Mike Maples, Jr. is the managing partner of Maples Investments, and was recently named as one of "8 Rising VC Stars" by Fortune Magazine for his investments in business and consumer technology companies. His background spans a variety of markets including consumer technology, small business, and the enterprise, and he has led various functions in product development, marketing, business development, and corporate strategy. Mike co-founded Motive and was responsible for worldwide product marketing at Tivoli. Now as an investor, he is behind investments such as Twitter, Digg, Spiceworks, Chegg, IMVU, and Aggregate Knowledge. See his investments here.

Mike shared some of his thoughts on joining Bazaarvoice as an investor and advisor, as well as his investment strategy and perspectives on the market:

Why did you invest in us when some investors are cautious of the “Web 2.0” space?  TechCrunch recently said that Web 2.0 is a bankrupt term.

I suppose it's more accurate to consider the question in reverse.  I've been looking for the opportunity to invest in Bazaarvoice for quite some time and I am thrilled to be *permitted* to invest. I guess persistence does pay off sometimes!

In terms of the market space, and all of the talk of web 2.0, in my view the company's success speaks for itself.  It's customers read like a who's-who of online commerce providers and the company has dared to be new and different in an environment characterized by a lot of me-too companies.  It has also discovered a very efficient business model that can reach scale without raising a lot of money.

What trends do you see in the marketplace that support the growth for our type of service?

The first generation of companies in the social web understood that user-generated content would be important for value creation and many of the companies I invested in earlier were the first to jump on this.  In my opinion, Bazaarvoice is the first company to marry user-generated content with user-generated *commerce*. Combining these two is very powerful because you have the architecture of participation characterized by communities, combined with a very straightforward and efficient way to monetize.

I believe that there will be several very interesting user-generated commerce plays (especially since eBay hasn't moved quickly enough in recent years) and I think Bazaarvoice is the first in this new wave just as companies like Facebook, digg, and Twitter were pioneers of the user-generated content trend.

The other trend that is powerful is the shift from traditional "old media" style mass-marketing to peer-to-peer marketing enabled by relationships on the Internet.  Bazaarvoice is a leader in leveraging this and I am also working with 750 Industries, who plays firmly into this trend as well.

How does this investment align with your priorities and what you want to invest in?

At a high level, I believe that about 15 startups per year will set themselves apart in a fundamental way from the over 8,000 that will be funded.  If I had to reduce my strategy to one sentence, it would be "Find as many of the 15 as you can every year."

Finding the 15 out of the 8,000 is a lot easier said than done!  My approach is to invest in companies that have a visionary founding team, a huge potential market, a fundamental advantage backed up with a network effect, modest capital requirements, and a unique value proposition for customers. I believe that Bazaarvoice has been a superperformer in these areas for some time.

As an investor in Digg, Twitter, and now Bazaarvoice, where do you see the “social space” going in the next five years?

The trends in technology innovation have switched from enterprise trickling down to consumer innovations scaling up.  The bellweather companies are now companies like LinkedIn, digg, Bazaarvoice, Twitter, and Facebook and they are the companies to watch to get a feel for what will happen with business solutions in the future.  There will be new types of companies in the business software and services arena that apply IT consumerization to solve problems that have in the past been solved by expensive and hard-to-use enterprise software.  Some of the companies I work with are already demonstrating this, such as Solarwinds, Spiceworks, Demandforce, Egnyte, and Hyper9.   Each of these firms leverage network effects, highly appealing user experiences, communities, and consumer internet sales and marketing methods to build their products and their businesses with great efficiency.

Five years from now the trend toward IT consumerization will be very pervasive and will impact small businesses and enterprises in a very fundmental way.  Traditional enterprise software companies will feel that this is very disruptive but the users of technology will be the big winners.

We recently launched a new client, Mighty Leaf Tea, a specialty tea company “born for the sole purpose of infusing life into an ancient indulgence by creating tea products that reach new heights of quality and innovation.” They are truly passionate about finding the best handcrafted teas in the world – just try some and you’ll see.

While not a huge company, they are very hands-on when it comes to maximizing their Ratings & Reviews solution. They’re already very engaged with their Community Manager, who is helping them create campaigns to build review volume, setting up analytical reporting to track ROI, and talking about using customer feedback in their marketing campaigns.

This innovative company is also adopting several  Ratings & Reviews features, including…

TagShare, where their customers can summarize their opinions with searchable  tags
QuickTake, so their customers can quickly scan tags, pros and cons for a more cursory view of reviews
SearchVoice Reviews creates a single portal where all product  reviews can be found and maximizes SEO value. See theirs here.
ShoutIt! allows their customers to share their reviews, products and profiles on social networking sites like Facebook, Digg, and Del.icio.us
Ratings snapshot – allows customers to visualize the distribution of ratings across products

Brett, our CEO, has long been a big fan of Mighty Leaf Tea and we’re proud to welcome them into the Bazaarvoice family….and to serve their teas in our kitchen. They’ve been a big hit both in our Austin and London offices and their positive word of mouth is spreading fast. They even create fun green tea leaves to denote their ratings, instead of stars…

Overall Rating:

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?

We started answering that question today with the launch of our newest feature, called ShareThis(tm). It is a FREE feature for our clients allowing their shoppers and customers to share a review, profile or product to their favorite social networking or bookmarking site. And because we’re already hosted in their site, we can turn this live within days without IT involvement.

Dow Jones covered the launch, including commentary from Dell. Here’s a snippet from the article:

The feature enables a person who is, say, excited about the Dell monitor he just bought to share the news by posting on his Facebook profile a link to a review that he or someone else wrote. The post, which can also include an image of the monitor or the Dell logo and brief comment from him, will show up on his profile mini feed and in the news feed his Facebook friends see. Bazaarvoice says no money will change hands; shoppers won't be paid for posting reviews and Facebook won't get fees.

"It's making (consumers) an advocate" for brands on sites where the audiences are highly desirable to marketers, yet tend to be skeptical of online marketing, says Greg Sterling, of Oakland, Calif., consulting firm Sterling Market Intelligence. "It's trying to leverage a more trusted environment" and a form of marketing — word-of-mouth — that is particularly trusted by consumers.

It is also an effort to engage people who online-marketers have come to call "influencers" — people who through their expertise and efforts to share that expertise in online forums have gained outsized influence over other consumers. Sites like Facebook, del.icio.us and Digg are places where these people, and other less-active Web users, love to express themselves and have access to large numbers of other people.

"Now, for the first time ever, whenever (consumers) see a product they like, they can post it as a representation of who they are and what they like," says Sam Decker, chief marketing officer at Bazaarvoice.

I couldn’t have said it better myself!

You can see it live on these sample product pages from Dell, Toshiba and Jewelry Television.

We have future plans for this functionality, plus other ideas on social network integration with user generated content. Drop me a note if you’re interested in discussing them (sam at bazaarvoice.com).

If you’re a client interested in adding this to your site, it just takes a call or email to your Community Manager…otherwise you’ll be hearing from them! Remember, it's free! I mean FREE!

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.

With inspiration from IdeaStorm, a Digg-like site that enables users to suggest and vote on new ideas, I've been thinking a lot about the concept of customer-driven ideation.  Maybe I'm dressing the concept up with the word "ideation" but I think "suggestion" sells the concept short and brings to mind old and dusty customer suggestion boxes that might as well be black holes for customer input!  Ideation is more interactive and mutual, an invitation to the customer to really get involved in the creative process of product and service development and branding.  Imagine for a second that just 25 of the top of consumer products brands had customer ideation communities like IdeaStorm, wherein the best (according to the customer!!) ideas surfaced to the top of the stack for all to see.  Imagine the amount of customer-focused innovation that would follow.  To put this into perspective, the Dell community has posted 5384 ideas on IdeaStorm, as of today, and they have posted almost 24,000 comments. 

I really want to see more companies follow Dell's lead in creating online, interactive ideation communities that invite customers to submit and defend their ideas and suggestions.  Not all of these ideas are going to be great, but with the right tools in place, a community of passionate customers can very efficiently separate the wheat from the chaff.  I would love to hear your thoughts on how ideation communities should be designed and even better, what companies and brands you think need them most!  

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")!

Well, the answer to that question is something I have been thinking about ever since launching Bazaarvoice with Brant. Why do people take the time to write reviews? [We will announce next week that we served over 19 million reviews on Cyber Monday!] Why do people take the time (like I did this morning) to vote on community photos for JPG Magazine? Why do people take the time to label images Google has crawled? [Google's top contributor, "wordgirl", has labeled 1,335,500 images since they launched this only three months ago - that is a staggering 14,839 images per day since launch!]

The answer is actually more complex than you may think. It is a combination of ego, social connection, and good karma. Let me explain:

1. Ego – At Bazaarvoice, we know that a reviewer comes back to our client's site three times, on average, after submitting a review to see if it has posted yet. When people take the time to share their opinion, they want to know the world heard it. This fact alone gives our clients three opportunities to resell a customer. In a recent report, Patti Freeman-Evans researched these reviewers.

2. Social connection – Why do you share your favorite movie with an acquaintance? Do you care if they watch it? Why do we talk about our favorite music? The answer is linked to human nature. We all care about connecting with each other as humans. This is what drives the creation of culture.

3. Good karma – A universal truth is that if you help someone, it makes you feel good. When reviewers help each other shop, it saves time. Saving time is one of the most important things we can help each other do, especially in the manic, multitasking world we live in today.

Now, if you apply these three elements to JPG Magazine, it all begins to make sense.

Obviously, we are thinking about the power of photos in customer-generated content at Bazaarvoice. A while back, we added Photo Reviews to our feature set. Wayne blogged about this recently. If you think about the three elements above, photos are a very strong component. Experts believe that the advent of the digital camera is one of the keys to why MySpace took off versus its predecessors (Geocities, etc).

How should you leverage photo reviews? With contests and multichannel recognition. Don't just run a contest for a gift certificate give-away for customers that write a review and include a photo, post the winning photo on your home page! Use it in an email campaign. Use it in a circular. Use it in an in-store display. If your community of customers sees that all three elements – ego, social connection, and good karma – are maximized by you, then it will spark customer participation unlike anything you have seen before. Threadless' entire business model is based on this, and I think it is a brilliant application of the three.

For fun, here is a photo we recently moderated that you won't see on one of our client's site because it came from a rejected review. Alas, it added no obvious value, there was no text review associated with it, and I think this person was just bored (they were thinking about element #1 above only – ego). But, it does grab your attention!