June 4th, 2008 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO
As everyone now knows, last night was a historic one in the U.S. But did you also know that Obama made history for how innovative his online campaign was?
We had the pleasure of hosting Kelly Mooney, President of Resource Interactive and my peer on the Shop.org Board of Directors, as one of our keynote speakers at our Social Commerce Summit last week (note: the event was amazing, see the recap post from Sam Decker, our CMO). Kelly was great, as always. Her interview of Ze Frank, one of our Advisory Board members, was fantastically thought-provoking and entertaining. Hey keynote presentation on The Open Brand, her new book (see my interview of Kelly), was also top-notch. What I remembered most from her presentation was the "Yes We Can" shared community video produced by will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas. Kelly blogs about it here (her blog is one of the few that I personally follow). The video is an awesome expression of community participation and user-generated content (note: mouse over the mosiac as it plays).
Whether or not you support Obama, his innovative use of the online channel will be emulated for future democratic elections. And as politics gets more "open", that will benefit us all. Just like customer-generated reviews benefits all with better products and services (at our Summit, I learned that Wal-Mart drops any product nationwide after it gets a certain number of negative reviews online), so will politics as candidates engage in openness.
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February 27th, 2008 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO
As a businessman who loves technology, Wired is my favorite magazine. I simply find no other business magazine as innovative, both in the way it is physically organized and designed. But the real gold is the content. The Editor In Chief of Wired, Chris Anderson, is one of the most visionary business thinkers of our time. You remember “The Long Tail“? – an awesome read that nicely summarized the true power of the Internet to reach niche markets. I had the pleasure of meeting Chris in person at Resource Interactive’s iCitizen event last year, as we were both speakers at the event. He then ran the tables at conferences, keynoting seemingly almost every one that I attended. “The Long Tail” had real business impact (see my post on it’s impact on eCommerce). Chris deserves the success he earned – seeing a commerce-changing trend that none of us could as succinctly and powerful describe.
Now Chris and Wired strike again with a preview of his new book, “Free”, which is due in 2009. The cover article of this month’s Wired is “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business“. If you want to read now what everyone will be talking about next year, read this article now. It isn’t worth me summarizing here – trust me, it’s worth your 15 minutes to read the entire article by clicking the link above.
Free is a very powerful word-of-mouth driver, and Bazaarvoice has certainly placed a lot of “bets” in this area. Currently, the following Bazaarvoice solutions are free (to at least one stakeholder):
- ShoutIt!: Share your review on Facebook, digg, and Del.icio.us – free to clients and users; creates a form of advertising without the taint of being advertising
- SyndicateVoice: free for shopping comparison portal partners, free for new clients for a period of time; creates a form of advertising without the taint of being advertising
- BrandVoice: free high-converting user-generated content for clients from the customers of their manufacturing partners; leverages the power of channel marketing, which has existed since the dawn of vendors selling through the retail channel
- Ratings & Reviews, Ask & Answer, Stories: free for users; gives them the context they need to make a purchase decision as well as connect with other customers; consumers used to pay for this type of content from people like “Consumer Reports”, or by physically driving to a store to speak to an in-store sales person who may or may not have the information and context that they need
I look forward to seeing how Chris’s new book shapes up, and I have no doubt that it will be impactful. As he so eloquently describes in this article, free already surrounds us due to near free transistors and bandwidth. As more businesses transform to be information-based, this trend will radically accelerate.
How are you using the power of free in your business?
August 26th, 2007 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO
In the entire Web 2.0 space, there may be no medium more hyped in the past year than Second Life, which provides us with a glimpse of what the 3D-Web of the future may be like. You've read about Second Life everywhere – from the Wall Street Journal to BusinessWeek to Wired. Back in January, I did some exploring of my own in Second Life in my Word-of-Mouth Wisdom interview series and reporting on the news that Second Life had open-sourced it's previously proprietary browser.
But recently Second Life is taking a beating. Check out these recent articles in Time and Wired. Even though many corporations have rushed in to grab their own virtual real estate, it turns out that not that many people are there to shop. They are primarily there to gamble and have sex, and this shouldn't be surprising. Many of the first businesses on the Internet were about gambling and sex. It's the early-adopter syndrome in a medium that let's you hide your real identity and pretend to be someone else.
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January 14th, 2007 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO
As a BusinessWeek subscriber, I look forward to Saturdays when I get the upcoming week's edition. BusinessWeek is never as "meaty" as my favorite magazine, Wired, but it is a fast read, more focused (all business, all the time), and keeps me informed. In this issue, the January 22, 2007 edition, I noticed a trend that mirrors a topic I have been writing about often – the potential of "green" products (see my Dec. 30th, 2006 post).
First, on page 6 there is a full-page ad from The Home Depot, one of our clients. It is titled "What do you call a year in which you sell 63 million Earth-friendly products? A healthy start". This ad has a corresponding Web presence, but it is a little hard to find and it isn't mentioned in the ad. Unfortunately, you can't yet shop for these "Earth-friendly products" online and searching for "Earth friendly" on their Web site doesn't return any results.
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July 8th, 2006 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO
"The hierarchy of attention has inverted – credibility now rises from below. MTV and Tower Records no longer decide who win. You do." – from "The Rise and Fall of the Hit" by Chris Anderson, Wired magazine, July, 2006
Chris Anderson's book, "The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More", is finally out. Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired (my favorite magazine), maintains a popular blog about the journey of researching the book. The article cited above is based on it, and it's brilliant. As I like to think about emerging trends in a historical context, here is my favorite excerpt:
- "Before you shed too many tears for the declining hit, remember that the era of the blockbuster was an anomaly. Before the Industrial Revolution, culture was mostly local – niches were geographic. The economy was agrarian, which distributed populations as broadly as the land. Distance divided people, giving rise to such diversity as regional accents and folk music, and the lack of rapid transportation and communications limited the mixing of cultures and the propagation of ideas and trends."
When I came up with our company name, Bazaarvoice, I was inspired by The Cluetrain Manifesto and thinking about how word of mouth has always been the most powerful form of marketing. Human nature hasn't changed; it isn't like we all woke up last year thinking, "We need to communicate with each other more". What has changed is the ease of communicating in a globally-connected sense. This has profound implications for word of mouth and is driving an explosion in consumer-generated content. As Anderson writes, "the Internet's peer-to-peer architecture is optimized for a symmetrical traffic load, with as many senders as receivers and data transmissions spread out over geography and time". For all of the wonder of the Internet, it may be the most wondrous medium of all due to its power to connect people like we used to be connected locally (before the advent of the one-way, controlled broadcast medium).
I would recommend that you read Anderson's article (I can't recommend his book yet as I haven't read it) and think about how it will change your business. Here is how I think "the long tail" changes the world of retail and eCommerce:
- More personalized products
- More niche eCommerce opportunities with established and start-up businesses capitalizing on them
- Faster product cycle times due to better and more accessible information from customers about what they like and don't like about the product
- Product reviews will play a big role here; we are already seeing our clients make some pretty profound merchandising decisions based on our word of mouth analytics
- Better customer service
- Store reviews and customer reviews will also play a big role here
- With more choice, tighter community, and a greater demand for niches, personalized service will become an even more important differentiator
- Better multichannel integration
- Buy online and pick up in store initiatives are just the beginning; REI is a good example (30% of all online purchases are picked up in their stores)
- Retailers will have to leverage their use of channels to provide a better overall customer experience or risk losing them to niche businesses
- Customer-centric, multichannel database and analytics opportunities will be a huge area of opportunity and frustration; RFID will only make this more complex
- More private-label brands
- JCPenney's ana line is a good recent example but there are many, many others
- This bullet may be redundant with the second bullet as the reason these private labels are being launched is a combination of profit margin motives as well as focusing on attractive niches for revenue growth and differentiation
- An entire discipline will evolve on creating products that drive word of mouth
- I enjoyed Bryan Eisenberg's article on ClickZ this week and think that he and Roy Williams are on the right track here; Bryan cites three triggers – architectural, kinetic, and generous – and provides examples from our client's product reviews of these triggers driving five-star product satisfaction and word of mouth
- This will lead to much tighter communication between retailers and their suppliers with product reviews being one of the most important sources of data for these conversations (obviously returns and sales being the two longest-adopted sources)
- Members of the rapidly growing Word of Mouth Marketing Association will play a big role in this evolution
What am I missing from this list? And how do you think it will change your business?
Two other important notes that are relevant to this post:
- In this same issue of Wired, I was happy to see "The Power of Peer Production" named as one of the six trends driving the global economy, by Chris Anderson no less.
- Speaking of hits, Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg's new book, "Waiting For Your Cat to Bark?", is out and has already been named to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestsellers list. Here is the praise I wrote for the book when Bryan was nice enough to give me a preview copy:
"The Web is a democratizing force as the world's largest global brain. It educates everyone on the pros and cons of every product, service, and even person. An educated person doesn't react well to the traditional art of manipulation that some marketers attempt to employ in their campaigns. As a matter of fact, it makes them angry and defensive … like a cat backed into a corner. No one understands this new world of marketing better than the Eisenbergs. Waiting For Your Cat to Bark? is the marketing manifesto of our generation. Read it, weep, and then go do something about it."
