Mike Maples, Jr. is the managing partner of Maples Investments, and was recently named as one of "8 Rising VC Stars" by Fortune Magazine for his investments in business and consumer technology companies. His background spans a variety of markets including consumer technology, small business, and the enterprise, and he has led various functions in product development, marketing, business development, and corporate strategy. Mike co-founded Motive and was responsible for worldwide product marketing at Tivoli. Now as an investor, he is behind investments such as Twitter, Digg, Spiceworks, Chegg, IMVU, and Aggregate Knowledge. See his investments here.

Mike shared some of his thoughts on joining Bazaarvoice as an investor and advisor, as well as his investment strategy and perspectives on the market:

Why did you invest in us when some investors are cautious of the “Web 2.0” space?  TechCrunch recently said that Web 2.0 is a bankrupt term.

I suppose it's more accurate to consider the question in reverse.  I've been looking for the opportunity to invest in Bazaarvoice for quite some time and I am thrilled to be *permitted* to invest. I guess persistence does pay off sometimes!

In terms of the market space, and all of the talk of web 2.0, in my view the company's success speaks for itself.  It's customers read like a who's-who of online commerce providers and the company has dared to be new and different in an environment characterized by a lot of me-too companies.  It has also discovered a very efficient business model that can reach scale without raising a lot of money.

What trends do you see in the marketplace that support the growth for our type of service?

The first generation of companies in the social web understood that user-generated content would be important for value creation and many of the companies I invested in earlier were the first to jump on this.  In my opinion, Bazaarvoice is the first company to marry user-generated content with user-generated *commerce*. Combining these two is very powerful because you have the architecture of participation characterized by communities, combined with a very straightforward and efficient way to monetize.

I believe that there will be several very interesting user-generated commerce plays (especially since eBay hasn't moved quickly enough in recent years) and I think Bazaarvoice is the first in this new wave just as companies like Facebook, digg, and Twitter were pioneers of the user-generated content trend.

The other trend that is powerful is the shift from traditional "old media" style mass-marketing to peer-to-peer marketing enabled by relationships on the Internet.  Bazaarvoice is a leader in leveraging this and I am also working with 750 Industries, who plays firmly into this trend as well.

How does this investment align with your priorities and what you want to invest in?

At a high level, I believe that about 15 startups per year will set themselves apart in a fundamental way from the over 8,000 that will be funded.  If I had to reduce my strategy to one sentence, it would be "Find as many of the 15 as you can every year."

Finding the 15 out of the 8,000 is a lot easier said than done!  My approach is to invest in companies that have a visionary founding team, a huge potential market, a fundamental advantage backed up with a network effect, modest capital requirements, and a unique value proposition for customers. I believe that Bazaarvoice has been a superperformer in these areas for some time.

As an investor in Digg, Twitter, and now Bazaarvoice, where do you see the “social space” going in the next five years?

The trends in technology innovation have switched from enterprise trickling down to consumer innovations scaling up.  The bellweather companies are now companies like LinkedIn, digg, Bazaarvoice, Twitter, and Facebook and they are the companies to watch to get a feel for what will happen with business solutions in the future.  There will be new types of companies in the business software and services arena that apply IT consumerization to solve problems that have in the past been solved by expensive and hard-to-use enterprise software.  Some of the companies I work with are already demonstrating this, such as Solarwinds, Spiceworks, Demandforce, Egnyte, and Hyper9.   Each of these firms leverage network effects, highly appealing user experiences, communities, and consumer internet sales and marketing methods to build their products and their businesses with great efficiency.

Five years from now the trend toward IT consumerization will be very pervasive and will impact small businesses and enterprises in a very fundmental way.  Traditional enterprise software companies will feel that this is very disruptive but the users of technology will be the big winners.

First, think about how any social technology will impact the prospect or customer’s “purchase momentum.” There are social technologies that create connections and communities, but the ultimate goal is driving purchases. Evaluate how salient any type of UGC or social participation is for researching, shopping, narrowing, comparing, and building confidence for prospects to buy. The closer the interaction is to a prospect’s “task,” the closer it is to helping people make their purchase decisions.

The importance of the second factor (X axis, below) is something I’ve come to realize after years of change leadership at startups, at Dell, and during the last two years seeing how the right investments in customer dialogue accelerates our clients’ social strategies. This is the depth and speed of acceptance of the proposed social initiative. I call this factor the “cultural momentum” of your initiative, and it relates to how quickly you can build excitement internally, bringing “customer oxygen” into your corporate culture! Let me explain…

Social commerce and user-generated content initiatives are new, unproven, and scary for most companies. However, I’ve seen our clients go from anxiety level “9” to hundreds of employees embracing UGC alerts, review, question, and answer reports, and actively engaging with our community managers every week. The right social initiative can create a halo effect around the whole idea of “social” for your company. If you choose the wrong initiative, though, the “social” activity becomes a fringe activity, destined to be cut.

Executives who start with ratings reviews usually start with high anxiety level, but, when they see that  85% reviews are positive, interest peaks. They start looking at the data and content. They see for the first time — perhaps because it’s now right there on their site — how customers talk about their products. It’s enlightening and relevant because it’s about the products they sell (their day-to-day jobs). The voice of the customer spreads throughout the organization and changes business decisions. It just takes one brand, category, or product manager to share a success story of how UGC changed his strategy, buying, negotiation, or merchandising. That story spreads throughout the organization, senior management applauds, and everyone jumps on board.

To evolve, you have to have this kind of momentum to get buy-in for future social initiatives and experiments. Other people in the company have to get excited about this new strategy, because as your social commerce strategy evolves it will start to tap more functions (and it should). So the first social program you enact should be one that drives this cultural momentum.

When evaluating social technologies and programs, you can plot and debate them on this simple 2×2 matrix:

What drives purchase momentum?

Write down what your customers need before they make a purchase. How do they research, shop, and evaluate? Where do they go, who do they consult, and what information do they need?

Then evaluate the social initiative on its ability to meet those shopping needs where the customer is looking. For online retailers, your customers go to shopping portals, they ask friends questions, they search Google, or they go down the purchase path of your site. Would a social network ”walled garden” on your shopping site help the majority of these customers? Would a blog? You might do those for other reasons, but they’re not in the bulls-eye of helping drive purchase momentum for the majority of customers.

Today, Ratings and Reviews are table stakes for retailers because multiple research studies have found that 70-90% of customers seek or want reviews before purchase. Customer search Google for reviews, and you want to be found. Customers use reviews to sort and filter to determine which product to buy. They need to read some level of negative reviews to feel they’ve ”vetted” the product and done their research. They need an “excuse to buy” with their spouse, and a sound bite from some reviews is as good a justification as any! Customer reviews are very aligned with purchase momentum.

What drives cultural momentum?

Three things drive cultural momentum – that internal “buzz” around social initiatives.

1) Results

The language of a business is the P&L. If your social technology can show results as close to the P&L as possible (i.e., revenue, margin, cost reduction), even the CEO will be interested. Bring your results into a senior executive meeting and they will applaud you in front of their managers and peers.

2) Data

Can you make  customer dialogue data and content useful and accessible to multiple functions in your organization? I get about four emails a week with product ideas from our clients, and the majority of them revolve around our workbench, reports, and alerts. We knew from the beginning that wide use of the customer voice and data is what would drive adoption. It’s what I’ve called the “customer oxygen” that corporations need. It drives wide interest in customer dialogue and UGC.

3) Cross-functional relevance

If you do a program that is just interesting to the online, marketing, or eCommerce teams, you’re missing a huge opportunity to engage merchants, product development, catalog, stores, customer service, training, research, and other departments. Your goal is deep and wide adoption of social marketing, so the program that has utility for other departments will accelerate cultural momentum. We see clients using answers from our Ask & Answer application for training, research, and copywriting. Reviews can be used by store managers and merchandising in email, catalogs, and advertising. The cultural momentum from these three factors increases the interest in the next investment in customer dialogue.

Where there’s ROI and high internal interest, then investment and resources follow. Simply put, that’s why you prioritize social programs that have purchase momentum and cultural momentum!

Meet wehkamp.nl – the number one online retailer in Holland and one of the best and most personal online department stores across Europe. Wehkamp prides itself on turning products and services into smart, innovative solutions and exceeding their customers’ expectations.

“Innovation” was the resounding topic for the first-ever “Wehkamp Online Partner Day,” which Bazaarvoice attended, alongside our Radius partners Endeca, Coremetrics, and Responsys, plus Optimost and Scene7. These partners brought innovation to life, providing aggregated solutions on some of the most forward-thinking ideas of the industry. Discussions ranged from social shopping, viral marketing, advanced social networking, and taking ratings and reviews to another level. Exploring integrations with Scene7 (advance picture navigation on pictures submitted with R&R), Endeca (text mining reviews for relevant search criteria), Responsys, and Optimost (A/B tests on “Top Rated” emails with and without ratings or reviews) were just a few ideas that came of out the sessions. The leadership at Wehkamp clearly saw the need for the web of partners to come together and share ideas – the day was buzzing with thought leadership, creativity, and overall feeling of excitement and innovation.

What has made this unique online retailer number one in one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world? According to Wehkamp, it’s a combination of innovation, early adoption, a strong personal brand, and an innate need to provide exceptional customer service to a marketplace they have served, cross-channel starting with catalogues in 1952, for over half a century.

I caught up with Alexander Van Slooten, Manager of Internet Strategy at Wehkamp, to learn more about their vision for the future of online retail.

1. INNOVATION
Two-thirds of the Dutch population have shopped online in the past year, and over 88% have access to the Internet (2nd highest in the world.) You have a great opportunity to be a creative thought leader in the online space. What are some of the ways you innovate?

Being the first online retailer in Holland (we launched our first site in 1995), we have an obligation to stay innovative. Over the years, we were the first to launch a customer self-service ‘chatbot,’ had the first Dutch viral marketing video on YouTube, were the first Dutch retail website that may call itself “Drempelvrij” (our site is also optimized for disabled people who use voice browsers and Braille media browsers). And we were of course the first Dutch website that allowed reviews on apparel.

2. CUSTOMER SERVICE
You pride yourself on being very customer-centric. Your use of user-generated content such as Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews is one way to show your customer that you value their opinion. How does having reviews on your site improve your business?

We pull a weekly report for our Quality Assurance department, containing bad reviews which help our buyers in determining their assortment. We have feedback for our suppliers which can be of great use to them. We can see that our visitors read the reviews because they talk about other reviews when writing their own. In six months time, we have over 31,000 reviews which show that customers like this functionality. Through Ratings & Reviews, employees of wehkamp.nl become more involved with the online business.
(See Wehkamp’s reviews splash page – in Dutch! – here.)

3. APPAREL
You have many great apparel reviews – your customers are very happy to discuss their wardrobe, recent purchases, fit, and style. Was this surprising to you to have so much attention given to apparel? Why do you think you customers are happy to discuss this?

There was no website in Holland that allowed reviews on apparel before Wehkamp, so we really had no reference. Most of the time hardware reviews are about meeting expectations. We thought this would also be the case with reviews on apparel. What surprised us was that customers are also willing to describe their feeling. Many reviews on apparel are also about emotions. “I’ve got my self-confidence back, after buying this bathing suite.” “My husband says I look pretty in this dress,” and so on. This fits the trend that people are more and more willing to express themselves online and have no shame at all about telling the most private details, even in Holland, where people tend to be a little conservative.

4. BEHAVIOR TARGETING
We discussed extending the use of customer data to deliver more personalized, relevant content to the end user. What are some of the ways that you imagine doing this, and where do you see the internet space moving with these ideas?

Relevancy is key nowadays. Behavioral targeting is still a technical term, which can frighten some people. We see it as a service; we will only show you things you are really interested in so you don’t have to spend time searching. I think it’s important to have a balance between the things you show based on the customer profile and more ‘organic’ display. The more we know about a customer (also think about profile data from for example social shopping, just show an item one of your friends just bought) the better the suggestions will be. Monitoring the whole process will be extremely important, the theory is good, but never just trust the technique!

5. CULTURAL IMPACT OF eCOMMERCE
Does having an ecommerce site in the Netherlands, targeted at Dutch customers, require you to do anything different? Are there any cultural differences between online shopping behaviors in Holland versus elsewhere?

Dutch customers are used to having their shops very near (within a 20-30 minute drive at the most). This means that to succeed in doing online business in the Netherlands, you have to be even more applicable. Dutch customers (and the Dutch in general) are very much used to direct communication where they just say what they want to say without holding back. This also means that the way of communicating with Dutch customers can be more direct and the feedback you will receive (e.g. via reviews) will be more direct.

For those that missed David's presentation, I recommend watching this video.  Or even for those that saw him speak, you may want to watch this and forward it to some folks in your company.  Tagging, and other user-generated content trends, will have a profound impact on eCommerce over the "long-term" (i.e., the next 1-3 years – remember this is an "Internet Speed" age we live in). 

I highly recommend reading his book as well.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Recently the Wall Street Journal featured an article titled "The Wizards of Buzz". In it the authors cite how Web 2.0 is "turning ordinary people into hidden influencers, shaping what we read, watch, and buy." In today's connected and social media driven world, a twelve year old from Toronto is helping to define what "news" is on Reddit, a news site similar to Digg.

Here's a key excerpt from the article about the impact of these "ordinary people":
"The opinions of these key users have implications for advertisers shelling out money for Internet ads, trend watchers trying to understand what's cool among young people, and companies whose products or services get plucked for notice."

Earlier this year Brant posted a blog about Kevin Killian, who is writing a book solely about the 1,000s of reviews he's written on Amazon.com about books, movies, music, and other every day products. Killian is a prime example of an ordinary person who is influencing the market place. At Bazaarvoice we have found similar trends to support the WSJ's findings. Across all of our clients there are heavy reviewers that are influencing their respective communities. For example, take "jason7" from Cabela's, who has already written over 200 reviews since Cabela's launched ratings and reviews five months ago or "Kerri" from Macy*s, who has written 124 reviews since Macy's launched four months ago.

There's no question that reviewers made up of ordinary people like me and you are speaking their minds, and the masses are listening. Your customers are actively seeking these influential reviewers to help them make the best purchase decision possible. The clients that will be most successful in this Web 2.0 era are those that can listen and act upon what their customer communities are telling them.

The question is: What are you going to do to leverage the most influential members of your community?

Here are a few key recommendations on how to build and foster your own influential online community:

1. Identify your company's top reviewers and supporters based on the quantity and quality of their reviews. You may also want to factor in their Net Promoter response to seek out your company's most loyal customers.
2. Provide incentives for these top reviewers. Encourage them to return to your site and continue writing insightful reviews that will benefit the rest of your online community. It's important to reach out to these reviewers, thank them for their feedback, and give them an incentive to return to your site. Ideas for incentives include: discounts off of their next purchase, free shipping, gift certificates, exclusive membership to your company's rewards club, or even a free sample of a new product before it's released to the public. These are great ways to ignite positive word of mouth throughout your online and offline community!
3. Highlight your top reviewers and put a name, face, and identity to these ordinary people. Remember, these reviewers are leading by example by making great purchases and they're kind enough to share it with the rest of your online community – for free! Ideas for recognizing your best reviewers include featuring a "Reviewer of the Week" on your website or creating a "Meet Your Online Community" section featuring all of your top reviewers. You can also use their compelling review content in email marketing campaigns, newsletters, circulars, and even in-store signage!

I encourage you to let your creative juices flow and comment on what your company can do to identify and harness your most influential reviewers (which, in our experience, are usually your "alpha shoppers")!

Joan is Shop.org's VP of Content and Education.  I remember how excited I was on the day Joan told me she was joining Shop.org's executive team, and she has already had an enormous impact on the quality of the events, new hires (such as Larry Joseloff), and new initiatives (such as the recent blog launch).  Joan couldn't have brought a better background to the Shop.org team.  As I mentioned, she previously worked for REI as their VP of Multi-Channel Programs.  She managed two business units, encompassing over $100 million in annual revenue with a team of 200 people.  Joan was responsible for launching REI's "order online, pick up in store" option for customers, as well as many online services.  Prior to REI, Joan was Office Depot's Director of Web Publishing.  She has spent more than 12 years in the online industry, including working at O'Reilly & Associates and America Online.  In other words, Joan has more online experience than almost anyone I know.

Here is our interview:

1. Please tell us our readers about your success with the pick-up-in-store initiative at REI.  Did the light-bulb go off for the rest of the organization about how much cross-channel shopping was occurring?

The REI order-online/pick-up-in-store program was definitely a team effort, and literally every department in the company played a part in its success. I think that the organization had already had more than an inkling that cross-channel shopping was going on, but this helped underscore how much one channel influenced another in a big way.

[Note from Brett: Internet Retailer reported that in-store pick-up of online orders accounted for almost 30% of REI's web sales; that sounds like a huge success to me.]

2. Now we live in a world of the increasingly more connected customer, due to the Web.  Broadly speaking, what are the three biggest impacts you think the Internet will have on multichannel shopping over the next three years?

I think that Internet sales will continue to become a larger percentage of a multi-channel company’s sales; the Internet will become more prominent within a MC retailer’s marketing strategy; MC retailers will need to figure out Web 2.0 technologies and see what’s going to work best for them.

3. User-generated content and Web 2.0 are all the rage with the acquisition of del.icio.us, YouTube, MySpace, and many others.  Shop.org itself had a Web 2.0 Boot Camp at this year’s Annual Summit, which attracted an amazing 2,300 attendees.  Why do you think Bazaarvoice is experiencing such rapid adoption by established, multichannel retailers?

The summit had over 2000 attendees, but the attendees for the Web 2.0 boot camp numbered around 150. My personal opinion about Bazaarvoice’s success is that it is based on an idea whose time has finally come. That is, consumer reviews and consumer-generated content, in general, have become mainstream to the point where they can successfully influence browsers to become buyers.

4. What do you think will happen in stores when customers have their mobile Web browsing device with them?

I think that eventually customers will use some sort of handheld (probably a phone) to do pretty much everything in brick & mortar stores: scan product codes to get pricing/product/sourcing information; compare prices with other online and offline retailers; find other brick & mortar stores that have the product in stock and are selling it for less by using Google maps and such; and even use the device to buy the products in the stores either by scanning a credit card or using some other payment method through the phone. Maxwell Smart would be proud!

5. How will user-generated content be used on these devices?  Does your answer change if you consider 1 year from now versus 3 years from now?

In the scenario above, the user can call in customer reviews as part of the product information. Using social networking, s/he can ask advice in real-time on whether the people in his or her network think s/he should buy the product, etc.

6. Thinking back to your experience with the pick-up-in-store initiative at REI, how do you see multichannel retailers leveraging user-generated content in an increasing always-connected environment?

I don’t know if I can relate the work I did at REI to this new, always-connected scenario. But I can see that eventually people can use that handheld to reserve/buy a product that they then go in and pick up at a brick and mortar store.

7. Any predictions on how user-generated content will change in-store signage, circulars, or other forms of offline advertising?

I think that consumer reviews have a great deal of power to sway buying decisions. That’s gold for retailers, and they are likely to try to use them in any way they can. It’s just a matter of figuring out the best way to get that information across in more traditional online and offline formats.

I look forward to seeing Joan in a month at Shop.org's FirstLook conference, where I will be speaking with Sarah Fay, President of isobar, and Jacob Hawkins, SVP of Online Marketing at Overstock.com, on the future of marketing as it becomes impacted by user-generated content.  Joan has significantly changed the format and focus this year, and I think it will be a fantastic event.  I hope to see you there, too.

Happy New Year, and thanks for all of your support in 2006!

The most insightful part of the movie, as it pertains to word of mouth as well as green products, is to watch the reaction of EV1 leasees (all EV1s were leased until GM proved the market potential) when they realize that they can not buy their EV1 under any condition.  They organize, they petition, they beg.  Big name actors like Mel Gibson, Tom Hanks, and all other EV1 leasees are turned down.  The organizers get together and offer to buy all of the cars for $1.9 million – their request goes with no answer (according to the movie).  After finding out that the EV1s are being destroyed, they stand outside of the GM parking lot where EV1s are being stored to watch over the cars to make sure that GM doesn't destroy any more.  They literally do this for months on a 24×7 basis.  Talk about love for a car!  It makes iPod owners look downright disloyal.  I guess that is because a car has such a big impact on your life as opposed to an iPod, and the EV1 leasees were so passionately focused on making an impact on the environment.  These consumers were a word-of-mouth revolution waiting to be leveraged by GM.  But, GM being short-term focused like so many companies that are incentivized to think that way due to the short-term nature of making your numbers for Wall Street analysts, completely misses the boat.  [Side note: this short-term focus was really crystallized for me by my friend, Derek Woodgate, who is a corporate futurist and the founder of The Futures Lab, in a discussion we had on why the corporate world needs futurists.  He has a great job, in my opinion, but more on that perhaps later.]

One of the big critiques of the EV1, from a consumer perspective at that time, is the short distance that the car can travel on a full charge (only 55-75 miles on the first generation model, due to the early generation batteries used; but the movie states that the average American only drives 29 miles per day although it doesn't seem like the car was ever marketed to highlight that this range would be sufficient for some 90% of American drivers).  Another critique is the high production cost of $80,000 per vehicle when the lease payments would net around $34,000 to $44,000, obviously a money-losing proposition for GM.  But a former EV1 employee explains that once economies of scale kick in, from good marketing and availability in large metropolitan areas, the production costs would have fallen dramatically and battery technology would have rapidly improved.  This seems like a logical argument to me, especially considering the recent success of the Tesla, which can travel up to 250 miles on a full charge.  It also helps that the Tesla goes 0-60 in 4 seconds and looks like a well-designed sports car.  Unlike the EV1, which had a failed rollout (only leasing 800 units), the Tesla recently sold out their flagship 2007 model in just four months. 

I guess my point here is that GM could have figured it out if they stuck with it, and the consumer emotion evoked by the product was simply incredible.  And I think it is indisputable that GM missed the boat on the launch of hybrids relative to Toyota (who is projected to pass GM in 2007 as the world's largest producer of autos).  In the movie, one of GM's former Board members talks about his support of the EV1 project more from a R&D perspective, given the shift in consumer demand that he saw coming.  The success of hybrids and the launch of the Tesla prove that demand is there, if the marketing is well executed then word of mouth could have done the rest of the work.

What does all of this have to do with the title of my blog post?  Well, I predict that green products are going to be one of the hottest trends for the next decade.  They are ripe for an amazing level of positive word of mouth ("free marketing?").  Obviously coffee and universal access to global information also need little advertising when the product is great (Starbucks invested in their stores and locations, Google invested in the world's best search, and neither invested in advertising – positive word of mouth did that job for them).

There are more and more people that are accepting the consequences of global warming.  Just today, it was reported that another enormous ice shelf broke away in the Canadian Arctic.  As I first predicted in July of 2006, I wrote that the documentary An Inconvenient Truth would be marked as the most impactful documentary in modern history.  After seeing it a month ago for the first time, I have to admit that is a transformational movie.  You simply can't see it and not be emotionally moved by the implication of the evidence presented – it truly is "an inconvenient truth".  If you haven't seen it and want the quick "cheat sheet", this summary is a good place to start.  And 60 Minutes recently had a compelling report – here is an excerpt.

In August, I wrote about Wal-Mart embracing sustainability (and the rapid impact they could have given their immense scale).  And I recently learned (when having coffee with one of their heads of eCommerce) that they include a video on what they are doing about it with every copy of An Inconvenient Truth that they sell.  Here is an example of one of their recent initiatives, among many. 

From Millennials being more socially conscious consumers to Kleiner Perkins investing huge sums of money in alternative energy, there is something major under way here.  There is a shift in consumer demand that is just beginning to be felt (look at the Whole Foods stock rise that I wrote about when reporting on Wal-Mart and sustainability).  Wal-Mart, the largest company in the world, acting early on this shift is a wake-up call for smaller companies everywhere.

The bottom line is that I truly believe when we look back and assess the long-term economic impact of the events of 2006, it will be that the green movement got underway and rolled like a freight train through the economy for the next several decades.  And sparked consumer emotion and word of mouth that had never before been seen.  The stakes are simply too high and too broadly felt for it not to.

If you don't have a green strategy, I suggest you start moving now.  We'll see a lot more green (both green products and the money made off them) in 2007 and beyond.  We can help you rapidly evolve these products by tapping into word-of-mouth analytics and helping you learn what is really resonating (and what isn't) with your customers.

Update on Jan. 2:
I was just catching up on BusinessWeek while at the gym, and noticed that the "green" trend was highlighted in three different "ideas" for the "The Best Ideas of 2006", specifically:

• Super Recycling (also there is a great interview with the CEO of Interface in the good but slanted documentary The Corporation)
• Global Warming
• Green is Good

The only other trend to have as many common ideas is that of user-generated content, a topic near and dear to Bazaarvoice and our clients.  Specifically:

• Trend Mining (one of the many reasons we have invested so heavily in word-of-mouth analytics)
• Get a Second Life (stay tuned for my third Word-of-Mouth Wisdom interview for more on this)
• Free Labor (more on the crowdsourcing, which I have written about often)
• Web 2.0 Goes Corporate

You can also come to a panel or roundtable we are hosting at the Web 2.0 Bootcamp (pre-show event) and during the summit. Here's our schedule if you want to print this.

And, for a select few people who read this (you can tell your closest colleagues) we are going to perform a unique display of ecommerce wizardry. Come by our booth and we will guess your conversion rate. If we get it wrong, we have a special 'under-the-table' giveaway for you (limited supply)!

Oh, and one more thing (this is like the peeler in the ginsu knife commercial, but better!)…

This is not announced anywhere else. Bryan Eisenberg (speaking at the conference) will be signing and we will give you FREE copies of his new best-selling book, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, at our booth (#120) on Thursday, Oct. 12 at 1pm and 4:15pm breaks. He may be guessing some conversion rates as well!

See you there!