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Williams-Sonoma has quickly realized the value of UGC. This holiday season they used customer reviews in several emails to promote holiday foods and merchandise top-rated cookware.

Beauty products purveyor philosophy re-styled the look and feel of Ratings & Reviews for the holidays. They also used top-rated gifts as one way to merchandise products in their holiday shop and promoted this on their homepage.

 Throughout the holiday shopping season Best Buy featured three different homepage banner ads with pop-up URLs to direct the consumers to various shopping categories. One of their favored merchandising categories was top-rated products.

Levenger featured top-rated products as “Customer Favorites” in their holiday gift guide and highlighted this in an email.

Land of Nod gave away a $1,000 gift card in return for reviews…just in time for customers to do some holiday shopping and for the Land of Nod to collect some great content to help indecisive shoppers.

This holiday season saw a huge reflection of the customer voice in retail. We’ll keep you posted on other unique holiday promotions this year!

Warning: the video has profanity.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Did Leroy Jenkins' ridiculous battle cry and bravado drive awareness for World of Warcraft?  You bet.  It is much more compelling than an advertisement.  This is word of mouth in action – as captured directly through the players real-time let down due to their cowboy friend, Leroy.  You can hear the anguish and passion in their voice.  They've spent a lot of time building their characters, and Leroy blew it up for them.

There are now well over 15 million views of Leroy Jenkins videos on YouTube.  That's reach.  And look at all of the mash-ups.  Many are not that interesting (that is why I sorted by view for you in that link), but people actually care enough to make them.

Comedy Central's hit South Park created an entire episode inside of World of Warcraft as well.  Were they inspired by Leroy Jenkins?  Probably.  In any case, it is hilarious too.

And, of course, Leroy Jenkins has turned into a celebrity of sorts in the videogame world.  Here is an interview of him at BlizzCon 2007.  Blizzard Entertainment, the makers of World of Warcraft, were smart to leverage him.  World of Warcraft now boasts 10 million subscribers, or an impressive 62% of the estimated MMOG market.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Clients are leveraging our Stories product to find their Leroy Jenkins (or their "Jareds", should you want a more well-known example from Subway).  Stories can include user-generated text, photos, and videos.

In our webinar this past Tuesday, I enjoyed presenting with John McCullough, Director of Marketing at James Avery, on how they are using Stories (email us if you would like to see the recorded version).  The level of customer engagement is awesome to see – passion exemplified.  Read some of the James Avery customer Stories (note there are six categories for their Stories).  And then venture over to Philosophy to read some of their customer Stories: here is their award winning story about mothers during their Mother's Day Stories contest.

This is incredibly powerful: our clients are literally breathing personality, passion, and "connection" into their businesses online.

Philosophy is a great skincare company that goes far beyond products – as their name suggests, their brand is about a way of being – a philosophy!

To that end, they launched their “Your Mom’s Philosophy” campaign to encourage their customers to share the life-changing stories and lessons their moms taught them. Once stories were posted, writers encouraged others to vote, and two winners received $1200 Philosophy shopping sprees. The campaign was envisioned and executed by Philosophy's agency, dotbox media and included a Google Maps API integration to show where the users' were from..

Philosophy hoped to gain new visitors to its site – and boy, did they succeed. Here are some of the results:

• They received more than 1,000 stories in just over a month and thousands of votes.
• During the month of May, 39% of their entire web traffic came in through their “Your Mom’s Philosophy” pages
• 33% of all their visitors overall read stories during their time on the site.
• Visitors through Stories had 81% more page views and 20% higher average order value than average

Traffic is still coming into the “Your Mom’s Philosophy” pages as daughters share their stories with friends and family.

Philosophy used Bazaarvoice’s newest product, Stories, to make the entire process simple. They used our flexible options to style the input to match their existing site and brand, and our three-tier moderation – with our standard SLA of fewer than 72 hours – meant that they could collect stories with confidence and ease.

We’re excited to say we have dozens more clients launching Stories, using it for holidays, special campaigns, and even recruiting! Keep an eye here for more great implementations, and think about how you can go beyond the product to build bridges between your brand and your customers.