Keeping their brand in mind is just one way our client B&Q has had success in social commerce. The company is the leading home improvement and garden center retailer in Europe, and the third largest in the world. In the webinar, co-hosted by Bazaarvoice and our partners at ATG, Joanna shared how the retailer is using social to build a community around do-it-yourself home improvement on their ecommerce site diy.com.

Bill Zujewski, VP of Product Marketing at ATG, explained the ways “how we buy” has changed. Social media and customer reviews have made it easier than ever for customers to find the information they need – opinions of friends, family, and other customers online. Couple those tools with increasingly ubiquitous internet (smart phones, netbooks, WiFi, 3G/4G) and always-on communication (texting, instant messaging, Facebook, Twitter), and customers today never have to shop alone, says Bill.

According to Joanna, 21% of home improvement products don’t get started due to lack of motivation or confidence. B&Q has the expertise to give people the confidence they need to get started, and their customer base is full of do-it-yourself-ers ranging from beginner to expert. Recognizing the selling potential in their employees’ and customers’ shared expertise, B&Q has used user-generated content (UGC) to gather these collective home improvement experiences into one expert resource at diy.com. Here’s how they did it, and what they’re doing next.

Start the dialogue. B&Q launched customer reviews, question and answer, and stories on their ecommerce site, and established an internal team to manage their UGC. The retailer uses post-purchase emails to solicit review content.

Open it up. Since launching UGC, B&Q created their Social Hub, which gathers all reviews, questions, answers and stories into one collaborative community. They also launched the Answerzone, a collection of all customer Q&A from product and category pages in a central, searchable site. Since launching Answerzone, answer rate has increased 40%, and 70% of customer questions now have answers. They’ve also launched a Twitter account to promote various deals and communicate with followers – over 1,300 customers are following the retailer already.

Capitalize on the conversation. In addition to increasing customer engagement with B&Q and solidifying the retailer as an expert in home improvement, UGC is driving real bottom-line results. B&Q has begun featuring reviews content and star ratings in display ads. They see ads with products rated four stars or higher converting three times higher than ads without reviews. Additionally, the company now uses compelling content from customer stories in their PR campaigns.

What’s next for B&Q? Joanna says the company plans to grow Social Hub, as well as expand into Facebook and YouTube, drawing from their current learnings with UGC – keep it simple, remember the customer, and never forget why you’re here.

This post is just a brief glance at what B&Q is doing with social commerce. For more from Joanna Robb at B&Q, Bill Zujewski at ATG, and our own CMO Sam Decker, you can download the full webinar for free here.

Download the free webinar: Social Commerce DIY: How B&Q uses customers to build their business.

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!

“Customers already share their experiences around the web, so sharing reviews, photos and videos on our site is a fantastic opportunity to build our own community,” said Steve Mills, Web Manager of Wiggle.co.uk. “We want this service to be integral to our site.”

Monthly promotional emails will encourage cycling enthusiasts to share their experiences of over 250,000 products available on the website. This month’s promotion is a competition offering reviewers the chance to win a Focus bike worth £750.

Read more about the launch in our press release.

This is the final post in our three-part blog series with Rebecca Lieb, Econsultancy’s Vice President of North America. Econsultancy, the UK’s leading source of insight on digital marketing and e-commerce, has been a partner and resource to Bazaarvoice in the UK for over two years and is now launching its US office in New York City. Here, Rebecca shares her thoughts on research and e-commerce trends. Read the first post on growing the new US office and the second post on monetizing Twitter and social media.

Q: What are some of the smartest retailers doing right now to stave off effects of the economy?

A: First and foremost, they're selling online. E-commerce is suffering as a channel along with the rest of the economy, but it's not suffering to the extent that offline retail is. They're getting smarter about search, both SEO and SEM, as well as vertical and local search, and many are having great success with online coupons, which have really taken off in tough times. They're also building social media components into their efforts, both on-site and off. We're talking customer reviews, of course, but also using tools like Twitter, blogs, photo-sharing and more to encourage users to do no small part of the online marketing lifting for them.

Q: What are some trends you’ve identified, specifically with regard to social commerce?  As customer reviews are now commonplace, what is Econsultancy’s view on the future of social commerce?

A: People are social by nature, and commerce is an everyday activity. Wikipedia defines social commerce as a type of e-commerce in which "active participation of customers and their personal relationships are at the forefront." This is nothing new — commerce and social interaction have commingled since the days of the agora. Recommendations, reviews, lists, and other forms of sharing and participating in shopping and commerce are utterly inherent to human nature. Online tools enable extending these very natural impulses and proclivities into the realm of e-commerce. People have always gone shopping, at least in part, to be social.

Q: We advocate embracing customer conversations on your site – to drive social interactions within the purchase path.  How else do you see brands engaging in social initiatives to drive measurable sales?

A: Twitter is the channel most in the news these days. Dell recently attributed over $3 million in sales — $3 million! — to Twitter-generated sales. Certainly tech companies have jumped on that bandwagon, but so have United Airlines, which is offering Twitter-only deals, and Starbucks, which is giving away gift cards in the channel.

I'm also seeing companies use Facebook to generate contests and user-generated content, not to mention bases of fans and loyal supporters. Certainly this drives sales and affinity at least indirectly.

PR is another important tool in social channels. Grasshopper recently sent 5,000 chocolate-covered grasshoppers to influential bloggers, generating mountains of social media coverage. Automotive companies are doing the same, offering loaner vehicles to influentials in exchange for coverage. These initiatives, when properly executed, can generate sales, if not at least consideration — and have the potential of going really viral.

Really, ways to increase sales in social channels are limited only by imagination and proper execution — neither of which is to be taken lightly. This stuff can be hard. But the rewards can make the effort worthwhile, as can the minimal impact on marketing budgets.

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!

This is the second post in our three-part blog series with Rebecca Lieb, Econsultancy’s Vice President of North America. Econsultancy, the UK’s leading source of insight on digital marketing and e-commerce, has been a partner and resource to Bazaarvoice in the UK for over two years and is now launching its US office in New York City. Here, Rebecca shares her thoughts on monetizing Twitter and social media. Read the first post on growing the new US office, and keep an eye out for the next post in this series.

Q: What has been the biggest surprise in covering digital marketing this year?

A: I don't know how surprising this is, but it's been very gratifying to see digital marketing more or less hold its own in a very difficult financial climate. Sure, we're no longer expecting those previously forecasted double-digit growth numbers for online advertising as we were last year. But it’s heartening to see web-based marketing to more or less maintain through these difficult economic times. Obviously, this is due to economies in the channel that just don't exist in traditional marketing media. But it's also due in no small part to the just-in-time rise of social media. More and more, marketers are relying on building their own communications channels, and encouraging users to do so as well, rather than buying ads and plunking them inside someone else's media. This flexibility and adaptability is what really makes interactive "interactive." So it's been surprising, as well as delightful, to see more, not less, innovation in troubled times.

Q: Econsultancy conducts plenty of research throughout the year.  What were some of the most unexpected results you discovered?

A: The extent of Twitter's exponential growth over the last few months has taken us by surprise. A recent report we published found that 49% of companies are now incorporating Twitter into their marketing efforts, up from a meager 3 percent at the start of 2008.

We've benefited ourselves from the Twitter explosion and now have 8,000-plus followers for our @econsultancy account. This sends us a very significant amount of traffic and enables us to communicate and engage with our community in an unprecedented way.

Twitter is a big reason why companies are waking up to the importance of social media. Our recently published Online Measurement and Strategy Report found 40 percent of companies are now measuring online reputation and social media metrics compared to only 21 percent a year ago.

Another pleasant surprise has been the big jump in companies that are effectively measuring return on investment from both paid search and search engine optimization.

The proportion of company respondents who say that they are tracking PPC ROI effectively has increased from 33 percent last year to 45 percent in 2009. For SEO, there has been an even bigger increase (in those tracking ROI effectively), from 20 percent to 35 percent.

The recession has obviously focused minds on measurement and optimization, but even so, this was a really big jump. But having said that, there are still far too few companies out there that are measuring and optimizing properly.

Q: Your founder & CEO, Ashley Friedlein, has recently mentioned that Twitter has become the fourth-largest referrer of traffic to the Econsultancy site.  How are you leveraging Twitter, and how would you recommend other brands make use of it?

A: Amazing, isn't it, that something as new as Twitter could have this much of an impact on site traffic so quickly? As publishers, we're naturally pushing our RSS feed headlines into Twitter, and everyone associated with the company tweets as well. We were also the first company I'm aware of — certainly weeks before Skittles' experiment — to feature a live, unfiltered Twitter feed on our homepage for all mentions of "Econsultancy." And to encourage tweets about our content, we've added a prominent "tweet this" chicklet on our content pages. It's much more visible than our other social media links for Digg, StumbleUpon or Delicious because Twitter simply confers that much more value.

While it's difficult to make a blanket recommendation as to how all businesses might leverage Twitter, because there is never a one-size-fits-all solution for all businesses and all business goals, it does make sense to consider how Twitter can help, and then work to leverage that benefit. In our case, as publishers, we're capitalizing on traffic. Other businesses have used Twitter to support customer service, e.g. @comcastcares, or sales. Check out @Zappos_Service for a good example of that latter category.

Q: I understand Econsultancy has recently opened a New York office to service e-commerce professionals in the United States.  Tell us more about your plans for the US market, and about any upcoming events or opportunities our readers should know about.

A: In the US, Econsultancy is oxymoronic: a 10 year-old start-up. In the UK, we're by far the leading source of information on digital marketing and e-commerce, but as a brand on this side of the pond, we're much less well-known. Nevertheless, without any effort, a significant and growing number of users and subscribers began coming to us from the US, logical, given our content is in English and our search rankings are good. The goal of having a US presence is to expand everything into North America: our publications, research, events, training and membership.

Already we've had strong success with expanding our coverage of the US market, content-wise. We've just run our first training course on social media, and we're planning some smaller, informal roundtable events in the coming week. In October, we're really ratcheting things up with our Peer Summit,  a larger and very networking-focused event in New York. I've been producing conferences for years and am personally very excited about the format of this event, which focuses much more on interaction and knowledge exchange, and much less on PowerPoint.

Q: Tell us about your recent rebranding, the success you’ve had with it, and some of the learning you’ve uncovered along the way.

A: The redesigned Econsultancy website soft-launched just as I joined the company early this year, so I wasn't part of the rather onerous 18 or so month slog toward its completion. Basically, a 10-year-old site couldn't keep up with our growth, or with the new products and services we offer — and plan to offer — our members. We needed new technological underpinnings, a better taxonomy, APIs and a whole host of functionalities that just weren't possible with the old site. So, as an exception to the rule, the cobbler's children actually got new shoes.

It was certainly a process, considering everything from URL structure to metadata and international functionality. Very fortunately, we have seen an increase in conversions. We don't just function as a publisher, of course, but also as an e-commerce play in terms of sales of memberships, conferences and training — all important metrics that we track. The most difficult part of the rebranding – at least, the one I experienced, was the precipitous, if temporary, drop in our search rankings once the new site went live. We expected that to happen, of course, but we didn't know how severely or for how long we'd be affected. Fortunately, after a month or so, we fully recovered. During that period, it was critical to get the 301 redirects right, not just to ensure users landed on the desired pages, but also to maintain the authority of our inbound links.

Q: What’s next for Econsultancy?

A: Why, we conquer America of course! At least our target slice of America, which are this country's interactive marketers and online retailers. Our short-term goal is to deliver both the quality and quantity of great content to our readers and members here as we do in the UK. But it's also to help build community and forums, both online and off, where people can share ideas and best practices that will help them to succeed with their businesses online.

We’re bringing the best in Social Commerce! From notable keynotes and client presentations, to real-world training and roundtable discussions, Bazaarvoice’s Social Commerce Summit London is the definitive event for driving social commerce strategy and ROI.

Our keynote speakers include:

• James Caan of BBC's Dragon's Den
• David Rowan – Editor of WIRED Magazine UK
• Ian Jindal – Editor-in-Chief of Internet Retailing Magazine
• Ze Frank – Designer, Speaker, and Popular Video Blogger
• Jonathon Brown – Director of Multi-Channel at B&Q

You’ll also experience engaging seminars on customer-centricity, measuring ROI, breathing “Customer Oxygen,” and the Bazaarvoice product roadmap. View the full agenda online.

The Bard once asked: “Can one desire too much of a good thing?” We hope not. With a day full of informative and entertaining keynotes, real-world training and sessions, and plenty of time to network with peers, this year’s Social Commerce Summit in London is sure to be a hit. Brush up on your Shakespeare, because the social commerce event of the year doth cometh in October!