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")!

I won't rehash or provide commentary for this particular list of predictions, as I encourage you to read it in its entirety (it's pretty lengthy) to get a good sense of how Trendwatching breaks down and cross-references their predictions with macro-trends and micro-trends that they have identified throughout the past few years.  However, I will share a highlight or two: 

My favorite soundbyte from the list is "participation is the new consumption."  They note that consumption is deeply related to the quest for status, but in mature consumer societies, like our own, many physical goods are available in abundance.  As a result, consumer behavior is evolving away from the "dated lifestyle centered on hoarding as many branded, luxury goods as possible" and towards more experiential consumption activities, which are often social experiences.  My takeaway here is that as consumption becomes more experiential and social, consumer opinions and advice will become THE most valued source of information and "advertising" for those products and services, since consumers – individually and in groups – are so deeply involved in shaping the quality of the experience itself.    

Also, I loved the intro to trend #2: TRANSPARENCY TYRANNY . . .

"Remember the promises of flawless matching of supply and demand, and limitless consumer power, when the web burst onto the scene a dozen years ago? While the last few years didn’t disappoint (consumers are already enjoying near-full transparency of prices and, in categories like travel and music, near-full transparency of opinions as well), 2007 could be the year in which TRANSPARENCY TYRANNY really starts scaring the shit out of non-performing brands.

Why? For one, 1+ billion consumers are now online, and the majority of them have been online for years. They're skilled bargain seekers and ‘best of the best’ hunters, they're avid online networkers and they're opinionated reviewers and advisors (tripadvisor.com now boasts 5,000,000+ travel reviews)."

At Bazaarvoice, we often discuss the long-term potential of ratings & reviews and other transparency-enabling technologies to expedite the obsolescence of truly bad products – products that disappoint customers, that erode customer loyalty, that are costly for retailers and manufacturers to carry and support, etc.  If Trendwatching is right, 2007 could be the year that early adopters of ratings & reviews, many of who are clients of ours, take decisive action by discontinuing products that have accumulated overwhelmingly negative reviews from customers or at least begin to factor a product's customer rating into other core measures of a product's contribution to the company's bottom line (e.g., profits from negatively rated products could, at the end of the day, be "bad profits" in Net Promoter terms).

Additionally . . . 

"Real-time TRANSPARENCY TYRANNY is on the rise for another reason as well: as more people are contributing, the sheer mass of reviews will lead to daily and who knows, hourly reviews on any topic imaginable. . . . Pleasant side-effect: mass postings will also unmask, outnumber and neutralize any fake reviews posted by desperate brands trying to piggy back on the powers of transparency."

"However, the missing link in the above is profiles: the onslaught of recommendations needs some transparency of its own. After all, what good is a recommendation if it’s from someone leading a different STATUS LIFESTYLE than your own? Expect a host of new TWINSUMER ventures to monetize collaborative filtering and profile matching in 2007, most likely by partnering with sites that are already centered around profiles, like MySpace and Bebo.com. Collaborative filtering and profile matching ranges from social shopping (check out Crowdstorm, ThisNext and Stylehive on Springwise) to the Last.fms and Yoonos of this world."

"Once this PROFILE MANIA reaches its zenith, and even more purchase decisions will be influenced by fellow, likeminded consumers, expect star contributors/reviewers to demand a piece of the action. Re-read our GENERATION C(ASH) briefing for a taste of things to come. Smart 'participants' will want to get paid in 2007."

On the first point above, we are seeing this very trend every day.  In addition to the accelerating organic growth of customer-generated content, we are helping our clients further accelerate the impact of UGC on their businesses by defining, testing, and refining best practices for engaging UGC contributors.  Our Client Services team has compiled an 80-page best practices guide containing these tactics, and one of our recently launched clients received over 25,000 reviews in a 24-hour period by applying these tactics.  

On the following points, we are working on new product and partnership initiatives designed to address this very opportunity.  As we expand our platform to include additional UGC applications and services, expect to see more "connective tissue" in the form of enhanced user profiles and possible integration with other profile-based applications in use on our clients' websites.  

Speaking of bad profits, I was especially intrigued this morning to read about my friends at 1-800-FREE-411 (Jingle Networks). TechCrunch reports that 1-800-FREE-411 has already received 100 million 411 calls! It has taken over 3% of the $8 billion 411 market. I know the CEO of this company (he founded Flycast with a fellow Wharton MBA graduate from my class), as well as their early investor Josh Kopelman, who is also an investor in Bazaarvoice and the founder of Half.com. I consider these two some of the smartest people I am fortunate enough to know. This is another stunning example of bad profits creating an incredibly huge and disruptive market opportunity. 1-800-FREE-411 has the easiest marketing slogan I have seen in a long time – everything you need to know is right there in the phone number. To learn more about what created this opportunity, check out Josh Kopelman's great blog post.

There are so many recent examples of bad profits in action. Think of the incredibly disruptive Skype, which yesterday had over 8 million users online. The negative word-of-mouth from exorbitant long distance fees paved the way for Skype's success. And, of course, everyone knows by now that eBay bought them for $2.6 billion.

Where are the bad profits in your industry and how can you capitalize on them?

Do you have any bad profits yourself? One example I can think of in retail is the difficulty of returns when you have a bad experience with a product. Costco capitalizes on that by providing unlimited returns on all items (i.e. buy a TV, save the receipt, and you can literally return it 2 years later if it breaks). Their only exception is for computers – there is a 6-month policy on those. I have been tracking Costco's success for years to see if this incredibly customer-friendly policy would hurt them. Quite to the contrary, Costco has thrived as a result. I encourage you to read my friend Gary Stein's blog for more analysis on Costco.

If you are a Bazaarvoice client, we suggest you measure your word-of-mouth promoters and detractors with our Net Promoter service. We haven't promoted it as well as we should (we'll change that), but it is truly powerful and will illuminate any potential sources of "bad profits" and word-of-mouth detractors.

And now enjoy the free 411 calls!