Buying a Kindle DX ten months ago and now an iPad (delivered in the first batch on April 3rd), it really struck me recently how messy (or exciting!) everything is getting.  Mash-ups of business models are happening everywhere, and at an accelerating pace.  Here are a dozen big trends that I'm watching for this year, some relevant to Bazaarvoice and others not so much:

1. After Amazon.com launched the Kindle, it quickly became their number-one seller.  The free wifi to download a book from anywhere was just too compelling to pass up, along with the very easy to read screen.  Amazon projected that it would increase compulsive buying of books to the point where the wifi was subsidized by Amazon.com.  And it is working (for now).
2. And while we're talking about compulsive buying, consider Amazon.com Prime for "consolidated" buying vs. other retailers.  Other retailers have tried to emulate Prime and failed to do so.  It is difficult to do – you have to be very quick to ship (i.e., many distribution centers), with the availability (i.e., tons of inventory), to really trigger the compulsive buying effect.  There are profound implications on the long-tail as Amazon.com expands.  And, in their most recent quarterly report, Amazon's same-store U.S. sales were up a staggering 75%.  It seems that both the Kindle and Prime are triggering the compulsive buying effect, coupled with Amazon's long-tail inventory.  Many retailers same-store sales are flat to down as we come out of the Great Recession, and Amazon.com's stellar performance has to be noticed by them.  Our Chief Marketing Officer, Sam, blogged about this in November of 2008 and it is even more true today.
3. Enter the iPad.  The week Apple launched the iPad it sold 450,000 units with 600,000 books (via iBooks) shortly after.  Now that I have had the iPad for awhile, I don't just think of it as competitive with the Kindle or other eReaders or "tablets" – it is also competitive with netbooks (another mash-up), as Steve Jobs eagerly stressed.  Just project out a few years when the iPad has 256gb capacity, instead of the 64gb my model has today, combined with the new iPhone 4.0 OS (coming out at the end of this year) that enables multitasking, a micro-USB port or two, and wireless streaming everywhere allowing for seamless connectivity no matter where you are.  The iPad already has a keyboard docking station, which I also bought, and, of course, bluetooth for connecting to wireless keyboards.  And new TVs and DVDs are coming out with built-in home network and wireless capabilities, allowing you to stream TV to laptops, netbooks, desktops, iPads, iPhones, or whatever you choose to use around the house (or while you are on the road if you have a Slingbox or something similar).  The bottom line is that the genius author, Kevin Kelly, got it right in this Wired magazine article (comparing tablets to a portable window into the world).
4. Will the iPad hurt Kindle sales?  Many Wall Street analysts and journalists think so.  My personal take?  Well, I was skeptical about whether or not I would enjoy reading books on it as much as I do the Kindle.  Initially we were just buying the iPad as a family device for watching movies, playing games, and keeping up with blogs, Facebook, and Twitter.  But now with the Kindle app loaded on my iPad, adjusted to a sepia "paper" color and 60% brightness, I can read for hours just fine.  But to really see how the iPad transforms books, just check out the book it comes pre-loaded with (a Winnie the Pooh children's book, which is, of course, in beautiful color).  No color on the Kindle.  Every try to read a no-color book to a child?  And then check out the app, The Elements, which has gorgeous color, 3D illustrations, and full-on video.  Or look at what Wired magazine may be planning to do with tablets.  I was watching Alice in Wonderland with our daughter recently, and Alice said (shortly before falling down the rabbit hole), "What is the use of a book, without pictures or conversations?".  Just look back in history at the adoption rates once color television came out vs. black-and-white television.  It is just a matter of time before our children are carrying interactive tablets in their backpacks instead of heavy textbooks.  Yes, I think it is going to impact Kindle sales.
5. Ok, let's talk about mobile.  Google's Android (open platform) continues to gain traction vs. Apple's iPhone OS (closed platform).  It wasn't surprising to me when Eric Schmidt resigned from Apple's Board of Directors.  I moderated a panel of amazing venture capitalists at NRF and Shop.org's Innovate conference back in March, where my good friend Peter Fenton of Benchmark Capital predicted that Android would overtake the iPhone OS over time.  Of course, Android will power tablets too.  We've seen this movie before as Apple stayed closed vs. the PC world being open.  Will the movie be the same this time?
6. Mobile is now at a tipping point, with GPS built in, good camera phones, and great web browsers (e.g., Safari and Chrome).  We'll see a lot of mash-ups in this area as mobile is increasingly used by consumers while in stores, which will one-up the mobile use we've seen in social commerce so far.  Interestingly, the VCs on my NRF and Shop.org panel in March thought it would take several years, so our prediction about "the year of mobile" in 2009 may have been a bit early, although I would argue that the iPhone's rapid adoption that year did change the game.  And it certainly hasn't slowed down Mary Meeker at Morgan Stanley to produce the most comprehensive report (at 424 pages) I've ever seen on the state of the mobile industry, nor did it prevent NRF and Shop.org from having a Mobile Boot Camp at the March conference.
7. How about blogging?  My guess is that blog-post length has decreased (this post aside!) as Facebook has increased to a longer status format and people have become more and more used to Twitter's 140-character length updates.  Perhaps blog views have also decreased.  This leads to more "lightweight", or surface-level, conversations than the deeper-thinking conversations on blogs.  But we'll survive just fine.  I simply don't buy Nick Carr's arguments but I'll debate that later if you wish.
8. Although this would be the obvious place to discuss this trend, I'll purposely stay away from Facebook Like vs. Google Buzz vs. Google AdSense as my co-founder and our Chief Innovation Officer, Brant, is addressing that in a future post.  But needless to say, social is permeating the Web and that trend is accelerating, so we will continue to innovate quickly in this area.
9. Let's talk about transparency.  At the Liberty Interactive NetLeaders Forum in 2008, I remember Rich Barton, founder of Expedia and Zillow, presenting, "everything that can be reviewed will be reviewed [on the Web]".  He showed us examples of CEOs being reviewed on Glassdoor.com.  My opinion?  This will lead to a company culture revolution, which is part of the reason I feel so compelled to write my forthcoming book, How to Make Your Company Suck Less.  And Chris Fralic of First Round Capital as well as Kamal Kirpalani of Bazaarvoice recently asked me to review them on Unvarnished.  I wrote about transparency awhile back, based on a leadership talk I gave at The Wharton School.  In short, I think this is a very profound trend that will not only cause a renaissance in commerce but also in politics, government, and all types of human activities and relationships.
10. At Bazaarvoice, we're leading a revolution of marketing and merchandising with social commerce and user-generated content – or (my preference) digital word of mouth.  Digital word of mouth is quickly becoming the central point of insight for marketers and merchants.  We are writing the marketing and merchandising textbook of the future in our work with our clients (read my previous thoughts on this, from when we reached out 100-billion-impression milestone in February).  Digital word of mouth is getting mashed-up versus the aging focus group, NetPromoter, customer survey, and other methods that get "close" but aren't nearly as pure as how customers speak to each other with no bias vs. how they communicate while in the context of talking to the company.  Things for you to consider here: a) the market has always been based on conversations (read this chapter that was the namesake of our company), b) reviews are the new advertising as we are already beginning to commonly see, c) consumers write reviews to help each other (i.e., altruism, or with no bias), and d) this trend is why Google and Nielsen partnered with us.
11. Channel marketing is becoming more wired.  We see a major trend in this area with the adoption of our BrandVoice and BrandAnswers solutions.  We are at the beginning of this shift, and it is logical to think that, just as offline to advertising shift has fueled online advertising, we will see a similar accelerating trend as suppliers of retailers become more savvy at online channel marketing in a world where 80% of consumers read reviews while they are shopping (Nielsen's most recent stat).  And, of course, mobile is a major accelerant of this trend.
12. Finally, the digital executive will continue to rise in prominence as companies work hard to make sense of the rapid shift to a more digital, hyper-connected world.  For some early indicators of this, look at Raul Vazquez's promotion from CEO of Walmart.com to EVP and President of Walmart West.  Or Toby Lenk's, the founder of the original eToys, rise to President of Direct at Gap.  (I should mention that both are among the best speakers we have ever had at Shop.org events, where I proudly serve on the Board of Directors.)  These are very exciting times for those who really "get it" in digital.

For the long-term potential of the Web, I recommend you check out Kevin Kelly's speech at TED in Dec 2007 or his similarly brilliant article in Wired magazine.  And if you have time to get really far out in thinking about technology's impact on the world, just read chapter 1 (trust me, it's enough) of Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (thanks to my good friend, Ethan Holland at American Eagle, for suggesting it to me).

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.

U2 is a great band, but far too many ecommerce experiences make me recall their 1987 chart-topper, "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For." Even at leading online retailers, it’s often way too hard for me to find the information I need to move from browsing to buying.

At Bazaarvoice, we’re doing our best to change that by integrating the voice of the customer throughout the shopping experience, including how shoppers search, navigate, and discover the products that best match their needs. Listed below are 5 unique examples of how we’re helping shoppers worldwide find what they’re looking for:

1. Top Rated Product categories: Merchandising categories that highlight the highest-rated items drive increased conversion, higher average order values, and greater sales per visitor.

2. Sort By Customer Ratings: Shoppers that sort product search results by customer rating bought 34% more than other searchers at Golfsmith.

3. Multi-focal Navigation: Enabling your shoppers to use customer ratings and reviews data along with other criteria to sort through hundreds of products makes online shopping more like reality: you wouldn’t walk into a Wal-Mart and just sort through everything by price alone!

4. Review-Enabled Landing Pages For Brands: This is new, but early results look promising. Also enticing is the possibility of retailers offering a unique branding opportunity to their top suppliers, perhaps for a fee!

5. Smarter Recommendations: Featuring customer ratings data in product recommendation windows helps recommendation engines deliver more relevant recommendations.

We’re excited about what we’ve accomplished with our customers and partners so far, but we’re even more excited about what they will do next. Have an idea for leveraging social commerce data to enhance the shopping experience? Please take a minute to include it in the comments below. Any day a customer brings us an idea for a new integration is indeed a beautiful day.

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:

1. Store merchandise receipts: encouraging customers to write reviews and visit Walmart.com to shop by reviews.
2. Store shelf fact tag: encouraging customers to research reviews prior to their purchase.
3. 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.

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. 

Endeca can help with the fact finding questions – its search filter certainly includes the full set of popular search features – but what Endeca is really designed to do is support investigations…to guide people through the process of discovery.  Guided Navigation is a part of that.  Think about a hotel concierge.  You tell them you are looking for a good place to eat – the equivalent of typing “restaurant” in a search box.  Rather than just listing out every possible restaurant in town, they might ask whether it’s a special occasion, if you prefer certain types of cuisine, how much you want to spend – next step questions that are the equivalent of Guided Navigation. But more than just ask these questions, the concierge would suggest ideas, and expose tradeoffs.  Want that French restaurant?  The price just went up to between $30 to $80 a plate, unless you mean French Fries.  The concierge might also ask whether you want something close by or perhaps in a certain area of town, the equivalent of visualizing results on a map rather than in a list.

The Endeca Discovery Suite, taking the analogy a step further, is like arming the concierge with even more tools, like a Zagat Guide, so now, they can tell you things like these restaurants are really popular with couples, or the restaurants that had great food but where service was suspect.  The idea is simply that we want to give regular people more and more ways to express what’s most relevant without putting the onus on the person to ask the perfect question… or “the concierge” to be a mind reader.

3.  Many of our shared retail customers now offer the ability to filter or sort search results by customer rating and have seen significant conversion improvements as a result. Why do you think user-generated content is such a valuable attribute in search and navigation?

User reviews have long been a consumer favorite.  What better evidence is there of how something will work than someone else who is just like you enjoying that product (or not!)?.  The meteoric rise of companies like Bazaarvoice has really changed the game here – our ability to work with this type of information has quickly gone from nice to have to must have.

Information access techniques like Guided Navigation really unlocked a new way of looking at reviews; not by individual products but by collections of products; building community and driving business results by letting users advise each other through media like reviews.  Even more important, they open the possibility of new types of cross-product navigation, integrated with the other criteria buyers care about.  Interested in a gift for that young nephew?  Well, how about, “what are the favorite products in the $30 – $50 range among 15 year olds?”.  This takes the review content into a new context, combining it with product attributes to open up the kinds of advice that used to be only available when talking to a store’s best sales reps.  Best part – no need to hustle for their attention during the busy holiday buying season.

And the early success stories – the early techniques used to combine these features – are just the tip of the iceberg.  Over the next 12 months we’re going to see marquee sites introducing information access capabilities that will forever change the way reviews are used in online retail.

4.  What makes user-generated content such an interesting search/navigation challenge for Endeca to focus on?

Our ability to integrate and expose this type of information is critical to our success and that of our retail clients. Making that happen introduces some rather interesting user experience and technology challenges, and opens the door to many new ways to be creative in site design.

First, you have the problem of introducing new attributes into the environment.  As far as the user experience is concerned, we have to expose this combined information in a way that facilitates discovery, gives shoppers a myriad of ways to explore desirable products by characteristics most relevant to them.  And it needs to be intuitive. People need to be able to take advantage of this info using familiar techniques – you don’t have time to train your shoppers. It has to be done in a way than any shopper can take advantage of right out of the gate.  And, it can’t introduce any fragility into the systems IT need to maintain.  It needs to scale, and also embrace new scope as new elements of reviews get added over time.  For instance, we see sites expanding demographic information on reviewers to include other elements like clickstream analysis.

But including user reviews data goes beyond attribute navigation.  One key to making this information useful is taking advantage of information about the users reviewing the products in addition to the products themselves.  There is a subtle user experience issue here with dramatic technology implications.  Navigating by the characteristics of the review – age, gender, etc. – is not enough, alone.  It is important also to see the products these reviewers assessed, and also within that subset navigate by the characteristics of those products.  In this fashion, a user can ask those useful questions like “I’d like to understand the best inexpensive stroller options that were preferred by mothers like me.”

Yet another challenge is around data irregularity.  Product catalogs are very structured, organized in a more classic table format — a product has associated attributes like price, brand, size, color etc.  Reviews take many forms from numeric ratings to free form text to user-generated tags.  Unlike a product catalog, this kind of irregularity makes it virtually impossible to shove all of this info into a relational database.  You need to create a very flexible data model to bring these worlds together while retaining the context between related information.

5.  Several Internet search engines are integrating user feedback tools into results pages to ultimately make those results more relevant for the community as a whole.  Can you share any insight into Endeca’s roadmap in this area?

It’s an interesting concept and something we’ve watched for a while.  The challenge is two people who enter the same exact query may be looking for completely different things.  Likewise, a result that is perfect for one person may not be as relevant for someone else.  For instance, two people looking for digital cameras.  One may prefer portability for fun shots, another may be shopping for the ideal camera to capture some nature shots for an art class.  Or, imagine how even a single person may alternate between shopping for themselves and gifts for others.

A different community approach, and one that you’ll see in the not-too-distant future is something more similar to the tag-based approach popularized by sites like Flickr.  In this approach, the user will have an ability to add descriptive tags to either individual results or even aggregate lists of results.  These tags will instantly be added to the user experience and can then be used exclusively as personal tags for later access or can be shared with all users as another descriptor of that information. 

6.  You work closely with Endeca retail customers every day.  What are the biggest search/navigation problems these companies are trying to solve, now that solutions like Endeca’s are fairly ubiquitous?

This really is a fun market to be a part of right now.  Retailers have always been on the cutting edge of leveraging innovative technology to provide a competitive advantage.  There are quite a few advanced capabilities that retailers are looking at incorporating in to their site right now.  The challenge, and what is going to separate the leaders from the followers, is their ability to integrate these different capabilities into a cohesive and compelling user experience.

Beyond the social media challenges we’ve covered, other areas of interest and investment include multi-channel commerce, bringing in-store inventory and localized pricing into the online shopping experience.  The Home Depot recently took this challenge head-on and you can now use Endeca to browse both online and in-store inventory, unique to which ever store you select, side by side.  We expect to see a lot of retailers heading in this direction.

Another key area is mobile commerce, where there are unique challenges in replicating an experienced optimized for a full-sized computer screen into a handheld device.  Innovation like that seen in the iPhone will change the game forever, and we’re already working with companies to take advantage of this new class of interaction and user experience.  We’ve even gone as far as to incorporate the local, in-store inventory and social navigation – bringing user reviews into the Endeca experience – into our first prototypes.   

As stated in Wal-Mart's press release: 

"It is the No. 1 customer-requested feature," said Cathy Halligan, Chief Marketing Officer. She went on to say "We will use those customer reviews and ratings to be able to provide more direct information about how our customers feel and make decisions on a case-by-case basis."

To read the full article, click here – http://news.com.com/Walmart.com+to+let+customers+review+
merchandise/2100-1038_3-6197478.html?tag=nefd.top

The Bazaarvoice Team is extremely proud to have helped make this happen and to serve Wal-Mart as a client.

Here is some other coverage of the news on Blogs:

Andy Sernovitz remarked that the Wal-Mart launch “is going to fundamentally change the marketing environment. More important, it is going to give consumers extraordinary power to fight back against businesses that don't deliver on their promises.”

http://www.damniwish.com/2007/07/a-landmark-mome.html

The GrokDotCom described the launch “a giant leap for corporate transparency and the growing popularity of word-of-mouth marketing."

http://www.grokdotcom.com/2007/07/19/say-what-you-will-about-
walmartcom-seriously/

Here is some of the press coverage of this launch: