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.

The intent of the vendor ranking is to help retailers make decisions about suppliers. Internet Retailer is a great organization and we’re happy to be listed as one of the top providers of customer reviews; however, we noticed that the numbers can be a bit deceiving. The breakdown cited Bazaarvoice as serving  40 of the Internet Retailer 500. In fact, we are proud that we partner with over 100 of the Internet Retailer 500, making Bazaarvoice #1 for ratings and reviews, not to mention for social commerce solutions.

Why did they cite only 40? In the case of the Internet Retailer Guide, the methodology is for retailers to self report about which eCommerce providers they used. It’s the prerogative of the one person who fills out the survey to choose or know who their provider is for each function of their ecommerce ecosystem. It’s possible larger clients are less inclined to divulge all their providers, or perhaps the person filling out the survey doesn’t know all of their providers. Either way, according to our actual client records, Bazaarvoice was vastly underreported in this year’s Guide. We noticed other large eCommerce providers, such as IBM and ATG, were also underrepresented in the survey.

You could also look at market leadership in terms of size of clients or business size. In the Internet Retailer Guide, no additional weight was given to the largest retailers – the #1 retailer is ranked the same as #500. While smaller retailers may serve niche markets, the huge mass retailers amass tons of internal knowledge and expertise to become the largest in the United States, and more of the larger retailers choose Bazaarvoice. Among the Top 50 retailers, Bazaarvoice outranks the closest competition by a ratio of nearly 7:1 with clients like Best Buy, Dell, QVC, Macy’s, Costco, Overstock.com, and more. And in the Top 100, we outserve our nearest competitor by a ratio of 4:1.  See our partial client list here (not all clients give permission to display their logos).
When you factor in retailers who don’t have reviews or host them in-house, Bazaarvoice’s leadership is even more pronounced, with more than 80% of the Top 100 retailers choosing Bazaarvoice. And we are just talking about our Ratings & Reviews product, not to mention our other social commerce solutions, such as Ask & Answer and Stories.

This is an important point because as a hosted provider, part of our value to each client is learning from the whole. We help shape and share best practices from innovative, smaller clients (such as Vintage Tub and Bath or Fair Indigo) to large multi-channel retailers, such as Best Buy, Dell, and Costco. We truly believe we are inventing the future with our clients, and with a cross-vertical client list across small and large clients, we are able to innovate products rapidly (every seven weeks) and share best practices that help all clients grow ROI from social commerce.

Today over 525 brands, including over 100 of the Internet Retailer 500, turn to Bazaarvoice because we are the leader in ratings and reviews…and moreover the leader in social commerce.  We’d rather not beat our chest about these things, but we are proud of the company we keep, proud of what we’ve accomplished, and believe it’s important that our clients know the facts.

Brant, my co-founder and our VP of Business Development, told me he was going to see 'The Hangover' with his wife soon, and I decided to do my typical research.  Both critic and customer reviews were positive, so Debra and I decided to go.  Let me just warn you that this is one lewd and wild movie, but it is also extremely funny.  We both had some great laughs, and there are some especially funny scenes that feature a "man purse".

The next week I was reading the June 29th edition of "Feeding the Voice: Cutting-Edge Promotions from Bazaarvoice Clients".  This is a weekly email from our Community Management team, and it is one of the most important emails I get all week.  Our clients are using user-generated content throughout their multichannel and online marketing in a transformative way (see recent examples from Urban Outfitters, The Home Depot, and Argos in the UK).  And the number of cutting-edge promotions by our clients working with our Community Managers has risen to 20-30 per week, which is about the volume we saw in an entire year just two years ago.  Back to the slide deck – I open it and the first example is our client, Roots, blogging about the "man purse" in 'The Hangover'.  It turns out it is their "Village Bag in Vintage Tribe Leather", which is rated a 4.9 out of 5!  I was showing the Roots blog post to Debra last night and her comment was, "that is a really, really nice bag".

I thought this coincidence was very cool, and you just never know where the impact of social commerce will show up.  And if you are one of our U.S. readers, enjoy your 4th!  We will proudly be watching the fireworks tonight.

Earning my MBA from The Wharton School in '99 was a transformational experience for me.  A big part of that experience were graduates returning to campus to speak to my class.  So I have returned to the school, once to twice per year (in more recent years, twice), on my own dime, ever since graduating to pay it forward to the best of my ability.  It strikes me that this isn't unlike shoppers, who we see encouraged to write their own content as they read more reviews, answers, and stories from their peers, receiving value and being motivated to pay it forward (see this study with the Keller Fay Group).

Last Thursday, I spoke from 9am-4:30pm to Dr. Stew Friedman's leadership and teamwork classes.  Stew has been a mentor for around eight years now.  He authored Total Leadership, an amazing culmination of his life's work and a book I deployed, with Stew's help (he graciously visited us in Austin twice, and our London team attended his talk there), to the entire Bazaarvoice staff last year and then this year to all of our new people.  You can read about that experience here, which The New York Times graciously covered.

Every time I return to speak to Stew's class, I reinvent my talk.  These talks come from the heart, and I prepare for them in the cab ride on the way to speak.  These are the key themes I spoke to on Thursday:

Humility. The single best leadership article that Stew pointed to me in our mentoring meetings was Level 5 Leadership by Jim Collins, author of Good to Great.  It is required reading for our executive team (and his class at Wharton), and I find myself referring to it often.  From the Wall Street meltdown, due to lack of transparency and oversight on very complex financial products (which still cannot be explained in most cases), to the hubris at AIG, we are living through a period of extraordinary transformation.

Lack of humility is a big problem in corporate America.  If you don't have it, spend some time in the real world (perhaps you should go help Dick Grace build a hospital in an impoverished area in Tibet).  Whatever it takes, get humble and reflective.  Ask the tough questions.  Don't sit comfortably with bad profits.  A lack of humility almost caused another Great Depression, but this time on a global scale.  It bankrupted an entire country (Iceland).

On the Bazaarvoice front, I believe our solution encourages humility through negative reviews.  You have nothing to be afraid of but having the data and the will to do something with it.  I have seen countless cases of initial shock to the negative, followed by the a-ha moment where the merchandiser realizes the reason they have such a high return rate with that product.  We are, after all, a digital reflection of offline word of mouth.  These are the conversations that people are having every day, like it or not (and you should like it – word of mouth drives your sales).  So have the humility to listen and do something about it.  Then have the wisdom to leverage it.

Transparency. The World Wide Web has brought us sites like Glassdoor.com, founded by Rich Barton, the founder of Expedia.  At Glassdoor.com, you have the ability to rate and review CEOs as well as report your salary information.  HR heads have reported the salary data as 90% accurate for large companies like Microsoft.  I learned about Glassdoor.com at Liberty Media's NetLeaders event last year, where Rich was a speaker (his theme: everything – people, person, place, service, product, thing – that can be rated and reviewed will be).  The Web has also brought us TheFunded.com, where you can rate and review venture capitalists (and not without an uproar).

Obama embraces transparency.  Leveraging social media, he went straight to the people for his election campaign fundraising efforts, and raised more money, in small amounts, than any other candidate in history.  And now, as President, he is bringing social media to government.  He gets his share of criticism (such as not allowing visitors to comment on some of the government sites), but my belief is that the genie is out of the bottle.  Just like his campaign is being heavily studied, and will be imitated, so will his efforts for social media in government.  No one can question that he is racing through policy discussions, from stem-cell research to reform on Wall Street.  The pace of legislation is unprecedented in modern times.

With the Web, including blogging, Facebook, Twitter, Glassdoor.com, TheFunded.com, reviews, and so many other forces, leaders will be held accountable to a higher level of transparency.  The opaqueness of poor employee satisfaction (and ethics) on Wall Street is coming to an end, quickly.  This transparency will transform leadership as we have known it.  The command-and-control style, coming out of military training, is dying.

Connectedness. My daughter, who is now 4, will literally grow up on Facebook (or something like it), with a digital lifestream of connectivity to her friends.  When she is my age, 37, she will be able to jump to a different job at a much faster pace than my generation.  She will be connected globally to friends that she has known since childhood.  If she doesn't like the company culture, her friends will know.  The level of transparency will be unlike anything we can imagine now.  As a result, the focus on leadership, management, and culture will be at a level that today we cannot imagine, as employee retention is already, today, often the most costly expense a company has.

Culture. Due to these themes, the importance of focusing on culture is greater than ever.  I'll spare you our uniqueness here, and instead provide you with this reference to all of our blog posts that have been categorized under culture – there are many.  I spend around 15% of my time focused on culture, and I believe it is largely responsible for our success as a company.

Total Leadership. Stew's book is the start of many initiatives to focus on the development of the whole person.  Although that may not directly help you sell or service more widgets (although it actually will raise performance), it will lead to greater retention, employee satisfaction, and, ultimately, productivity, in this era of transparency and connectedness.  Learn more at TotalLeadership.org (and check out TLTV).

Soul. The Corporation, a stirring documentary I watched 4 years ago, made me think hard about the soul of a corporation.  I'm a believer in karma, and the more successful we are, the more I focus on the nourishment of our company's soul.  The Bazaarvoice Foundation is a part of that nourishment, but there is much more (such as the charity CEO speaker series Tony Capasso launched this year).

After speaking all day (both exhausting and exhilarating), Stew and I had the pleasure of hosting dinner at Tequilas, my favorite interior Mexican food in Philadelphia, with Glen Senk, CEO of client Urban Outfitters; Dmitri Siegel, head of Direct at Urban Outfitters; Fiona Dias, EVP of Partner Strategy and Marketing at GSI Commerce; and Dana Lasher, an old friend from CDnow (former VP of Sales and Marketing) that helped me design Coremetrics' initial reports who is now an entrepreneur herself at get Ready girls, an affinity sportswear company.  It was a magical evening of discussion, and I passed along my endorsement of Total Leadership in the hopes of helping others.

I hope that this post encourages you to speak at your alma mater.  I have found it to be an incredibly reflective process, one of the most important leadership development activities that I do, and have really enjoyed the karma of it all.  To teach is to learn.

The focus of my presentation was on user-generated content (UGC), and how to measure social initiatives. As you are aware, Bazaarvoice provides social commerce solutions to a variety of organizations across many different industries. The hypothesis for engaging in social commerce is to get more visitors to the site, have them convert at a higher rate, spend more money, increase brand engagement, and return their products less frequently. But don’t stop there. It’s important to look beyond your hypothesis to determine the total impact of your assumptions (allowing you to both secure and defend your budget).

So where are the other areas of impact for UGC? Customer satisfaction is one. During his keynote at eTail in Phoenix last week, Larry Freed, President and CEO of Foresee Results, discussed the importance of measuring customer satisfaction. His hypothesis was that satisfaction drives conversion. This makes sense. Happy customers are more likely to buy your products. So how do you create a happy customer? By providing them the information they want, when they want it, and where they want it. According to Neilson Online, shoppers are demanding UGC as part of their shopping experience; 81 percent of online shoppers read online customer reviews over the holidays. If you give them the chance to read peer reviews, you have met their expectations. They will be happy. And, as Larry points out, if they are happy, they will be more likely to buy your products.

Let’s expand the hypothesis further. Are consumers in the store just as hungry for UGC as online shoppers? The answer is yes. The Web is a great mechanism for research and has a direct impact on in-store sales. According to BIGresearch, 92.5 percent of adults said they regularly or occasionally research products online before buying them in the store. Furthermore, eMarketer reports that for every $1 in online sales, the Internet influenced $3.45 of store sales.

So how do you marry the ease of research online and the demand for peer reviews with the comfort of purchasing in the store? Through mobile applications. Though in its infancy (according to ForeSee, only 29 percent of consumers have used their mobile device as part of their shopping experience), consumers are increasingly turning to their mobile phones to research products online while shopping in the store. ForeSee reports that 15 percent of surveyed shoppers used their mobile devices to go online to check product reviews. This is not insignificant, seeing that the number of smart phones is growing exponentially, and demand for UGC is over 80 percent. This is why Bazaarvoice recently launched MobileVoice; a solution that allows consumers to read peer reviews through their mobile devices.

But MobileVoice isn’t solely for the benefit of the consumer. As Joyce Hrinya, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Customer Service at Helzberg shared with me, Helzberg is excited to have their associates use MobileVoice in the store. The associate can share their expertise of a product and inject UGC from their mobile device to drive more sales for a better shopping experience, without the infrastructure costs associated with many POS terminals.

Helzberg is a great example of the proper way to continuously collect, measure, and analyze visitor behavioral data for the purpose of optimizing their business and their brand.

The study finds that consumers are planning to spend less this year. Accordingly, we know that retailers are feeling the consumer's pain and don't have budgets to purchase and utilize all of the tools they would like, so they must choose right the first time. The study results confirm what many retailers have already discovered, Ratings & Reviews have been and continue to be consumers' most used and most trusted peer-generated content tool outside of the standard site information provided by retailers and manufacturers.

Key findings from the study:

• 48% of consumers plan to spend less, primarily in the automotive sector (50%), travel (46%), and CE (43%).
• This group plans to do more due diligence, looking for more information in more areas than the other groups (42% will visit 3 sites or more)
• Many of those reluctant to spend can still be positively influenced – 61% report that their confidence can be increased via online shopping resources
• 77% cite reviews as being useful in making a recent purchase
• Ratings & Reviews are the top ranked Content Discovery Tool for driving consumer trust and loyalty
  800 consumers were surveyed on their changing propensity to spend this year and on what tools they plan to use to help them feel more confident about their buying decisions.

The results showed that many consumers are planning to spend less (49%), more consumers are now going online to research their online AND offline purchases, and that very few of them have made up their mind on price (33%), brand (23%), and store/retailer (16%) associated with their purchase. 61% of those who said they were more reluctant to spend said their confidence could be increased if presented with the right information online.

This information should be empowering to retailers and manufacturers.
They have a clear opportunity to influence and win new customers, even in this challenging economy. The reality is that consumers know the data they need exists online, and they will find the content whether on your site or somewhere else. Check out how Amazon's heavy adoption of social commerce content and tools has helped them gain market share during the past couple quarters.

Customer Ratings & Reviews Are Top Ranked Content Tool
77% of all those surveyed cite reviews as being useful in making a recent purchase, making it the most used peer-generated content (ranking even higher than the actual Manufacturers website). 81% of this of those who said they plan to reduce their spend said they used ratings and reviews to make past purchases and that they are the top ranked tool that would make this group more confident when considering a purchase. 

As JupiterResearch states in the study, "Retailers must consider user generated content as a base line component of their overall offering and use it not only to enhance product descriptions, but to augment search and navigation experiences, enliven marketing messages and improve organic search results. In fact, some forward thinking retailers are beginning to incorporate the content consumers write about products in the original product descriptions to make them more accessible or consumer-focused. Furthermore, multichannel retailers can use this valued content in their stores, catalogs and other channels to bring the voice of the customer to all aspects of their customer interactions."

Learn more at upcoming Bazaarvoice events
Patti Freeman-Evans, vice president and research director at Forrester Research, will join Bazaarvoice and richrelevance in a series of retailer events to share consumer intelligence and online marketing strategies based on this research. For more information or to register for the New York event on March 3, 2009 or the San Francisco event on March 26, 2009, visit https://www.bmmreg.com/Engaged/.

Récemment,  notre présence en France a vu  de grandes arrivées et a continué à connaitre une grande réussite. En tant que Community Manager pour la France, je suis très fière de voir Bazaarvoice lancer et signer autant de grandes marques françaises.

Un  de plus beaux accomplissements et dont je suis très fière également, est  le succès de Ratings & Reviews (les notes et commentaires) et le lancement  tout récent d’Ask & Answer (les questions et réponses) sur le site de notre client français historique – Mistergooddeal.com. Mistergooddeal.com est un des leaders e-Commerce de l’équipement de la maison et était notre tout premier magasin en ligne en France à lancer Ratings and Reviews. Quand  Ask & Answer  a été lancé, Mistergooddeal.com en a profité pour développer davantage la présence du commerce social sur ses pages avec de nouvelles fonctionnalités.

Par exemple,  Mistergooddeal.com a lancé une nouvelle landing page d’information. 

Cette nouvelle landing page d’information comprend des conseils d’utilisation et d’écriture pour Ratings and Reviews ainsi que pour Ask & Answer permettant ainsi aux internautes de pouvoir contribuer à chacun de ces types de contenu. Par ailleurs, la nouvelle landing page fait aussi la promotion des produits actuellement les mieux notés. Cette nouvelle page est visible depuis un lien situé sur la page d’accueil du site, dans la première moitié de la page, ainsi que dans le pied de page de toutes les pages du site.

En simultanée, sur sa page d’accueil, Mistergooddeal.com a  aussi commencé à promouvoir les produits les mieux notés du moment ainsi qu’une bannière très visible permettant de visiter la nouvelle landing page d’information.

La promotion de produits sur la page d’accueil est un moyen très performant pour attirer l’attention sur vos produits qui ont le plus le succès et contribuent à l’amélioration des ventes. Nous encourageons toujours nos clients à mettre en avant leur produits les mieux notés car notre recherche a montré que les internautes  achètent davantage de produits qui sont répertoriés comme produits les mieux notés  comparé à toute autre catégorie, y compris les meilleures ventes.
Enfin, et avec beaucoup de succès également dans la course contre la montre pour les campagnes de Noël, Mistergooddeal.com a envoyé des emails promotionnels contenant des avis consommateurs pour les produits phares de ces emails.

Je suis très satisfaite de ces deniers développements sur le site de Mistergooddeal.com: la période avant Noël est traditionnellement celle qui conduit le plus de trafic sur les sites marchands. Il était donc clé d’utiliser le contenu généré par les utilisateurs autant que possible pour conduire davantage de ventes et dynamiser la croissance et la voix de la communauté en ligne de Mistergooddeal.com. Avec non seulement Ratings and Reviews mais aussi Ask & Answer  derrière l’implication forte en commerce social, Mistergooddeal.com se positionne comme un des leaders sur le marché français pour les idées et expériences  innovantes avec l’utilisation du contenu généré par les utilisateurs.

Conversion rates and other metrics help make measuring the effects of UGC on retail Web sites fairly intuitive. With our latest case study, we hoped to better understand the effects of Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews on non-retail sites, where proving ROI can seem more difficult. Specifically, we hoped to grasp how Ratings and Reviews affect consumer interest during the research phase of the buying cycle. Cars.com, a content-heavy site that provides easy to understand information to some 10 million car shoppers a month, served as a great test case.

While Cars.com does not sell anything on their site directly, they do provide consumers information to make well-informed buying decisions, and they display vehicle ads from dealers and private sellers across the country. To determine how the addition of Ratings and Reviews affected their consumer base, we looked at various intent-to-buy metrics, including:

• Number of page views for lead-related “Thank You” pages
• Click-through rates to dealer maps from inventory pages
• Click rates to the “Finance and Loan” calculator from inventory pages

Inventory pages with reviews out-performed those without in each of these ready-to-purchase metrics:

• Reviews improved lead conversion by 16%
• Reviews doubled the click-through to dealer maps
• Reviews increased visitors seeking financing options using the calculator by 45%

This illustrates that even businesses without sales on their site can examine other metrics to better understand how user-generated content affects later buying decisions, community, and consumer loyalty. Take a minute to read the full case study.