ethics and integrity is the only way.  And don't get me started with what happens when all voting in elections is truly done via the Internet, instead of today's outdated and cumbersome method.  The cat is already out of the bag.

We live in such an exciting period in history.  Humanity is being unleashed online, and it will only accelerate from here via word-of-mouth.

Additional materials: Look at this NY Times blog entry for the background on where Wikileaks.org originated from.  A globally-connected experience, indeed.

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Books, Marketing Strategy, New at Bazaarvoice, User-Generated Content, Word of Mouth

Brett Hurt Chris Anderson and Wired on the Power of Free

February 27th, 2008 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO

Wired Magazine CoverAs a businessman who loves technology, Wired is my favorite magazine.  I simply find no other business magazine as innovative, both in the way it is physically organized and designed.  But the real gold is the content.  The Editor In Chief of Wired, Chris Anderson, is one of the most visionary business thinkers of our time.  You remember “The Long Tail“? – an awesome read that nicely summarized the true power of the Internet to reach niche markets.  I had the pleasure of meeting Chris in person at Resource Interactive’s iCitizen event last year, as we were both speakers at the event.  He then ran the tables at conferences, keynoting seemingly almost every one that I attended.  “The Long Tail” had real business impact (see my post on it’s impact on eCommerce).  Chris deserves the success he earned – seeing a commerce-changing trend that none of us could as succinctly and powerful describe.

Now Chris and Wired strike again with a preview of his new book, “Free”, which is due in 2009.  The cover article of this month’s Wired is “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business“.  If you want to read now what everyone will be talking about next year, read this article now.  It isn’t worth me summarizing here – trust me, it’s worth your 15 minutes to read the entire article by clicking the link above.

Free is a very powerful word-of-mouth driver, and Bazaarvoice has certainly placed a lot of “bets” in this area.  Currently, the following Bazaarvoice solutions are free (to at least one stakeholder):

  • ShoutIt!: Share your review on Facebook, digg, and Del.icio.us – free to clients and users; creates a form of advertising without the taint of being advertising
  • SyndicateVoice: free for shopping comparison portal partners, free for new clients for a period of time; creates a form of advertising without the taint of being advertising
  • BrandVoice: free high-converting user-generated content for clients from the customers of their manufacturing partners; leverages the power of channel marketing, which has existed since the dawn of vendors selling through the retail channel
  • Ratings & Reviews, Ask & Answer, Stories: free for users; gives them the context they need to make a purchase decision as well as connect with other customers; consumers used to pay for this type of content from people like “Consumer Reports”, or by physically driving to a store to speak to an in-store sales person who may or may not have the information and context that they need

I look forward to seeing how Chris’s new book shapes up, and I have no doubt that it will be impactful.  As he so eloquently describes in this article, free already surrounds us due to near free transistors and bandwidth.  As more businesses transform to be information-based, this trend will radically accelerate.

How are you using the power of free in your business?

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Marketing Strategy, New at Bazaarvoice, Ratings & Reviews, Research, User-Generated Content, eCommerce

Brett Hurt Bazaarvoice Research Discovers a New Holiday Tradition, and 71 Million Reviews Served on Cyber Monday

December 1st, 2007 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO

NY Times photo of Black FridayThis has been a busy week for Bazaarvoice Research.  At 9:25pm EST on Thanksgiving Day, we witnessed a new traffic peak across our client base.  As consumers read retailer circulars to prep for a busy "Black Friday", they also read reviews online.  At that time (9:25pm EST), we peaked at 1,400 reviews read per second across our client base of over one hundred retailers.  On Cyber Monday (November 26), we served 71 million reviews to holiday shoppers, up over 370% over last year's Cyber Monday figure.  In the last 30 days, our systems have seen 7.4 billion hits and delivered 40 terabytes of traffic.

There have been many exciting research moments for our industry in the past two years:

And this new holiday tradition is another major finding.  It shows just how much influence reviews online are having on offline shopping behavior.  This especially hits home for me because when Brant and I started this company in May of 2005 only around 10 retailers in the U.S. (including online-only, like Amazon.com) had reviews.  Now MarketingSherpa reported that 43% of retailers do (as of Feb-07).  That is having a broad impact on consumer expectations – reviews are quickly become a must-have for retailers and a norm for online shopping.

Most of these are intuitive findings and could be easily dismissed as "obvious".  But data informs strategy, as I learned so many times while working with clients as the founder of Coremetrics.

So, what do you do with this new data?  Here are a few ideas:

  • Promote reviews for the same products featured in your Thanksgiving circular on your home page the week of Thanksgiving – this will make it easy for the 70 to 77% that are seeking reviews (and the 82% that are influenced when they read them) to realize that you have them

  • Send an email about reviews on Thanksgiving morning with a subject line like, "Read Thousands of Customers' Reviews Before You Go Shopping on Friday".  In that email, feature the same products or categories of products that you have in your Thanksgiving circular
  • Create distinct shopping paths linked for your home page such as "Our Best Friday Deals on Customer Top-Rated Holiday Gifts" and so on for all of your major categories featured in your in-store (and online) sale
  • Push reviews again on Cyber Monday – both in email and on your home page – but with a distinct focus on online shopping
  • Put top-rated circulars in your stores for greeters and category managers (like HD TV) to hand out to help in-store shoppers
  • Feature reviews in your print circulars so that readers know that your site has reviews before they go online to research them

Want more?  Watch the holiday webinar that our Community Management team recorded.  And please don't forget to tell us your ideas as well!

Ray M. GreenlyAnd, finally, please support the Ray M. Greenly Scholarship Fund this holiday season by shopping at Shop.org's Cyber Monday portal.  All proceeds go to honor a great man that I had the pleasure of working with.  He helped grow Shop.org into the great organization that it is today.  And you will be helping to fund the future visionaries of the eCommerce industry.

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New at Bazaarvoice, Ratings & Reviews, Research, User-Generated Content, Word of Mouth, eCommerce

Sam Decker How SyndicateVoice Took Search Traffic from Good to Great

August 23rd, 2007 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer

By Jeff Watts, SyndicateVoice Product Manager

It seems that just about everyone is publishing something these days:  Technorati claims to be tracking 92.7 million blogs, Wikipedia has around 5 million articles, and more and more sites are facilitating the creation of consumer-generated content.  But publishing and publishing effectively are entirely different.  A site can have the greatest content on the web, but if it is not discoverable by the masses, it will yield little traffic.One of the most important types of content marketers should focus on publishing effectively is customer ratings and reviews.  After all, 77% of online shoppers are seeking review content online before they buy according to Jupiter Research.  Recently Bazaarvoice launched SyndicateVoice, a product that helps our clients dramatically increase the amount of traffic their ratings and reviews receive, particularly through search engines, by using an effective publishing strategy. 

In a nutshell, SyndicateVoice does the following:

  1. Publishes a standalone, review-centric microsite that targets long tail search traffic for review-centric key words.
  2. Retains visitors to the microsite once they’ve entered.
  3. Syndicates excerpts of reviews to a broad network of search engines, shopping portals, price comparison engines, and RSS outlets.

Several clients who have gone live with SyndicateVoice have seen fantastic results.  For example, in a sample of three clients for the first 27 days since their respective launches, SyndicateVoice results show the following: (more…)

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Customer Centricity, Marketing Strategy, User-Generated Content, Word of Mouth

Brett Hurt How Advertising Will Evolve Using Word of Mouth

July 3rd, 2007 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half..”
-John Wanamaker, advertising pioneer and famous merchant

YouTube Preview ImageWe had the pleasure of hosting Andy Sernovitz, the founder of WOMMA and a Bazaarvoice Advisory Board member, at our office a few weeks ago. Andy gave a lunch presentation to our team, and something he said really struck me: “Advertising is the tax companies pay to sell poor products”. Google, Starbucks, and many other brave companies decided to buck the formula and invest in the product instead of “brand imagery” (i.e., advertising). Andy has countless examples, and wrote a fantastic book on the subject that has been endorsed by the likes of Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki, two of my favorite authors.

And then I met with a large apparel company a week later that is afraid of reviews. Prospect: “We tell the consumer how they should think about our products”. Prospect: “A hip woman in NYC may be turned off by a woman in Topeka, Kansas writing a review on a trendy fashion”. I’ll save you my lengthy and impassioned response.

As I write this, I’m on my flight back from London after spending a week in our UK office, speaking at the e-consultancy conference and meeting with prospects, partners, and press. And tomorrow is the 4th, so I’m feeling kind of revolutionary. So, here is my take on how advertising will evolve.

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Interviews, User-Generated Content

Brett Hurt Word-of-Mouth Wisdom #5: Josh Kopelman, First Round Capital

March 17th, 2007 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO

For the fifth installment of my Word-of-Mouth Wisdom interview series, I decided to tap our investor base.  At Bazaarvoice, we are fortunate to count six serial entrepreneurs as investors in our company.  One of them is Josh Kopelman, the founder of Half.com and a prominent figure in the Web 2.0 scene.  Josh calls himself a "coastally challenged VC" on his blog "Redeye VC" because he is based in Philadelphia.  But you wouldn't know it because his investments are in some of the most prominent early-stage companies that I know of.  His portfolio includes companies like 1-800-FREE411 (currently owns 6% of the 411 market out of nowhere), Aggregate Knowledge (a recent Bazaarvoice partner), Krugle, Riya, Root Markets, StumbleUpon, VideoEgg, Wikia, and YackPack.  I can tell you from personal experience that Josh is an extraordinarily helpful investor.  His connections are extraordinary and his entrepreneurial experience is incredibly impressive.

Word-of-Mouth Wisdom Interview Series

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Community, Customer Centricity, Marketing Strategy, Ratings & Reviews, Research, User-Generated Content, Word of Mouth, eCommerce

Wayne Stribling Ordinary People Making Extraordinary Impact

February 27th, 2007 by Wayne Stribling Former VP of Client Services

Occasionally the Bazaarblog will feature guest bloggers. Today's blog was written and contributed by Tung Huynh, one of our Community Managers dedicated to helping clients leverage the Bazaarvoice solution, drive review volume, and promote ratings and reviews online and offline.

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.

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Interviews, Marketing Strategy, Word of Mouth, eCommerce

Brett Hurt Word-of-Mouth Wisdom #4: The Wharton School, Marketing

February 11th, 2007 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO

For my fourth interview in the Word-of-Mouth Wisdom series, I decided to tap two of the smartest people I know in the field of marketing.  Dr. Peter Fader and Dr. David Reibstein both teach marketing at The Wharton School, where I was fortunate enough to earn my MBA.  Both have been friends and advisors ever since graduation, and somehow I convinced them to invest in Bazaarvoice!

Dr. Peter FaderPete is well known on many levels.  He was helping CDnow run analysis back in the pre-boom times.  He has been very outspoken in the age of digital music, advising music companies on how to market in these rapidly changing times.  I remember him best as my Markstrat professor, one of the better MBA classes I had the pleasure of taking.

Dr. David ReibsteinDave is also very well known.  He consults for companies all over the world.  He served as the Executive Director of the Marketing Science Institute.  And few know him as the co-founder of BizRate, where he served on their Board of Directors from its inception to when Scripps bought the company for $525 million in cash almost two years ago.

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User-Generated Content, Word of Mouth, eCommerce

Brett Hurt The Ultimate Holiday Toy: A Crowdsourced, Word-of-Mouth Wunderkind

December 27th, 2006 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO

Amazon.com has posted an amazing holiday season, shipping 3.4 million items on its peak day of December 11.  You can learn a lot about "what's hot" by looking at their top sellers in each category (a $19,999 MP3 player?!).  But it was Frank Barnako at MarketWatch who blogged about Radica's 20 Questions being one of their top sellers in toys.  This product has 205 reviews with a 4.5-star average rating on Amazon.com, and it claims to be able to read your mind.

Why do I love this product?  Because, as the title of this post says, it is a "crowdsourced", word-of-mouth wunderkind!  Let me explain what I mean.

Radica's 20 QuestionsFirst of all, I have written about crowdsourcing a few times on Bazaarblog (see my May post introducing the term, August post on Yahoo! crowdsourcing ads – with a nod to GM doing the same, September post on Google crowdsourcing image labels, or early December post on JPG Magazine crowdsourcing photos).  I have also referenced the book "The Wisdom of Crowds" several times.  20 Questions is the wisdom of the crowds.  It is a database of over 46,700,000 (and rapidly counting) individual games played by "the crowd".  The crowd, of course, is you, as in "you: the person of the year" (as you have recently been named by Time magazine).  Yes, 20 Questions is a huge database of consumer(player)-generated content!

You can play the game for free here.  I first heard about it a year ago, from one of Chris Sherman's articles on ClickZ (theorizing what would happen if 20Q was applied to search engines).  If you haven't played it yet, it is quite entertaining.  I recommend "Classic 20Q", which has been built by players' answers since 1988.  It is hard to beat – pretty much guessing anything you can think of by asking you less than 20 questions.

Second, what does this have to do with word of mouth?  Well, everything!  This game was literally built by word of mouth since 1988.  The basis of most great word-of-mouth campaigns is a great product.  This game became great by people constantly playing it.  Once you play this game, the chances are pretty high that you will tell someone about it.  The more people that play, the "smarter" it gets, the greater the "wow factor", and, therefore, the pass-along factor continues to increase.

So, once you get done with all of your returns, pick up 20 Questions for $14.95 at Amazon.com, CompUSA. or Sears.  All of that AI brainpower for such a small price.  And now you have a great story about crowdsourcing and word of mouth to go along with it!  Finally, for more interesting reading on the background of 20Q check out the Wikipedia entry, especially if you want to tell your friends about folk taxonomy, neural network, AI experiments.

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