I’m thrilled that Scott Allen, noted social media thought leader, has blogged about us at the American Express OPEN Forum. He and I, along with several other Bazaarvoice team members, talked about how we “beat the odds” as a start-up. If you haven’t had a chance to read Scott’s book, The Virtual Handshake, it’s worth the time.

Thanks, Scott, for a really insightful piece.

Read it on OPEN Forum: How Bazaarvoice Beat the Odds

Brett recently appeared on the cover of Texas CEO magazine discussing just that – how to build a company culture that creates a place where people actually want to come to work. Here are a few tips on building a culture that rocks:

1. Hire the right people.

People are the foundation of your company culture. Hiring candidates who are as passionate, creative, and dedicated to excellence as you are is essential to maintaining a great corporate culture. From the beginning, we’ve had a process for testing every candidate in every position. Many candidates spend 12-16 hours preparing for their test. Every new hire brought on has been through the testing process – it’s something we can all bond over. You never know if you are truly passionate about something until you get tested for it. We want only the truly passionate here.

2. Trust them to do their thing.

Once you’ve hired the right people, trust them to execute on their own. This trust motivates accountability. For example, at Google, employees are encouraged to devote 20% of their work time to personal projects that will better the individual or the company. At Bazaarvoice, every employee gets an unlimited number of vacation days. As Brett told the Austin American-Statesman, no one has ever abused the policy in our five years of operation. “When you treat people like adults, when you treat them with radical trust, they in turn do the same for you,” he said. Hubspot practices the same policy.

3. Solicit feedback and recognize excellence.

At Bazaarvoice, much of our culture revolves around being open with our employees. All of our management team maintains an open-door policy – any employee has direct access to our leaders to voice their ideas and concerns. This openness lends itself to fierce conversations that solve problems, rather than dancing around them. Feedback on management is also formally solicited quarterly (we rate managers on whether or not they are living our cultural values), and our managers craft this feedback into actionable areas to improve their leadership in the next quarter.

Additionally, we maintain a number of ways for employees to recognize each others’ excellence, be that excellence cultural, personal, or work related. We present peer-nominated culture awards at every quarterly All-Hands meeting (held off-site at a low-key environment, such as the Alamo Draft House or Salt Lick), offer peer-nominated reserved parking spots to high performers, and sporadically dole out Star Performer awards for exceptional performance. These awards come with various equity offerings, grants, and general peer recognition that builds a culture of success.

Bazaarvoice is growing, and as such, we’re hiring. If you know passionate, qualified, rock-star candidate, send them our way and you could earn a referral bonus.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The overwhelming theme at this year's Summit? Marketing and advertising have changed forever in today's social landscape. These fun messages just remind us of this.

Bazaarvoice Labs

These were exactly the sort of enthusiasts present at Google’s Hackathon at SXSW Interactive last week, which invited savvy web developers to learn about and experiment with new Google-related technologies. The event allowed Google to provide brief training on many of their platforms – including Google Maps, Android OS, Chrome, and Wave – and offered a place for developers to hang out and play with what they had learned.

Dustin Mihalik, Bazaarvoice Labs engineer, took the opportunity to experiment with HTML5 – and ended up walking away with the first prize for best application. We sat down with Dustin to learn more about the competition and what he built.

What do you do at Bazaarvoice?

I’m an engineer on the BV Labs team. We create proof of concept implementations for new products and features for the Bazaarvoice Platform. This position requires my team to constantly learn about new ideas and technologies in our industry.

Describe the Google Hackathon.

Google had many of their own engineers available for questions or discussions about their technologies. It was great to have access to the engineers, because I could get answers directly from the person working on the technology. Developers could experiment with what they learned to create applications for various Google technologies. At the end of the day, they provided prizes for the most exciting applications and mashups created during the day.

What was your application?

I created a multiplayer tank fighting game similar to the original Atari Combat. I used a couple of new features available in HTML5 that are slowly becoming available in Google Chrome and other modern browsers. Traditionally, browser games are written in Flash, but there are some new features in HTML5 that will make it easier to write interactive applications that run in the browser without any extra plugins.

I used the Canvas element for the drawing the battlefield and WebSockets to allow for multiplayer. Anyone who visits the web page gets a tank added to the battle. Then, they are able to drive around and shoot at other players.

What did you get for winning?

Google had a number of Android based phones as prizes for the contest. I picked the Nexus One, and also got a spot on the VIP list for the Google Blogger party that night.

We’re always looking for intelligent and innovative developers to join the Bazaarvoice Labs team. If you know a sharp, talented candidate, refer them here and you could earn up to a $5000 referral bonus.

I’m thrilled that Dev Ittycheria has joined our Board of Directors. What is great about Dev is he has been a serial entrepreneur, and he’s led two public software companies. His strategic insights are invaluable to our Board and executive team at this point in Bazaarvoice’s rapid growth. He was President and CEO of BladeLogic, which had a very successful IPO in 2007. Then BMC bought BladeLogic in 2008 for approximately $900M, which was the highest multiple paid for any public software company that year. Dev is already proving to be a very valuable mentor for me and our executive team, and I am truly humbled and honored that he decided to join us in this exciting journey.

I’m also very pleased to announce that Heather Brunner has been promoted to Chief Operating Officer. This is a well-deserved move from her excellent work as SVP of Worldwide Client Services, where she’s been instrumental in working with the team that directly supports our clients. Each quarter, employees rate each member of our leadership team, including me, and Heather has consistently gotten incredibly positive feedback from our employees. With her operational background and CEO position prior to Bazaarvoice, she’s going to be fantastic in this new role.

We’ve also added Gill Felix as our Chief People Officer. Gill has an impressive background leading human resources teams for Virgin Retail (working with Richard Branson himself), Hoover’s and, most recently, she was Senior VP of Human Resources for Golfsmith. I look forward to working with her in improving our awesome culture here, especially as we dramatically grow. I’m already finding Gill to be a terrific partner, although she has only been in the role for three weeks (it feels like three months, which is a good thing)!

And we’ve promoted several other executives, creating opportunities for new VP-level leadership to continue our rapid growth:

• My co-founder, Brant Barton, is now our Chief Innovation Officer, where he’ll help shape long-term product and partner strategy and identify emerging opportunities. Brant has always had an eye on our long-term strategy, helping envision BrandVoice in our second year of business (long before we launched it), and this new role perfectly suits his ability and is critical for a company of our size and growth path.
• Andy Maag is now Chief Technology Officer. Andy’s team is the technical force behind the architecture that supports more than 105 billion pieces of user-generated content. With Andy’s leadership, we have consistently released as-flawless-as-I’ve-seen software every eight weeks since our inception. He’ll continue to lead all technology research and development for Bazaarvoice as well as personally focus even more on our future architecture opportunities (this will get more exciting, not less – we have big plans in store so please stay tuned).
• Mike Svatek is our new Chief Product Officer. Under Mike’s leadership, we’ve made huge strides in product innovation, debuting several industry-first offerings, such as BrandAnswers. We are putting more investment in R&D than ever before, and Mike has worked with our team to develop an incredibly exciting roadmap.
• And Michael Osborne has become our Chief Revenue Officer: As a force of nature (known internally only as “Osborne”), he’s done a fantastic job leading our international sales organization and now he takes the reins of business development, helping our sales teams better alignwith our partners. Our client contract renewal team also reports to Osborne, which is important to us culturally (our Sales team genuinely cares about our clients being successful with our products).

The entire team at Bazaarvoice continues to energize me daily, and I’m inspired by our incredible leaders and Board. We have a very bright future here, and we are not taking any of our success (and your partnership) for granted. Thank you again for all of your support. I expect 2010 to get even more exciting!

Marat Shafigullin, Enterprise Project Manager at Bazaarvoice

After monitoring Austin’s tech market from Russia, Marat Shafigullin joined Bazaarvoice after he found LinkedIn friends who enjoyed working here. He joined last month as an Enterprise Project Manager, and he recently completed our new onboarding program – the Bazaarvoice scavenger hunt.

The scavenger hunt is a series of tasks and questions designed to expose new hires to all areas of our company – our structure, history, events, departments, and, most importantly, our culture, and it gives us all a way to meet each other. We sat down with Marat to hear his thoughts on the experience, and his unique welcome.

What was the scavenger hunt like?

The scavenger hunt started for me on Monday. Luckily three new hires started the same day, so we formed a team to help each other out. It definitely made it more interesting, because we were able to feed off of each other’s ideas to get our tasks done more efficiently. When you first start out here, you’re all in the same boat. Working together was a bit of a bonding experience, which I liked.

What did you learn from the scavenger hunt?

I don’t think you can really understand the culture here until you’ve lived it. I learned a lot about Bazaarvoice as a company, and met a lot of people in different areas. There were tasks that aimed to teach new hires about the culture, like reading about the five stars and interviewing some winners of the Bazaarvoice Culture Awards.

But I think the most valuable part of the scavenger hunt was the high-level knowledge I now have of Bazaarvoice as a whole. The scavenger hunt helped me meet a lot of people at all levels of the company very quickly, and learn what they do. It was good preparation for my future here, because I won’t be afraid to reach out to other departments and people when I need an answer. That openness between departments and organizational levels is good.

It was a much more interesting and engaging way of getting on board than sitting through an orientation or reading a handbook.

Bazaarvoice is growing, and as such, we’re hiring other great folks like Marat. If you know a rock star, refer them here for up to a $5000 referral bonus.

Our exec team took this chance to share their reactions to our biggest milestone to date.

The “hidden” impact of 100 billion: the new textbook. I shared my thoughts on the radically changing nature of marketing, and dedicated my post to some of the most dramatic changes I’ve seen clients make through UGC these past five years.

100 billion & climbing, thanks to our partners. Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer Brant Barton reflected on the role our Radius Partners have played in reaching this landmark.

B2B, B2C… 100 billion C2C (client to customer) interactions! Our Chief Operations Officer Heather Brunner shared an open thank-you letter to our clients.

10 reasons why 100 billion impressions matter to you. CMO Sam Decker explained the significance of our milestone for marketers and brands alike.

A behind-the-scenes look at hosting 100 billion impressions. Chief Technology Officer Andy Maag took this chance to thank the Bazaarvoice Engineering Team and our trusted vendor partners who’ve made our exponential growth over the past five years possible.

What are 100,000,000,000 impressions worth? Chief Revenue Officer Michael Osborne uses some slightly hyberpolic math to determine what this number could really be worth.

One hundred billion. That’s a big number, even for Congress. Our Chief Product Officer Mike Svatek broke down the numbers, reflecting on word-of-mouth’s incredible volume and reach in the digital age.

The short five years leading up to this milestone have been simultaneously humbling and pride-filled. As we approach our anniversary in May, we’re all looking forward to the next 100 billion.

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.