As we celebrate this milestone, we are also close to celebrating our 5-year anniversary (Brant and I founded Bazaarvoice on May 2, 2005). With 80% of consumers now looking for customer reviews, it is hard to appreciate now just how few U.S. retailers offered customer reviews on their websites in May of 2005. Would you believe only four? Today we serve more than 50 of the top 100 U.S. retailers, more than 25 of the top 50 U.K. retailers, and similar numbers in Australia, France, and Germany. And we serve many clients outside of retail, from health care to manufacturing to financial services. We have rapidly grown into a company of 750 clients and 515 employees globally, operating across 25 international languages. I do not take our success for granted one bit and I'm very proud of and thankful for our partnerships with our clients. I'm also proud of the culture we have created here. We spend the majority of our waking time at work, and we strive to make that time as fun and meaningful as possible. Our passionate culture impacts the way we serve our clients and also give back to the community.

As I look back to my first Bazaarblog post, I think back to my analytical roots, spending seven years building Coremetrics, and reflect on how much we have achieved on the analytical front at Bazaarvoice. The "hidden" impact of 100 billion impressions is how we are writing the new marketing and merchandising textbook together with our clients. In a world of increasingly fragmented media, a dramatic shift to time spent in the online channel vs. other channels, and a rise in the prominence of the voice of the customer, the "hidden" impact is felt in how marketers and merchandisers adopt new practices based on user-generated content. And, to be totally frank, I underestimated the impact in how Bazaarvoice would change the world in this way. The Bazaarvoice School of C2C Marketing Seal to the left is from our first Social Commerce Summit in 2008, which quickly sold-out and was a magical event, full of clients speaking about writing the new textbook together (our fifth Summit is coming up in Austin April 19-21 and is almost sold-out already).

So this blog is dedicated to some of the most dramatic changes I have seen on the path to 100 billion. Here is a look back on just a few of them:

• Oriental Trading's CEO, Sam Taylor, leads a radical organizational change to reform merchandising based on user-generated content and wins the prestigious Gartner Group Customer Experience award (read the Bazaarblog post on the award, and another on specifics).
• The customer reviewer becomes the spotlight for campaigns (Free People example, and Urban Outfitters too). At that time, I believe this was an industry first. With 80% of reviews usually coming from the top 20% of your customers by lifetime value, this campaign technique will be adopted rapidly.
• Sephora uses in-store signs to get customers to read reviews via their mobile devices, and trains in-store associates to promote it. [Note: the sold-out Shop.org (NRF) and RAMA Retail Innovation & Marketing Conference in San Francisco this week will feature Julie Bornstein of Sephora - read her interview by NRF on the ROI of social media, a special Mobile Boot Camp, and me moderating a panel of rockstar venture capitalists.] Related to Sephora, Intuit's TurboTax did the same with their in-store displays, and made an impact at every Best Buy, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, and Walmart store in the U.S.
• The broad multichannel marketing implications of user-generated content, from print, to TV, to online. I'll never forget the first time this reviews were promoted on in-store receipts and by whom.
• The transformation of channel advertising with BrandVoice and BrandAnswers. With 80% of consumers searching for reviews, the implications for channel advertising are huge and user-generated content in the channel is quickly becoming a business imperative for a supplier. And it isn't just UGC. BrandAnswers and Ask & Answer now bring in supplier-generated content as well as retailer-generated content to answer user-generated content in the form of product pre-sell questions.
• TurboTax partners with us to launch the "Friendalyzer", where you can see TurboTax reviews written by your friends on social networks, including Facebook (which now has 400 million users). Seth Greenberg of Intuit will be presenting the great results on this live at our Social Commerce Summit this April 19-21 in Austin. The implication for technologies like Facebook Connect are profound for user-generated content at large and we are in Inning One for these innovations.

It has been an amazing 4 years, 10 months, and I want to take this opportunity to sincerely thank all of our clients, employees, partners, investors, and advisors. We promise not to take our success for granted, and we are ramping up R&D and Client Services like never before. This quarter alone, we are attempting to hire at least 80 people, but our very high bar makes this difficult indeed (we have 14 full-time recruiters working in our office at Bazaarvoice today and there is nothing more important for our culture than its foundation: our people). If you know of someone that may be interested in joining us, see the many jobs available here and note our referral incentives.

The next 100 billion impression milestone will no doubt be achieved much faster than the first, but I expect our impact to be no less profound than with the first (see our many case studies, webinars, or whitepapers for more). Thank you, thank you, and thank you again for your support. And stay tuned to this blog as we continue this exciting journey. As I said in my first-ever blog post on Feb. 3rd, 2006 (and remains just as true today):

Welcome to the age of customer empowerment in our hyper-connected global village! We look forward to being your tour guide in this wild, wild ride.

The theme of the Summit was “The New ROI: Return on Influentials”. Executives and managers from top retailers, manufacturers and financial companies came to the new AT&T Conference Center in Austin (on UT’s campus) for 3 days to learn how to build and show the impact of customer voice in their business. See the agenda here.

In the coming weeks we will blog cliff notes from the sessions. But you can also see the stream of Twitter notes here.

I didn’t hear everything (I was running around emceeing the event), but here are some of the biggest takeaways I had:

• Anyone can be an influencer. You can unearth them by facilitating their contribution and amplifying its impact.
• Measurement and marketing impact is easier than most think. Measure the impact of UGC on existing marketing campaigns (examples from Helzberg, Sephora, others)
• Getting C-level buy-in dramatically accelerates the evolution of transforming the business with the voice of customer (ex: Sam Taylor, CEO of Oriental Trading pulled together cross functional team to leverage reviews in supply chain and strategy)
• Brands realize that the voice of the customer is transformational, but are challenged to accelerate organizational change.
• We are all working on a comprehensive way to operationalize and measure all the impacts of social commerce initiatives.
• There’s a big opportunity in merging social content and data with email strategy. Bazaarvoice Social Alerts with JCWhitney had 100% open rate and 50% click through!
• We’re scratching the surface on the database marketing opportunities with influencers. Those who contribute can help identify others who contribute. Some thought leadership discussed with our partner, Merkle.

And we had fun too…

• We were in Austin…so we’ll start there!
• During the sessions, Sunni Brown drew graphic recordings on each session (will post soon).
• Tuesday night we took buses out to the Salt Lick Pavilion (best BBQ in TX, in my opinion) and hosted the Bazaarvoice Bull Ride contest again.
• Leslie from Williams Sonoma took the prize this year (Omare from Geico won last year).
• We had live music from Jeff Hughes and Chaparral
• We played Chicken Shit Bingo (sorry…that’s just what it’s called!)
• Attendees grabbed their beverage from the backs of Beer Donkeys!
• As an unorthodox way to evangelize our message to clients, last year we debuted the video “More than Words”. This year we created two videos, “The Influencer Abduction” and “Freedom! ’09 (Let Their Content Free!)”. Share them with colleagues that need to ‘get’ social commerce!

Abduction of Influencers

Click here to view the embedded video.

Freedom! '09 (Let Their Content Free!)

Click here to view the embedded video.

To give you a Bazaarvoice “inside perspective” on the event…

Last year’s event received a Net Promoter score of 9.3 out of 10. We were excited to get such positive feedback on our first event, but it also meant we had a high bar to jump over. We want to continually improve. We’re tallying the on-site surveys now, and we’ll be sending out an additional email survey, but just based on our experience and comments from clients, we were thrilled with the results. The majority of the event experience was based on the presentations and interaction between clients, as we learn from each other. One of my favorite quotes “the Summit is an amusement park of ideas.” And because so many clients came, our community management, support, implementation, and sales team members were able to put faces to voices. The entire Bazaarvoice team worked on making this successful. It takes a lot of work and requires juggling a lot of details. I want to give special thanks and recognition to the three folks on my team who were the producers of the event: Sarah Loyens, who quarterbacked the invitations and logistics to get folks there; Chris Wellington, our designer who took the event experience to the next level and tied it all together (including the Polaroids in the notebook!); and Amber Quist, who was the overall Producer of the event with RedVelvet Events. And of course, thank you to our partners who added to the content and made the event possible.

Stay tuned for cliffnotes of the content! For those who attended, stay tuned for presentations and conversations posted to the SCS Community.

p.s. If you're in Europe or the UK, register for our Social Commerce Summit London on September 22!

Last fall I bought an iPhone 3G and, despite a few Apple-esque quirks, it has exceeded my expectations, handily. Now I can rarely be separated from it. I’ve used its built-in GPS while traveling on business, streaming audio via Pandora to keep up on the news, and what impressed my wife (which in my case is the ultimate litmus test for technology) is that we were able to access shoppers’ ratings and reviews on products while we were standing in the aisles looking for gifts last Christmas. And I’m not alone. In October 2008, Apple announced they had sold 6.9M iPhones during the prior quarter, bringing the total to over 13M iPhones sold at that time. Those devices are in the hands of consumers, and they’re using it for research on products and services in real time. And those stats are just for the iPhone – nearly every phone sold now is a smart phone.

Since 2009 is undeniably the year of the mobile device, we are celebrating with our announcement of MobileVoice. Announced Monday in AdAge, MobileVoice is Bazaarvoice’s first mobile application that brings consumer word of mouth into stores to help customers make their purchase decisions. Simply put, when you’re standing in the store trying to decide which product to buy, MobileVoice is there to provide you user-generated ratings, reviews, and answers to your questions in real time.

If you’re a retailer, consider the power of giving shoppers in your stores access to product information, user reviews, and recommended accessories in the palm of their hands – on demand and tailored for their specific interest at the time. As a consumer, I can attest that it has helped me in several ways:

• First, and most obviously, having word of mouth in the palm of my hand provides the much-needed perspective of people who have purchased the product, helping me to make a decision.
• Secondly, it displays more manufacturer and retailer information products that what can possibly be displayed on a shelf or on the packaging. Access to specifications, warranties, features, and so on help me to make a more informed decision on the product.
• Lastly, MobileVoice and mobile applications at large are beginning to solve the issue of in-store discovery. Who among us has not asked a Home Depot employee “do you know were _____ is?” It’s a common refrain in any store, anywhere. As for my holiday shopping, I needed to find a Dora The Explorer toy for my niece but I did not like any of the Dora toys I saw on the shelves in front of me. Using the integrated search capablity within MobileVoice, I was able to locate a Dora chair on the other side of the store with just one keyword. Luckily for that retailer, I bought that chair instead of going to another toy store.

MobileVoice is already being used by prominent retailers and suppliers nationwide. Sephora’s clientle can get access to nearly 100,000 reviews on cosmetic and beauty products while standing in the store. And taxpayers headed into Office Depot, Office Max, Wal-Mart, and Staples stores around the country access Intuit’s reviews to see what version of TurboTax and other software packages is right for them. Read the full MobileVoice press release for more details.

As a consumer I hope you enjoy getting ratings, reviews, answers and in-store discovery in the palm of your hands. This is just the beginning of the mobile commerce revolution.