This blog post is guest-written by Anna Skaya, Community Manager - Europe at Bazaarvoice.

When Bazaarvoice partnered with Argos to build and deliver their User Generated Content (UGC) platform, we couldn’t have imagined the kind of impact UGC would have had on Argos’ social marketing strategy, or how this would have a knock-on effect on conversion. As one of our flagship ‘early adopters’ in the UK, our recent Argos case study highlights details of this exciting discovery, and showcases how the Argos eCommerce team is focused on retaining a competitive edge over its rivals along with delivering a consistently great customer experience. Increasingly fundamental to this now is the decision to make UGC a focal point for online strategy planning.

When Argos first launched customer Ratings & Reviews, our challenge was to find a way of utilising Consumer-to-Consumer opportunities in a way that was relevant and complementary to the established customer experience, while demonstrating additional benefit to the business. When doing so, ROI is always king.

The conversion numbers speak for themselves – 10% increase in conversion on products with reviews, across all categories. Customer reviews form a key part of Argos’ continuing website innovation; and with new key functionality supported by technology partners such as Bazaarvoice, these types of results are just the beginning. There is a lot more in store for this leading online retailer!

Brant, my co-founder and our VP of Business Development, told me he was going to see ‘The Hangover’ with his wife soon, and I decided to do my typical research.  Both critic and customer reviews were positive, so Debra and I decided to go.  Let me just warn you that this is one lewd and wild movie, but it is also extremely funny.  We both had some great laughs, and there are some especially funny scenes that feature a “man purse”.

The next week I was reading the June 29th edition of “Feeding the Voice: Cutting-Edge Promotions from Bazaarvoice Clients”.  This is a weekly email from our Community Management team, and it is one of the most important emails I get all week.  Our clients are using user-generated content throughout their multichannel and online marketing in a transformative way (see recent examples from Urban Outfitters, The Home Depot, and Argos in the UK).  And the number of cutting-edge promotions by our clients working with our Community Managers has risen to 20-30 per week, which is about the volume we saw in an entire year just two years ago.  Back to the slide deck - I open it and the first example is our client, Roots, blogging about the “man purse” in ‘The Hangover’.  It turns out it is their “Village Bag in Vintage Tribe Leather“, which is rated a 4.9 out of 5!  I was showing the Roots blog post to Debra last night and her comment was, “that is a really, really nice bag”.

I thought this coincidence was very cool, and you just never know where the impact of social commerce will show up.  And if you are one of our U.S. readers, enjoy your 4th!  We will proudly be watching the fireworks tonight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Holiday shoppers read reviews.

Last year, 80% of holiday shoppers read reviews while deciding what to buy. It’s important to build review volume now, so shoppers find all the information they need on your site come shopping season. In November through January, reviews served surges over 140% for the year – 3.6 billion reviews were viewed in December 2008 alone!

Now’s the time to increase reviews on your site.

The more reviews you have, the more they drive visitors to your site (read how SearchVoice increases traffic 142%, on average) and the more they help shoppers make decisions. Take the time now to capture reviews from all your shoppers this year. For example, Argos sent a post-holiday email to all shoppers and gained 70,000 reviews in a day! Stay tuned to this blog for many more ideas about how to drive review volume.

Manufacturers should get involved, too.

Shoppers research products on manufacturer sites, so it’s important to have reviews there. At the same time, it’s important to share the reviews collected on manufacturer sites with top retail sites – where shoppers will actually buy. BrandVoice lets manufacturers seamlessly share reviews with retailers who use Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews. In fact, 76% of all revenues from the top 25 Consumer Electronics Retailers flow through the Bazaarvoice exclusive retail network.

Don’t have reviews on your site?

There’s no doubt; this year’s holiday season will be critically important to all brands. If you’re considering reviews, it actually hurts your business to wait – if you implement in the next two months, you could gain a 6.8% increase in net sales. Our SaaS model lets you implement Ratings & Reviews – and Stories and Ask & Answer – in weeks, not months. We know your technical team is busy, so we do most of the heavy lifting.

Contact your Community Manager today to drive review volume for the coming months.

One of our Community Managers, Lisa Tu, used Wordle’s “word cloud” generator to create a graphic word collage of Free People’s Ratings & Reviews. The more a word was used, the bigger it appears in the collage, creating a fun visual of what Free People’s customers have to say about the brand.

Words like “love,” “cute,” “great,” and “dress” showed up most frequently in Free People’s reviews. The collage shows how Free People’s customers are able to reflect brand associations back to the company through user-generated content.

We decided to create our own Wordle collage for Bazaarblog. Not surprisingly, our biggest keywords included “community,” “recommendations,” “brand,” and “word-of-mouth.” But the most prominent word in our collage by far was “customers.” We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again – Bazaarvoice solutions put the voice of your customers to work for your brand. Customer centricity is core to everything we do; it’s no wonder discussion around “customers” dominates our blog.

Check out our Bazaarblog Wordle, below. You can create your own using the online generator.

One such tribe in the works now is Financial Peace University, a twelve-week course in personal finance and debt management. Designed to help participants eliminate debt and save money, FPU teaches through guided video lesson plans designed to facilitate discussion. Led by Bazaarvoice team members who have graduated the program, participants share their techniques and experiences, helping each other develop a new way of looking at money.

These skills translate to better productivity – studies have shown that personal finance is the number one reason for individual stress in the workplace. As such, Bazaarvoice allows employees to use part of their $1,000 sponsored education fund to cover the cost of the course.

Other tribes have included beginning photography lessons, public speaking training, improv comedy classes, and weekly wakeboarding lessons on Lake Travis. The Bazaarvoice Speaker Series, a brainchild of our philanthropy awareness tribe, has brought in several speakers from community-serving organizations like the Lance Armstrong Foundation and the V Foundation for Cancer Research.

Tribes contribute to the openness, passion and teamwork among our employees that are so characteristic of our corporate culture – a culture that helped us win Austin Business Journal’s Best Place to Work 2009. And we’re hiring!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: What’s next for Econsultancy?

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

At Bazaarvoice, when we hire, it’s about much more than just work. Sure, job skills are absolutely essential, but it’s also important to have fun.

As we continue to (thankfully) grow our customer base, we need more Community Managers than ever, so we had a happy hour last week at a local watering hole here in Austin. Dozens of our employees spread the word via their Facebook and Twitter accounts (as well as through our own), and we had more than 100 attendees!

Community Managers (our version of Account Management) have one of the most exciting jobs at Bazaarvoice – they’re on the front lines of changing a client’s business. There have been several blog posts about cool things clients have done with Community Managers: Urban Outfitters features top reviewers in emails, James Avery customers share more than 1,000 Mother’s Day stories, and Home Depot innovates with their Answer Depot. So this event was humming with activity.

While we met a lot of great candidates for jobs across the organization, we also got a lot of “thanks” from people attending. As the job market tightens, it’s tough – and isolating – to look for a new job, and we tried to make it as fun a process as possible. It means a lot to us to brighten even one person’s day, and we’re lucky enough to have a fun group of people to socialize with.

Our CEO, Brett Hurt, got a nice email from an attendee, Clayton Clabaugh, after the event: “Between what I’ve seen from Austin Bootstrap, your website and meeting some of the team last evening you seem to have put together a really special organization.”

And we continue to get creative people interviewing with us. This guy tweeted about the website and music video he created, and within a few minutes, the entire company was watching. We’re keeping you on the list, Matthew Price.

It’s true – Bazaarvoice is a fun place to work, and we’re hiring – across the whole company.