Posts Tagged ‘Ed-Keller’

Books, Marketing Strategy, Social Commerce Summit

Sam Decker Bazaarvoice Summit Cliffnotes #5: Ed Keller, CEO of the Keller Fay Group: Understanding the Power of Influencers

August 1st, 2008 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer

This is the fifth in our series of key takeaways from some of the presentations and panel discussions offered at the Social Commerce Summit in May 2008.

Ed Keller, CEO of the Keller Fay Group and author of The Influentials, is an expert on measuring word of mouth.

Based on his research, Ed made six points about America’s word of mouth conversations:

  1. WOM spans categories and industries
  2. WOM is mostly positive (63%)
  3. WOM has impact – people are very likely to believe and pass along recommendations, and customers are more likely to buy or seek additional information because of word of mouth
  4. Customer-based WOM leads to better outcomes – people on the “receiving” side of WOM are more impressed by advice given by a true customer of the brand
  5. Marketing and media are a key part of WOM – nearly half of brand conversations refer to marketing or media (advertisements, etc.)
  6. When it comes to conversation, not all consumers are created equal – 10% of the population (influencers) account for one-third of all WOM

Ed pointed out that there is a misunderstanding that influencers are all elite members of society. In fact, influencers are actually those who tend to both listen and talk a lot. They exist across countries and socioeconomic groups. Influencers are well-connected, well-informed individuals who possess:

  • An active approach to life
  • Enthusiasm for learning and keeping up
  • Connections to many people and groups
  • A clear set of priorities
  • A strong belief in growth & change
  • Impact and the ability to create change
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Books, Community, Customer Centricity, Interviews, Marketing Strategy, Ratings & Reviews, Research, Social Commerce Summit, User-Generated Content, Word of Mouth, eCommerce

Brett Hurt Andy Sernovitz’s Video Interviews from Our Social Commerce Summit

July 6th, 2008 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO

Andy Sernovitz is a Bazaarvoice Advisory Board member and the founder of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA)*. Andy is also a fellow Wharton grad, the author of Word of Mouth Marketing, a serial entrepreneur, and a prominent keynote speaker at many conferences, including our own Social Commerce Summit.

I was happy to see Andy leverage the valuable community we assembled at our first-ever and sold-out Summit in May by recording five video interviews. It was truly an amazing group of individuals, charged with word of mouth marketing at many of the largest companies in the world, from Bank of America to Wal-Mart. It was humbling to be in the presence of so many smart industry leaders, sharing best practices with each other in our rapidly emerging field. Because of them (as well as the hard work by our team), we have set a very high bar for our Summit next year.

Andy recently published his interview of me. We discussed how user-generated content is changing the merchandising culture at companies, helping them become more customer-centric and successful as a result.

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Read on to see more interviews by Andy.

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Books, Interviews, Marketing Strategy, Ratings & Reviews, Research, User-Generated Content, Word of Mouth

Brett Hurt Word-of-Mouth Wisdom #7: Ed Keller, The Keller Fay Group

August 8th, 2007 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO

For my 7th installment of the Word-of-Mouth Wisdom interview series, I am proud to interview Ed Keller.  Ed serves on our Board of Directors and is an industry guru as well as a seasoned operational CEO.  He has continuously added value to the Bazaarvoice team and Board, and we are constantly learning from him.  He is also the founder and CEO of The Keller Fay Group, which is doing some of the most interesting work in the word of mouth field.

WOM Wisdom Header

Ed Keller1. As the author of "The Influentials", former CEO of Roper, President of WOMMA, Board Director at Bazaarvoice, and CEO of your new business, why do you think the word of mouth movement is buzzing like never before?

Why now and not five years ago?

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Customer Centricity, Marketing Strategy, Word of Mouth

Brett Hurt ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, Wal-Mart, and Word-of-Mouth

August 17th, 2006 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO

A month and a half ago on this blog, I predicted that An Inconvenient Truth would be remembered as the most impactful documentary to date.  There was no doubt in my mind that consumer sentiment is shifting towards green products for a variety of reasons – environmental (i.e. concern about the earth), political (i.e. oil conflicts), and sociological (i.e. concern about the crops that are being wiped out in Africa).  Here is an interesting quote from BusinessWeek that brings it home, so to speak:

  • "That American drivers aren't cutting back, and may not cut back drastically even if prices go higher, has huge implications for the world oil market. That's because U.S. motorists are the single biggest consumers of petroleum in the world. They use more than 9 million barrels of gasoline a day. That's roughly a third more than the consumption of all types of petroleum by every home, car, and factory in China, the nation whose energy consumption gets all the attention these days."

Green coffee supplier to Wal-MartWhat I didn't expect is that a month later, Wal-Mart would lead the charge (see Fortune magazine's article).  From a word-of-mouth and customer demand perspective, this makes complete sense to me.  Witness the amazing rise of Whole Foods Market, which is actually headquartered here in Austin.  Their stock has skyrocketed up to 500% in the past five years.  Why should Wal-Mart (or anyone else) cede such amazing growth to Whole Foods?  Clearly the market is ready for competition, and Whole Foods has been virtually uncontested.

Whole Foods Stock Growth

If you read the Fortune article, you will learn that Wal-Mart had Al Gore kick off this initiative.  What a great way to spark word-of-mouth inside the massive Wal-Mart employee base (they employ more people than the US Postal Service).  If those employees turn into evangelists, you can bet that will "infect" Wal-Mart customers as well.

Wal-Mart's scale is almost incomprehensibly massive.  Their scale almost put Vlasic out of business a few years ago.  As the corporation of retail corporations, they get their share of negative word-of-mouth, but most of it is among the intellectual elite.  The masses are actually very positive on Wal-Mart (because of their obvious low-price focus), and Ed Keller (one of our Board members and the former CEO of Roper) confirmed that Wal-Mart is one of the word-of-mouth marketing elite, right up there with Toyota, Honda, and the iPod.

But this is Wal-Mart's most brilliant word-of-mouth marketing move to date, especially among the intellectuals.  Because the intellectuals are the ones that will most appreciate An Inconvenient Truth.  And Wal-Mart has the scale to literally force many CPGs to "go green".  It is a big blow to Whole Foods, and it will be interesting to watch how they react.

Scale drives business change faster than any other factor.  How will you leverage your scale to "go green", spark positive word-of-mouth, explore new niches, and ultimately create higher margin opportunities?

By the way, I may appear to be a "greenie" but I am actually a die-hard technology optimist and believe that entrepreneurs will soon figure out real alternatives to oil given that it is a multi-trillion dollar business opportunity. 

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Books, New at Bazaarvoice

Brett Hurt Five Updates: BusinessWeek articles, Red Herring 100, and Ed Keller

June 6th, 2006 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO

So, I am supposed to be on vacation tonight after traveling 13 hours to Maui to celebrate my 10-year anniversary with my wife, Debra. But I am having trouble sleeping (it is 3:15am CT, 10:15pm Maui time) after reading some exciting articles. And both wife and child are asleep…

First, a friend of mine that works at Yahoo! sent me a BusinessWeek article put out yesterday, Web 2.0 Has Corporate America Spinning. If you have read "The Cluetrain Manifesto", this article will lead you to believe that companies are finally hopping on the train. It continues to amaze me how visionary that book really was. If it wasn't for the tech market bubble bursting right after it came out, more people would cite it today.

As usual, BusinessWeek has an insightful and practical view on the subject, instead of the typical hype-laden fluff. Here are a few of my favorite excerpts:

  • Companies are starting to take a page from MySpace, Facebook, and other social-networking services. The reason: As appealing as that social aspect is for teens and anyone else who wants to stay in closer touch with friends, it's even more useful in business. After all, businesses in one sense are social networks formed to make or sell something. [Comment: Why reporters don't mention "The Cluetrain Manifesto" when they write sentences like this boggles my mind.]
  • But the payoff can be substantial, if hard to quantify. Genial Microsoft (MSFT) blogger Robert Scoble, for instance, is credited by many Redmond watchers with doing more to improve the company's image than millions of dollars in public relations. In no small part that's because he has shown a willingness to criticize his company at times. [Side note: I am speaking with Robert Scoble at the Supernova conferencein San Francisco in two weeks.]
  • But the upside can be a brand to which people feel a stronger emotional tie. Says Forrester Research analyst Chris Charron: "In the end, the brand is owned not just by the people who create it, but by the people who use it."
  • All that's going to require more than slick technology. Executives, long used to ruling from the top of the corporate hierarchy, will have to learn a new skill: humility. "Companies that are extremely hierarchical have trouble adapting," says Tim O'Reilly, CEO of tech book publisher O'Reilly Media, which runs the annual Web 2.0 Conference "They'll be outperformed by companies that don't work that way." Ultimately, taking full advantage of Web 2.0 may require — get ready — Management 2.0.

Second, Netflix was profiled in BusinessWeek's June 5th issue for their "top 100 hot growth companies" feature story.  This reminded me of my blog post back in February. The subtitle of the BusinessWeek article is "the mail-order movie house that clobbered Blockbuster." If that doesn't sum it up in a few words, I'm not sure what would. Read my blog post to get a different perspective on why this is happening and what it has to do with word of mouth.

Third, I was happy to see Ed Keller's new company, Keller Fay Group, prominently mentioned in the same June 5th issue of BusinessWeek on page 12. Keller Fay is producing some really groundbreaking research.  Sam Decker blogged about some of it earlier this month, highlighting research that 62% of word of mouth is positive. Ed is answering questions that have been perplexing us for some time.

Fourth, congratulations to Ed Keller (and Bazaarvoice) on him joining our Board of Directors (as our first independent member) as well as WOMMA's Board of Directors (in their first elected Board).  Ed has the perfect profile for our Board as well as WOMMA's. He has fantastic operational experience (as the former CEO of Roper) and deep industry experience (27+ years in marketing research, including co-authoring "The Influentials", a truly amazing book that helped launch the recent word-of-mouth movement). I feel flattered that Ed joined our Board and look forward to working with him for years to come.

And fifth, congratulations to Chris Pacitti of Austin Ventures. Throughout my entrepreneurial career, I have had the fortune of working with some truly great venture capitalists. It is an amazing achievement for two of the companies that Chris serves on the board of, Bazaarvoice and Pluck, to be the only Texas-based companies in North America to be selected for Red Herring's Top 100 list.  We are very fortunate to be working with him. With Chris and Ed on our Board, we have a very powerful combination of resources.

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Marketing Strategy, Ratings & Reviews, Research, Word of Mouth

Sam Decker Keller Fay Study: 62% of Word of Mouth is Positive

May 15th, 2006 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer

The Keller Fay Group (www.kellerfay.com) today released results from a survey of American consumers indicating that brands are a critical part of daily conversation.  

The study was done using TalkTrack™, the first continuous monitoring system of all marketing-relevant conversations, providing nationally representative measures on word of mouth for every major consumer category and thousands of individual brands.  

Here are some key findings:

  • The average American discusses specific brands in ordinary discussion 56 times per week. 
  • 41% of conversations about brands involve a reference to advertising or something seen or heard in the media.
  • Contrary to conventional opinion, nearly two-thirds (62%) of brand-related talk feature products in a positive light, while less than 1 in 10 conversations features products negatively.

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