Ask Good Questions. Social media is not about just listening, it’s about interacting – starting conversations as well as listening to them. Asking questions invites your customers to be creative. Remember that your customers are their own brands now, Dmitri says, with multimedia channels they need to fill as well. Help them produce content they can share on their networks.

For example, last year Urban Outfitters did a “lo-fi, high style” sweepstakes/contest, where customers shared the cool things they had created on a small budget – not just outfits, but furniture and art pieces as well. As photos from customers started rolling in, the UO team found that their customer base is as beautiful and creative as the brand’s professionally done photo shoots. Today, when Urban Outfitters mashes up their own professional photos with those submitted by customers, even the marketing team can’t tell the difference – which is exactly as it should be. Their customers’ creativity inspires Dmitri and the design team.

Make some introductions. The key role of a brand in social media is to be a good host, introducing people with shared interests and giving them a place to connect. Brands can do this by hosting customer Q&A forums to facilitate conversations between customers and designers, vendors, the brand team, and each other. Create authentic interactions between real people around your products, brand, and associations.

Customers recommend apparel and accessories to form complete outifts.

Urban Outfitters added community Q&A to their site, which created a good format for introducing customers to one another. They now get close to 300 questions each week, anything from “Should I get this a size up?” to “What shoes should I pair with this top?” Responses come from other customers and UO designers.

It’s less about numbers, and more about one-to-one connections. Social media can’t be measured solely by impressions – the number of people who potentially see the information – like traditional advertising. The deep connections with individuals that make social media so valuable build over time, and with an effective nurturing plan can create an annuity that continues to grow.

On social marketing ROI, Dmitri recommends brands first focus on getting the “I” (investment) right – investing in personal relationships between people in the company and people they want to stay in touch with. Social media is not about technology, Dmitri says. It’s about people and making real connections with people they want to be friends with.

Social Commerce Trends Report

Dmitri Siegel’s 12 rules to social marketing are pulled from his presentation at the 2010 Social Commerce Summit. All 12 are available in the Social Commerce Trends report.

Download the free report here.

Octopus steals video camera

Click here to view the embedded video.

This video shows an octopus snatching an underwater video camera from its owner, and the subsequent chase to recover it. Intrigued by the stunning picture quality, one viewer on YouTube asked what type of camera was used. The conversation quickly turned to underwater video gear, with camera enthusiasts discussing the various pros and cons of different equipment.

Social media connects people to others who share their passions, sparking organic conversations around products and brands that outweigh traditional advertising. People trust people like them, and a recommendation from another consumer online is one of the most trusted forms of advertising. Finding ways to encourage these types of conversations is the foundation of social commerce.

Free hugs

Click here to view the embedded video.

The man in the video is ignored at first, as people pass him on the street without even a glance. But once one woman engages and gives him a hug, others begin to take notice. Soon there is a flood of hugs, and others begin to take the sign and spread his message themselves.

Traditional media – brands touting their own messages – is increasingly ignored by consumers. It takes engagement to make a message spread. Your marketing can’t be a megaphone anymore; without dialog with your customers, your message will be lost. Encourage conversations with your customers wherever possible by giving them a voice and spreading their words: on your brand site, in your stores, and across social media. Take this a step further by encouraging them to spread your message themselves, by pushing their UGC to where it’s most relevant – their own social networks.

Don’t stop believin’

Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’ is something of a theme song here at Bazaarvoice, so this last video has a special place in our hearts.

Click here to view the embedded video.

When searches for a new lead vocalist were unsuccessful, Neal Schon, lead guitarist of Journey, turned to social media. Schon scoured the band’s MySpace page, until he landed on a video of Arnel Pineda, then lead singer for a band that frequently covered Journey songs. In a matter of weeks, Pineda was on his way to the US to audition for (and eventually land the gig of) the band’s new front man.

Social media has leveled the playing field, giving both brands and consumers a direct line to communicate – “six pixels of separation” as Mitch Joel calls it. Social media enables your customers to become your influencers, and enables your brand to find those influencers and connect with them, just as Journey found Pineda.

So what do all of these videos have to do with your business? Everything. If you’re not thinking now about how user-generated content plays into your company, now is the time. Consumers increasingly to the web – and to one another – in ways we can’t yet imagine.

These videos were all featured in presentations from keynote speakers at the 2010 Social Commerce Summit. If you’re interested in more key takeaways from this year’s Summit, we’ve summarized our learnings in our new Social Commerce Trends Report, available for download below.

Social Commerce Trends Report

Key takeaways from this year’s Social Commerce Summit – from speakers Mitch Joel, Douglas Rushkoff, Sameer Samat of Google, Manish Mehta of Dell, and more – are available in our new research paper.

Alex Gruzen, Stuart Wallock, Manish Mehta from Dell, with Sam Decker

Customer Oxygen Award: Dell. I continue to be inspired by how Dell uses customer-generated content to transform their products and marketing. The product development and marketing teams use reviews – both positive and negative – to continually improve the overall customer experience with every product. The customer experience team at Dell uses UGC to transform the way the company does business, putting feedback generated by real customers at the center of many product and merchandising decisions.

Social Commerce Play of the Year: Samsung. Samsung implemented BrandAnswers to answer shopper questions across our network of retailers, and they took it a step further by creating online personalities to provide expert answers online: Mr. and Mrs. Samsung. The move has since become a best practice in the industry, and when Mr. or Mrs. Samsung answers a question, people ask twice as many questions,  suggesting that as a brand engages with its community, the community becomes more engaged as a result.

Tanja Zelko and James Connellfrom Roots accepting their award.

Rookie of the Year (Retail): Roots Canada. Roots hit the ground running with social commerce, launching Ratings & Reviews, Ask & Answer, Stories and MobileVoice in their first year as a client. They also churned out several innovative contests to gather content – then spread this content across every channel, featuring reviews on site, via mobile, in print, and in stores.

BSCA's Jason Wang accepts the award.

Rookie of the Year (New Verticals): Blue Shield of California.

I’m especially impressed by BSCA, a first mover in the health care industry to empower the voice of the customer. Brands in highly-regulated industries can be hesitant to adopt user-generated content, but BSCA has embraced transparency, enabling their members to share their feedback and help others like them buy. The company has created a conversation spot for members as well, where they can ask and answer each others’ questions regarding allergies, diet/food/nutrition, women’s health, first aid, and more.

Social Commerce MVP: Best Buy. Always one of our most innovative clients, Best Buy has formed a comprehensive social strategy for their social commerce goals that spans beyond our platform and into all of their social media efforts. One interesting innovation is their Fact Tags on TVs, which display average weekly star rating and number of reviews. These tags prompt visitors to text for more information, from which they can visit Best Buy’s mobile site where they can view reviews. Led by Senior BestBuy.com Capability Manager Dan Halsey, they have also implemented reviews at the store level, from which managers can act to improve the customer experience at their specific location. Across Facebook, forums, Twitter, the mobile site, the ecommerce site, in print ads, and even in stores, Best Buy has integrated social in ways that drive real business results for the brand – the definition of social commerce.

We’re so proud to partner with these pioneering brands in this transformational time in our industry. Social is truly revolutionizing commerce, and brands like these and many more of our clients are creating this change.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The overwhelming theme at this year's Summit? Marketing and advertising have changed forever in today's social landscape. These fun messages just remind us of this.

You’ll hear from social commerce experts, authors, and global brands that are getting it right. Check out the full agenda on the Social Commerce Summit site. We’ll be coming to you live from the Executive Education & Conference Center in Austin.

Check it out live, starting at 8:30 a.m. CST on Tuesday, April 20. Bookmark this link now so you don’t miss any of the action, and add it to your Outlook calendar here.

And follow the event on Twitter at #SCS10.

Red Velvet Events is helping us out again this year with the 2010 Social Commerce Summit. Kicking off April 19, this year’s Summit is our biggest and most informative yet. We’ll be tweeting, blogging, and posting video during the event, and we’ll have tons of content to share once the conference is over. Check back to Bazaarblog after the event for recaps and key takeaways.

Joining us at the Summit? Which speakers are you most looking forward to?

Connect at the 2010 Social Commerce Summit.

Coming to the Summit? Start networking! Check out our Twitter list of SCS '10 attendees to see who's coming and start connecting.

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.

While the experts argue over the math, I think that UK (and US) advertisers and consumers should celebrate this milestone. While the US Internet-TV ad spending gap is still sizable, the steady migration of dollars over the coming years will drive Internet industry growth and evolution, yes, but also a more customer-centric experience for consumers faced with hard decisions in an increasingly complex economic and marketing environment. Advertiser spending on social marketing/commerce applications is still significantly smaller than the leading categories of Internet ad spending mentioned above. However, as we have witnessed firsthand over the last 4+ years of building Bazaarvoice (and shared on many occasions on Bazaarblog), the social category offers perhaps the greatest opportunity for advertisers to think bigger than clickthroughs and conversion rates and instead focus on wholesale cultural and operational transformation of their businesses using the voice of the customer as a muse.

This news from the UK is timely, as we just wrapped up our second annual Social Commerce Summit in London, the European complement to our US Social Commerce Summit held in Austin every year. We now serve over 120+ customers across Europe, and the London Summit was a sold out event. In the coming days, we will share highlights from the Summit here on Bazaarblog!