July 6th, 2009 by Heather Brunner Chief Operations Officer
This blog post is guest-written by Anna Skaya, Community Manager – Europe at Bazaarvoice.
When Bazaarvoice partnered with Argos to build and deliver their User Generated Content (UGC) platform, we couldn’t have imagined the kind of impact UGC would have had on Argos’ social marketing strategy, or how this would have a knock-on effect on conversion. As one of our flagship ‘early adopters’ in the UK, our recent Argos case study highlights details of this exciting discovery, and showcases how the Argos eCommerce team is focused on retaining a competitive edge over its rivals along with delivering a consistently great customer experience. Increasingly fundamental to this now is the decision to make UGC a focal point for online strategy planning.
When Argos first launched customer Ratings & Reviews, our challenge was to find a way of utilising Consumer-to-Consumer opportunities in a way that was relevant and complementary to the established customer experience, while demonstrating additional benefit to the business. When doing so, ROI is always king.
The conversion numbers speak for themselves – 10% increase in conversion on products with reviews, across all categories. Customer reviews form a key part of Argos’ continuing website innovation; and with new key functionality supported by technology partners such as Bazaarvoice, these types of results are just the beginning. There is a lot more in store for this leading online retailer!
June 23rd, 2009 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer
Rosetta Stone, the leading provider of interactive language-learning solutions, launched Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews™ to help customers share their experiences with learning new languages. Now current customers can easily exchange their opinions on a wide range of language-learning solutions covering more than 30 languages, and new customers can browse customer-generated reviews to learn which solution is applicable to their interest and skill level.
Since the launch in April 2009, Rosetta Stone has already collected thousands of product reviews, with over 95 percent of the reviews having a 4 or 5-star rating. To further help visitors determine each review’s relevance, an extensive reviewer profile that highlights the reviewer’s previous experience with the language; reason for learning the language; next language to learn; and number of Rosetta Stone products owned are provided with each review.
According to Tom Adams, CEO of Rosetta Stone, “The positive response to Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews has been outstanding and we are eager to further listen, learn, and communicate with our customers and help them in their language learning journey.”
Read more about Rosetta Stone’s launch in our press release, and check out our related blog posts to see how other clients have used Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews to drive customer engagement for their own brands.
September 18th, 2008 by Brant Barton Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer
Mike Moran, IBM Distinguished Engineer and author of “Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules”, recently interviewed me for his blog, Biznology. I really appreciate Mike’s positive endorsement of Bazaarvoice and hope that you will find the interview educational, as it touches on a number of issues relevant to customers of our Ratings & Reviews product as well as companies that are contemplating the use of user-generated content. Enjoy!
February 27th, 2008 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO
As a businessman who loves technology, Wired is my favorite magazine. I simply find no other business magazine as innovative, both in the way it is physically organized and designed. But the real gold is the content. The Editor In Chief of Wired, Chris Anderson, is one of the most visionary business thinkers of our time. You remember “The Long Tail“? – an awesome read that nicely summarized the true power of the Internet to reach niche markets. I had the pleasure of meeting Chris in person at Resource Interactive’s iCitizen event last year, as we were both speakers at the event. He then ran the tables at conferences, keynoting seemingly almost every one that I attended. “The Long Tail” had real business impact (see my post on it’s impact on eCommerce). Chris deserves the success he earned – seeing a commerce-changing trend that none of us could as succinctly and powerful describe.
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?
January 27th, 2008 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO
This weekend, Intuit launched the largest online campaign to promote customer reviews in history (at least that I know of). Over 500 million impressions were served on the home page of AOL, MSN, and Yahoo! to promote TurboTax. In just the past five days of being live, Intuit has collected over 4,000 customer reviews across their TurboTax product line.
This marks a seachange in the financial software space. Intuit is known as one of the best companies in the world to work for, and now they are known as one of the most "open" brands for embracing customer centricity through user-generated content. Although the reviews are generally very positive, what makes them authentic to customers is that even a 5-star review will point out features that Intuit can improve in their next release of TurboTax.
I applaud Seth Greenberg, the leader of this initiative and a former Shop.org Board peer and CEO of eHobbies, and his team of remarkable people.
I encourage you to check it out for yourself by visiting TurboTax's home page to see the reviews. And here are three of the campaign creatives that appeared this weekend.
AOL "Review Bubbles" (note the instant-messenger look):
Review quote:
Yahoo!'s home page:
Note: these are online-only promotions. If you have been missing the news on Bazaarblog, check out these great examples of multichannel promotions in 2008 from Best Buy (Bazaarblog link) and Wal-Mart (Bazaarblog link).
January 23rd, 2008 by Wayne Stribling Former VP of Client Services
Research has proven that customer reviews drive sales conversion, reduce product returns, fuel online search, and significantly influence the purchasing decisions of online shoppers. And we know that consumers want to hear from people like them.
So why not take it a step further and utilize customer generated content in the form of product reviews in advertising?
Advertising has become so ubiquitous that it is mostly ignored and consumers don’t trust the messages that companies send them. But the customer’s voice is as powerful offline as it is online, so why not take advantage of it?
Best Buy recently featured their customers’ voices – actual snippets from online product reviews along with product ratings – in their nationwide Sunday newspaper circular. They utilized a clear call to action to drive consumers directly to their “Top Rated Cameras” page, giving shoppers quick and easy access to top rated cameras. This not only provides a great way for Best Buy to advertise their top cameras, but it allows them to easily measure the success of this advertisement by measuring traffic to this page and sales conversion of these products.
This is another example of a Bazaarvoice best practice developed by our team of Community Managers – use your customers’ words to fuel your entire marketing mix. We strongly encourage our clients to use their customer reviews (along with other valuable user generated content such as from our Ask & Answer, BrandVoice and Stories products) in all forms of advertising: email marketing, online ads, store signage, print ads, Facebook groups, etc.
There is no more effective way to get customers to listen than to let them hear from other customers just like them. This is the future of advertising or should I say “effective" advertising!
January 6th, 2008 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO
The Social Commerce industry hit another major tipping point this holiday season. Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, has begun the process of integrating user-generated content into their stores. There are three integration points so far (see the bottom of this post for screenshots), with undoubtedly more to come:
- Store merchandise receipts: encouraging customers to write reviews and visit Walmart.com to shop by reviews.
- Store shelf fact tag: encouraging customers to research reviews prior to their purchase.
- In-store and newspaper circulars: encouraging customers to visit Walmart.com to shop by reviews.
In all three integration points, Wal-Mart is pointing their customers to a common URL: Walmart.com/ratings. This campaign "landing page" not only teaches the mass market how to write reviews (many of them for the first time) on Walmart.com, but it also teaches them how to shop by reviews. This is a great showcase of what is possible with our partner integrations – Endeca, in this case (see Brant's December interview with Endeca).
This is a nationwide campaign for Wal-Mart, and one of the best examples I have seen to date of multichannel integration. We have been giving webinars and advice on the topic through our Community Managers and, 2007 marked the year where we saw a lot of traction in this area (ask us for other examples). But to see the world's largest retailer launch this in such a powerful integrated fashion, just six months after launching Bazaarvoice, is extremely impressive. Congratulations to our Client Services team for proactively working with Wal-Mart and achieving such a milestone for both our company and industry.
Since the launch of this campaign, we have seen Walmart.com's customer review volume increase substantially.
For other ideas on multichannel integration, be sure to check out my December post on the topic (integrating for maximum Black Friday and Cyber Monday benefit) and ask your Community Manager for ideas. We are working hard to evolve with our clients in this area because we see the real impact of user-generated content extending far beyond the walls of your website.
December 20th, 2007 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO
We recently had our holiday party at Speakeasy, a bar on famous 6th St. We rented out the whole joint, and it was a blast. We had our own stand-up comedian (I’m not joking – she is one of our Community Managers), and she gave a fantastic performance. We also had the karaoke machine going through the night, a great assortment of “adult beverages”, and catering from Cuba Libre.
There is no doubt that 2007 has been a banner year for Bazaarvoice. From winning Red Herring’s Global 100 award to launching clients like Wal-Mart, we have achieved one major milestone after another. And there is also no doubt that it is because of our amazing people that we have had such a year. I wake up every day with a smile on my face because I work with the best and the brightest.
Culture has been important to me and the executive team from day one. We regularly put initiatives and policies in place to shape our culture, and it works. One of them is that we never compromise on hiring. If we have the slightest reservation about a candidate, we’ll pass. This keeps our foundation incredibly strong. Some of the others can be seen if you click on the link at the beginning of this paragraph.
For our holiday party, I asked our team what they liked most about working at Bazaarvoice. I then presented the best of these at our holiday party. Here are some of my favorites:
- Delivering value to everyone [to businesses because we increase their revenues / to consumers because we help them make better decisions].
- Co-workers – it is such a relief to know that the people you work with are dynamic, smart, and capable. I also like how everyone is constantly striving and surpassing goals that the entire group is working towards.
- The vast opportunities here. There are always new things to learn, teach, improve, and create. It makes me really feel and see the personal and professional growth that I’m experiencing at Bazaarvoice.
- The opportunity to work with other people that are themselves jazzed about coming to work every day. There is a buzz here I’ve not felt in years in the work environment.
- The people – we rigidly guard our culture. When we decide to hire somebody, we’re as sure as you can be during an interview that the person will fit in at Bazaarvoice.
- We’re a very healthy company. Many of our employees are friends outside of work.
- Good work/life balance – this company is really good about having fun while working and organizing events to get us out of the office and have a change of pace to prevent burnout.
- The “winning team” feeling. Our company is kicking &*$, and it’s great to be on the winning team. Our competition is inferior to us and we enjoy the success that we have as a team.
- The people – everyone at Bazaarvoice is incredibly helpful. I feel like I don’t have to deal with any unnecessary red-tape when talking to anyone and we all work together to get things done. It is awesome to work on projects and know that everyone else at Bazaarvoice has your back and will be there to support you.
- Our client list. It is awesome to work on so many well-known companies/brands. I bet everyone related to a BV employee gets annoyed when we start pointing saying “they’re a client… they’re a client… they’re a client…” but it’s just so much fun.
- Complete trust of the proven leadership at our company. Our solutions are a perfect match for today’s market.
- Everyone I work with is a top performer, without exception. Because of this, I am constantly challenged by my teammates and have had faster growth here than anywhere else.
- Bazaarvoice People – there’s nothing more inspiring than being surrounded by people who like to dream big, always present the energy and excitement on how to improve things, and make things happen.
- There’s a fantastic mix of autonomy and teamwork, which brings out the wacky individualism of everyone as well as the accountability of being part of a team.
- I would actually pay money to see my colleagues’ responses to this question – they’re that creative, energetic, and bullish on Bazaarvoice.
- The products – our products work and our customers love them. It’s exciting to be on the cutting edge of word of mouth marketing.
- Our customers – we are working with some of the largest companies in the world and it is exciting to know that we are impacting their business.
2008 is going to be an even more amazing year for Bazaarvoice and our clients. With 7 products in 20 languages, referenceable clients across the world, a clear business opportunity, and a winning team, the sky is the limit. If you are thinking about joining us, now is the time. Click here to see our job listings, and please – spread the word to your friends!
December 18th, 2007 by Brant Barton Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer
In this third installment of the Bazaarblog partner interview series, Matt Eichner, VP Marketing & Strategic Development at Endeca, shares his views on where the field of information access is heading, specifically within the e-commerce domain. Endeca and Bazaarvoice share many customers in common and have partnered to bring social navigation functionality to market through out-of-the-box integration, so we were eager to pick Matt's brain about what the future has in store for Endeca.
1. Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information. As a B2B company that provides access to information, what is Endeca’s mission?
Endeca’s mission is to inform – and influence – daily decision making. This manifests itself in many ways across many different industries. But the idea is that businesses are sitting on a wealth of information in a wide variety of formats that lives in different places. If you can give people the ability to better explore, analyze and understand this information in a way that helps them make better decisions, the aggregate positive economic value of all these better decisions is mind-boggling.
Take e-commerce as an example. A consumer shows up on your website looking for a great digital camera for her 65 year old mother – they are at some stage of the buying decision process. They aren’t just looking for a list of all the cameras you have. They want information about those options that will help them figure out which one is the perfect match. They may care about common things like brand, price or resolution, but they also may care about what features matter most to less tech savvy people like their mom. This info may come from product catalogs, buyers guides and customer reviews. The challenge is pulling it all together in a way that supports this unique buying decision…and making sure you do the same for all users: The amateur photographer…or the person looking for the best kids games for the Wii…or the shopper who literally has no idea what to get her 10 year old nephew for Christmas. Influencing a unique decision is worth 10’s or hundreds of dollars. Influencing all of the unique decisions is worth 10s or even hundreds of millions of dollars when you think about the aggregate volume of commerce traffic.
2. I associate Endeca with search and “Guided Navigation”, but “discovery” has become a popular term in our industry over the last year. Endeca released its Discovery Suite very recently, which includes a social navigation module. How do you differentiate “discovery” from “guided search and navigation”?
Search can be an effective tool for fact finding, if you know what you are looking for and how to ask for it. Want to know how much a Wii costs…and if they actually have any in stock? No problem, type “Wii” in the search box and voila. But search is a poor tool for discovery, where you may not know exactly what is available and can’t ask for it precisely. Stores like Walmart.com have millions of SKUs. How could anyone possibly know even a fraction of what might be available in a catalog that size? Shopping for your nephew and you want to know what are the hot toys this holiday season for 10 year old boys? How would you describe that question? Search isn’t going to help.
(more…)
December 5th, 2007 by Brant Barton Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer
eMarketer reported today that six in 10 surveyed US consumers share product advice with friends and family, a finding from Forrester Research's NACTAS Benchmark Study.
While the highly sought after "Influentials" segment garners much of the focus of word of mouth marketers, Forrester's findings provide ammunition for more broadly focused approaches to enabling and capturing word of mouth. Rather than thinking in campaign terms, brands should be seriously evaluating tools and technologies that can widely capture consumer opinions, enable deep analysis of what these opinions reveal about brand strengths and weaknesses, and facilitate the distribution of word of mouth to those who actively seek it, from the brand directly or from other sources.
Fortunately, marketing spending trends suggest that this is in fact happening. The eMarketer brief also states that spending on word of mouth marketing totaled $1 billion in 2006. Small by traditional marketing standards but quickly growing, with 2006 spending representing a 36% increase over 2005.
