It takes a very talented and experienced person to manage a global team of such complexity to the level that our clients, our executive team, and I expect.  But we found her.  I am incredibly proud to announce that Heather Brunner has joined us as our Senior Vice President of Worldwide Client Services.  Her first day was Monday, and we put out the press release on Wednesday.  Her ability to rapidly ramp has impressed our entire team, and I have already had several important client-facing meetings with her during week one.

I have known Heather for many years, first working with her when she was a Regional Vice President for Concero while I was the CEO of Coremetrics.  I was impressed with her back then, and Concero did a great job for Coremetrics during a very important, foundational period.  But Heather has grown her career so much since then.  Most recently, she served as the CEO of Nuvo, a wholly owned subsidary of Trilogy.  Prior to Nuvo, Heather was the COO of B-Side.  In past jobs, she has served as a the VP of Client Services at Coremetrics, the VP of Client Delivery and Operations at Trilogy, a Practice Director at Oracle, and a Senior Manager at Accenture (where I also began my career).

I am confident that Heather will be an incredible leader for our Worldwide Client Services team.  With nearly 20 years of experience in client services and operations, she really gets it.  Just as importantly, Heather fits our unique cuture perfectly.  We were recently named one of the best places to work in Austin again, and the executive team (now including Heather) sets the cultural tone for the rest of the company.  It is also impressive to note that she understands the importance of nurturing the soul with her decade-long community service to the United Way.  Bazaarvoice has been very focused on community since inception, as we strongly believe that companies also have a soul to nourish.

Client Services has been a major strength for Bazaarvoice, and I know that Heather will help us make it even better.  The teams reporting into her are already successful, with exceptional ratings from our clients (we survey them quarterly and take their input very seriously).  Heather will make sure we keep that high-bar as we rapidly scale globally.

Heather will be attending the Shop.org Annual Summit in Vegas as well as our upcoming Social Commerce Summit in London (the first was a sold-out success) with me.  I sincerely look forward to introducing you to her.

As I promised, Part 2 is more focused on the forces shaping global commerce that we directly see in our business, working with our clients and partners.

5.    Digitally archived word-of-mouth: Blogs are here to stay (see BusinessWeek for a recap).  Word-of-mouth online is not a phase.  It’s a permanent shift.  Word-of-mouth has always been with us (that’s why I named our company Bazaarvoice).  More than 70 of the top 100 retailers in the U.S. have, or are launching, customer reviews today.  When Brant and I launched Bazaarvoice three years ago, only five retailers in the U.S. offered customer reviews, including Amazon.com.  Over the past three years, we have served 10 billion reviews to shoppers (see our recent celebration of this and real-time counter) and are on a current run-rate to serve another 20 billion over just the next year of our business.  Customer reviews are word-of-mouth.  People speak the same way about products online as they do offline.  We are literally seeing word-of-mouth for the first time in human history.

        Luxury retailers are still vigorously debating this – not wanting to give up control and open up their brand.  Like I do almost every week (it seems), I spent time on Wednesday in NYC debating this with the head of online marketing and merchandising of a luxury apparel retailer.  Meanwhile, Best Buy and Wal-Mart have been launching incredible multichannel campaigns (see them here and here), leveraging the power of customer reviews to drive sales online and offline.  Wal-Mart and QVC have all of their online merchandisers plugged into our reports.  They are having intense conversations with their suppliers to reduce returns, increase customer satisfaction, and ultimately evolve their offerings.  The end-game?  Better products and services for all of us.  I knew we were on to something big when we started Bazaarvoice.  But I had no idea it would affect this much change, this quickly.  The fact that Wal-Mart launched customer-review-focused, in-store nationwide campaigns only six months after they launched with us online has staggering implications for the retail industry.

        And it’s not just limited to retail.  Any market where word-of-mouth plays a significant role in driving the transaction are good markets for the type of transformation we offer.  We are, or soon will be (due to signed agreements), powering customer reviews for some of the largest manufacturers of consumer products, banks, credit unions, insurance companies, portals, travel sites, and healthcare companies.  We are doing this globally, in 20 international languages.  We have four offices now – Austin, London, Paris, and now Singapore.  This is a global movement.  As an entrepreneur, it is impossible for me to not be passionate about helping clients lead this transformation.  Word-of-mouth online is an incredibly disruptive force, and I mean this in a positive way if harnessed correctly.  Why did I start this company after seven years at Coremetrics?  Because I knew it worked – but I didn't realize that it worked as well as I know it does now. 

        Seven years ago, Michael Porter wrote about the Web’s incredibly disruptive impact on the five forces (standard material for any MBA program).  When I read this article in 2001, I thought, "Porter is late to the game".  Now when I re-read it in the context of the social media movement, I think he was incredibly visionary.  Smart companies are reaping the rewards of that disruption, while others have been too slow to change and are going out of business.

6.    Six degrees of separation (tip of the hat to my brilliant and passionate friend, Mitch): Millennials are growing up connected to social networks, namely Facebook.  Their network of friends is intact for as long as they’ve been in “the system”.  They will be able to track their friends’ progress throughout life’s many stages – forever.  I’ve been a programmer since I was 7 and have communicated online (via BBSs) since I was 8 (launching my own when I was 10).  So I can relate.  But I can’t imagine all of the implications of all of this connectedness.  What does it mean, as a human being, to be able to so easily track your friends evolution in life as they go from preteen to teen to college to career to marriage to parenthood and, ultimately, to death?  A typical Millennial is connected to hundreds of friends on Facebook.  By comparison, I personally keep in close touch with only one of my early childhood friends (a few more are reconnecting via Facebook, but I have missed decades of their life and its hard to relate to them anymore). 

        How will these Millennials be shaped by this as shoppers?  As people?  Obviously, social media everywhere will be an expectation.  Ubiquitous Web access, via mobile, is rapidly coming.  How will companies adapt?  Typical Facebook banner-ads are getting .005% click-thru rates, as reported on the Web 2.0 panel at Shop.org last week by those helping their clients experiment with them.  That’s pathetic performance!  Millennials don’t want the disruption by brands when they are in the modality of friending – unless they actually help them enhance that experience.  Being on Google, Yahoo!, or Live.com and clicking on a paid-search link when they are in a shopping modality is a whole different story, and obviously that works – ridiculously well.  Facebook applications, however, are performing when they give unique value to these consumers.  On that same Shop.org panel, the Victoria’s Secret PINK Facebook application was pointed as one good example. 

        What are the long-term implications of this connectedness?  I don’t know, but we’re determined to help figure this out by working with all of our clients.

Thank you again for an amazing three years in business.  It is a true honor to work with such smart clients, and I look forward to seeing you soon at our Social Commerce Summit. 

U2 is a great band, but far too many ecommerce experiences make me recall their 1987 chart-topper, "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For." Even at leading online retailers, it’s often way too hard for me to find the information I need to move from browsing to buying.

At Bazaarvoice, we’re doing our best to change that by integrating the voice of the customer throughout the shopping experience, including how shoppers search, navigate, and discover the products that best match their needs. Listed below are 5 unique examples of how we’re helping shoppers worldwide find what they’re looking for:

1. Top Rated Product categories: Merchandising categories that highlight the highest-rated items drive increased conversion, higher average order values, and greater sales per visitor.

2. Sort By Customer Ratings: Shoppers that sort product search results by customer rating bought 34% more than other searchers at Golfsmith.

3. Multi-focal Navigation: Enabling your shoppers to use customer ratings and reviews data along with other criteria to sort through hundreds of products makes online shopping more like reality: you wouldn’t walk into a Wal-Mart and just sort through everything by price alone!

4. Review-Enabled Landing Pages For Brands: This is new, but early results look promising. Also enticing is the possibility of retailers offering a unique branding opportunity to their top suppliers, perhaps for a fee!

5. Smarter Recommendations: Featuring customer ratings data in product recommendation windows helps recommendation engines deliver more relevant recommendations.

We’re excited about what we’ve accomplished with our customers and partners so far, but we’re even more excited about what they will do next. Have an idea for leveraging social commerce data to enhance the shopping experience? Please take a minute to include it in the comments below. Any day a customer brings us an idea for a new integration is indeed a beautiful day.

This marks a seachange in the financial software space.  Intuit is known as one of the best companies in the world to work for, and now they are known as one of the most "open" brands for embracing customer centricity through user-generated content.  Although the reviews are generally very positive, what makes them authentic to customers is that even a 5-star review will point out features that Intuit can improve in their next release of TurboTax.

I applaud Seth Greenberg, the leader of this initiative and a former Shop.org Board peer and CEO of eHobbies, and his team of remarkable people.

I encourage you to check it out for yourself by visiting TurboTax's home page to see the reviews.  And here are three of the campaign creatives that appeared this weekend.

AOL "Review Bubbles" (note the instant-messenger look):

Review quote:

 Yahoo!'s home page:

Note: these are online-only promotions.  If you have been missing the news on Bazaarblog, check out these great examples of multichannel promotions in 2008 from Best Buy (Bazaarblog link) and Wal-Mart (Bazaarblog link).

It is always dangerous to make any conclusions based on only your own behavior.  You need to look no further than the failure of Webvan, which raised $1 billion based on the premise that everyone in the U.S. was like San Franciscans.  But I still find it fascinating that I am more compelled to write about people than products.  Perhaps it is the nature of my job or personality type.  Or perhaps most of us talk more about people (i.e., generating more word of mouth) than products in everyday life.  Let’s not forget how many Americans voted on the last American Idol (74 million in the last round).

In a previous post, I gave the three reasons why I believe consumers write reviews: 1. ego, 2. social connection, and 3. good karma.  But these three rules may be slightly different when writing reviews on people.  The majority of reviews I have written on people have been on LinkedIn.  LinkedIn recently reached a tipping point, as you may have noticed from the increased number of "let's-connect" invitations that you have been receiving.  The network effect is kicking in (more on that subject in the brilliant book Information Rules), just as it has for eBay, Amazon.com, MySpace, Facebook, Second Life, StumbleUpon, Digg, Threadless, and many other businesses literally built on community.

I am often solicited to write these reviews (on people), not dissimilar from the way we at Bazaarvoice suggest our retail clients encourage their customers to write reviews on their purchases.  But I have a more emotional connection to people than I do to products, and therefore I am likely to act when asked.  And writing a review on a former employee or service provider on LinkedIn takes me a lot less time (5 minutes) than writing a recommendation letter for an MBA applicant (2-3 hours).

In any case, I believe that reason #1, “ego”, needs to be replaced with “emotion”.  I am compelled to thank the person publicly by writing the review – it's the reciprocity principle in action.  The other two reasons, “social connection” and “good karma”, fit fine.  I’m also not sure if the "J-Curve" will hold up when reviewing people.  From my own experience, I haven’t written a single negative review on LinkedIn.  I just won’t write the review at all if I don’t feel comfortable with doing so.

But that may be different on Avvo.  One thing is for sure with their launch – it is a whole new world for lawyers.  Just wait – this is coming for doctors, dentists, teachers, consultants, and all forms of service providers in a big way (I say “big” because there are already examples of all on smaller-trafficked sites).  Imagine for a moment joining a new HMO and having access to all members’ ratings on pediatricians.  Revolutionary, yes.  Incredibly useful, yes.  Scary, for some.  But I am convinced that it is just a matter of time before every person, place, product, service, or thing becomes reviewable – and very easily accessible to all.  And I am optimistic about this future, ultimately believing that it will lead to more accountability and better service overall.

But like I said at the beginning, let’s not make any conclusions from my own behavior.  As the founder of Coremetrics, spending seven years immersed in Web analytics, I learned that data tells the real story over time.  We’ll analyze Avvo and other clients as they build people-review volume and report back on the trends once they become clear.  For now, I would love to hear from you.  Do you review more people than products online?  Why?

Update 6/16: What timing!  I am a little behind on my TechCrunch reading, and was alerted by one of our Sales Directors that Avvo is now being sued by lawyers that are unhappy with negative reviews!  This is pretty ironic given my post yesterday was about how skewed to the positive I am when rating people. 

I'm assuming that Avvo expected this given the nature of some lawyers.  Avvo's CEO, Mark Britton, responds to the lawsuit on Avvo's blog.  There is a heated debate between readers of each blog post that is worth reading (although the reactions are as you would expect).  I applaud Avvo for providing a controversial, and highly useful, service.  And I hope that ultimately this press helps Avvo establish a well-known brand early in their history (remember that they just launched in beta).  My prediction is that the lawsuit gets dismissed and Avvo gets a ton of free press out of it.