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.

At the same time, it’s increasingly difficult to gain customers’ trust. Only 17% of people trust advertisers, according to a 2007 Myers Publishing study, and a 2008 Gallup poll found that only 10% of advertisers were perceived as trustworthy by consumers.

Customers do, however, trust recommendations. “Recommendations from friends” were found to be the most trusted source across all media in a 2009 TNS poll. Capitalizing on these recommendations is crucial for brands in building customer trust.

What’s more, customers recognize that these recommendations actually influence their behavior. Over half of all consumers believe word-of-mouth influences their restaurant choices, according to an October 2008 BIGresearch study. Word-of-mouth had different effects on different types of purchases and among different races, but these word-of-mouth recommendations always matter.

It’s one thing to recognize the importance of word-of-mouth, but it’s another to capitalize on it. Allow your customers to contribute feedback and recommendations in a forum where other, like-minded customers will see it. Make it easy for them to share these recommendations with their existing networks of friends. Place this UGC where other customers can find it – on your website and product pages – so it can influence your customers in every phase of the purchase path.

Enabling conversation with your customers will build trust in your brand – and drive your sales, too. Word-of-mouth matters; make it work for your brand.

Images courtesy of eMarketer.

The inspiration for this post is the now infamous "Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt", currently the #1 selling Apparel product on Amazon.com. No, that's not a typo. I could efficiently end this post by just telling you to read a few of the reviews for this product. That would more than accomplish my goal of demonstrating the value of not taking yourself (or your brand) too seriously. But I have a minimum length requirement to meet, so I'll go on . . .

Our good friends at Econsultancy in the UK beat me to the punch with an entertaining blog post on the t-shirt. The Washington Post published an article on the same day. No matter who you trust, that's one damn funny t-shirt. If you trust me and took my advice above to read a few of the reviews, I bet you are now making your way through the checkout process while you finish reading this nailbiter of a post. That's impressive multi-tasking.

We see our share of humorous reviews and many of those are just too inappropriate to post, but as reviews of the Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt aptly demonstrate, there is a very fine line between inappropriate humor and pure genius, not to mention a word of mouth marketing bonanza. I won't speak for my colleagues at Bazaarvoice (you know who you are), but this t-shirt is responsible for a major drop in productivity last Friday because I was personally contributing to the millions of word of mouth "impressions" that the product received. While it may be difficult to put a dollar value on each of those impressions, you can most definitely put a dollar value on lost productivity.

In closing, if you offer customer reviews of your products and services, whether you are a Bazaarvoice client or not, I urge you to evaluate whether your definition of inappropriate is too strict and your tolerance of humor too low. Millions of dollars and an immeasurable wealth of customer word of mouth could be at stake!

The theme of the Summit was “The New ROI: Return on Influentials”. Executives and managers from top retailers, manufacturers and financial companies came to the new AT&T Conference Center in Austin (on UT’s campus) for 3 days to learn how to build and show the impact of customer voice in their business. See the agenda here.

In the coming weeks we will blog cliff notes from the sessions. But you can also see the stream of Twitter notes here.

I didn’t hear everything (I was running around emceeing the event), but here are some of the biggest takeaways I had:

• Anyone can be an influencer. You can unearth them by facilitating their contribution and amplifying its impact.
• Measurement and marketing impact is easier than most think. Measure the impact of UGC on existing marketing campaigns (examples from Helzberg, Sephora, others)
• Getting C-level buy-in dramatically accelerates the evolution of transforming the business with the voice of customer (ex: Sam Taylor, CEO of Oriental Trading pulled together cross functional team to leverage reviews in supply chain and strategy)
• Brands realize that the voice of the customer is transformational, but are challenged to accelerate organizational change.
• We are all working on a comprehensive way to operationalize and measure all the impacts of social commerce initiatives.
• There’s a big opportunity in merging social content and data with email strategy. Bazaarvoice Social Alerts with JCWhitney had 100% open rate and 50% click through!
• We’re scratching the surface on the database marketing opportunities with influencers. Those who contribute can help identify others who contribute. Some thought leadership discussed with our partner, Merkle.

And we had fun too…

• We were in Austin…so we’ll start there!
• During the sessions, Sunni Brown drew graphic recordings on each session (will post soon).
• Tuesday night we took buses out to the Salt Lick Pavilion (best BBQ in TX, in my opinion) and hosted the Bazaarvoice Bull Ride contest again.
• Leslie from Williams Sonoma took the prize this year (Omare from Geico won last year).
• We had live music from Jeff Hughes and Chaparral
• We played Chicken Shit Bingo (sorry…that’s just what it’s called!)
• Attendees grabbed their beverage from the backs of Beer Donkeys!
• As an unorthodox way to evangelize our message to clients, last year we debuted the video “More than Words”. This year we created two videos, “The Influencer Abduction” and “Freedom! ’09 (Let Their Content Free!)”. Share them with colleagues that need to ‘get’ social commerce!

Abduction of Influencers

Click here to view the embedded video.

Freedom! '09 (Let Their Content Free!)

Click here to view the embedded video.

To give you a Bazaarvoice “inside perspective” on the event…

Last year’s event received a Net Promoter score of 9.3 out of 10. We were excited to get such positive feedback on our first event, but it also meant we had a high bar to jump over. We want to continually improve. We’re tallying the on-site surveys now, and we’ll be sending out an additional email survey, but just based on our experience and comments from clients, we were thrilled with the results. The majority of the event experience was based on the presentations and interaction between clients, as we learn from each other. One of my favorite quotes “the Summit is an amusement park of ideas.” And because so many clients came, our community management, support, implementation, and sales team members were able to put faces to voices. The entire Bazaarvoice team worked on making this successful. It takes a lot of work and requires juggling a lot of details. I want to give special thanks and recognition to the three folks on my team who were the producers of the event: Sarah Loyens, who quarterbacked the invitations and logistics to get folks there; Chris Wellington, our designer who took the event experience to the next level and tied it all together (including the Polaroids in the notebook!); and Amber Quist, who was the overall Producer of the event with RedVelvet Events. And of course, thank you to our partners who added to the content and made the event possible.

Stay tuned for cliffnotes of the content! For those who attended, stay tuned for presentations and conversations posted to the SCS Community.

p.s. If you're in Europe or the UK, register for our Social Commerce Summit London on September 22!

Does your company have a disaster recovery program for negative word of mouth?

Over the Easter weekend, social networking sites and blogs exploded with negative publicity about online retailing giant Amazon.com. Angry customers are protesting changes on Amazon’s site that lost sales ranking data for hundreds of books dealing with homosexuality, meaning that these books can no longer be found via keyword or subject searches or on best-seller lists.

Amazon appears to have been taken by surprise by the outrage – #amazonfail was the top-trending term on Twitter, and a Google bomb initiated by a popular blog for romance readers successfully redirected searches for “Amazon rank” to a snarky explanation of the issue before Amazon responded at all.

The initial response was a terse press release explaining that the de-rankings were the result of a “glitch” in the sales-ranking feature. A skeptical public declined to believe this explanation, which is widely perceived as a cover-up for a change in corporate policy – or an overzealous application of the existing policy. And it seems likely that Amazon’s customer service reps are being flooded with angry calls and emails. A subsequent apology included a more detailed explanation that the glitch was due to "an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloguing error," but conspiracy theories continue to circulate in the blogosphere.

No doubt Amazon’s slow response was due in part to the holiday weekend. It also seems likely that they didn’t have a good plan in place for dealing with a grassroots campaign of this sort. Ironically, Amazon has been a trendsetter in leveraging positive word of mouth, but it seems they were unprepared for the way that negative publicity can also spread rapidly on the Internet.

No one likes to think that a technological glitch or a bad decision by a single employee could result in a PR firestorm. But if something like this happened to your company, what would you do to contain the situation and turn it around?

Here are some suggestions for managing negative word of mouth:

• React quickly. Monitor user-generated content on your site, customer service complaints, and word of mouth in other venues. If you see a particular topic cropping up repeatedly, don’t delay. Proactively letting people know that you’re aware of the situation and that you’re actively seeking more information shows you care about your customers and that you’re eager to respond to their feedback. The Internet never sleeps! Identify an escalation point for issues that arise during off-hours so that your official response isn’t delayed until regular office hours.

• Be as transparent as possible. If you don’t have answers yet, just say so. Your customers are smart enough to recognize vague prevarication, and they’ll appreciate your honesty. When you’ve identified the problem, give a clear, understandable explanation of what went wrong and how you’re going to fix it.
• If you’re at fault, apologize. A clear admission of responsibility and a commitment to resolve the issue will go a long way towards counteracting the negative publicity.
• Don’t rely on traditional media to get the word out. Leverage the same tools your detractors used to get your story out there. Post about it in your corporate blog, tweet about it, and educate customer service reps on how to engage with your customers on social networking sites.

All companies hope they never have to deal with such backlash, but customer feedback – positive and negative – is valuable, and it's critical to not just listen, but to act.

Yahoo! Finance tells a dramatic story since then.  Blockbuster's total market cap, as of the close of trading on Friday, is $73.25 million.  Netflix, by comparison, is worth $2.24 billion.  Netflix is worth more than 30 times what Blockbuster is worth.  And to think that just two years ago, Blockbuster was worth the same as Netflix, based on Blockbuster's launch of Total Access (see my Round Two post).

It is worth revisiting my posts (linked to the dates cited above).  The lessons of bad profits apply more today than ever. The psychological cost of buyer's remorse is the highest it has ever been, with U.S. unemployment now at 8.1% (and California's unemployment rate at 10.1%).

Unfortunately, our entire global economy has been significantly challenged by bad profits, mostly stemming from financial firms' overly engineered and incredibly complex derivative trading products based on mortage-backed securities to Madoff's actions that will fundamentally change regulation of the entire hedge fund industry.  We will persevere, as we always have, but the costs of bad profits will hopefully be remembered like never before, especially as we live in this age of global connectedness and word of mouth transparency.

This blog post was guest-written by Matt Hawkins, Senior Marketing Analyst.

This January, we were thrilled to launch Ratings & Reviews for our first client in The Netherlands, huge retailer Wehkamp.nl. Wehkamp serves a significant amount of reviews content, averaging well over 900,000 reviews viewed daily…and this number is growing! Even more exciting? This doesn’t even include content seen on their top-rated email campaigns, post-purchase emails, and more (all driving incremental ROI).

Not long after launching, Wehkamp saw a lift in conversion, average order value, time on site, and lower bounce rates. Seeing these results only increased our excitement about having a leading European retailer experience significant ROI from Ratings & Reviews (albeit not surprising!.. see our other case studies).

And Wehkamp makes strategic decisions based on their customers’ input. Read more in our interview with Alexander Van Slooten, Manager of Internet Strategy at Wehkamp about what they’ve done with Ratings & Reviews.

Not long after Wehkamps’ launch, huge French retailer Mistergooddeal launched Ratings & Reviews and experienced a 40% lift in conversion for top rated products (see Mistergooddeals’ Reviews splash page). For us at Bazaarvoice, this was fantastic news – but again, no surprise, considering how many clients are successful with best practice of using customer content in “Top Rated” or “Customer Favorite” promotional collateral (see our case studies).

These two leading European retailers continue to follow our strategic best practices, build their online community, engage customers, and boost sales!

Cook gives several examples of businesses who are benefiting from [what he calls] a user contribution system, such as Honda, Procter & Gamble, Hyatt, and Loblaw. He also cites experience Intuit has had with it’s forum community and the reviews platform that we power for them.
He describes the user contribution system in this way:

The users can be customers, employees, sales prospects—or even people with no previous connection to the company. Their contributions can be active (work, expertise, or information) or passive and even unknowing (behavioral data that is gathered automatically during a transaction or an activity). The system is the method, usually internet-based, by which contributions are aggregated and automatically converted into something useful to others. Although the company retains control of the system and may choose to modify its design, the system converts inputs into useful outputs in real time with little or no intervention by the company.

Such a system creates value for a business as a consequence of the value it delivers to users—personalized purchase recommendations, connections between buyers and sellers of hard-to-find items, new personal or business relationships, lower prices, membership in a community, entertainment, information of all kinds.

He also cites the revolutionary potential of business benefits from user contributions:

• Cost advantage
• Scalability advantage
• Competitive advantage
• Customer service
• Marketing
• Employee support
• Capital resources
• Design and development

I encourage you to forward this article to your CEO, CFO and senior executives of your company who need to be informed of the benefits and impact of user contributions. In a world where companies succeed on word of mouth, where marketing and advertising are largely ignored, and where customers (90%) actively seek out recommendations from people like then, tapping into contributors (influentials) should be THE priority, especially during difficult times. It’s no longer a nice to have.