I met Ze Frank several years ago over drinks at a partner event and a few months later over lunch at the Austin airport, as he was leaving SXSW where he hosted the interactive track. Based on his videos, I was expecting a “zany” conversation. What I got was one of the most articulate and thoughtful perspectives of web participation I’ve heard. He comes at this from someone who has built a brand and a community with his own hands (he designed, programmed and edited everything on his site). He has dabbled at monetization strategies, but most importantly he understands what moves audiences to watch, interact and contribute. Undoubtedly, he is a true visionary when it comes to participatory use of the Internet.  At that airport lunch I asked him to be an advisor. Fortunately he loves what we do and agreed. For the last couple years Ze has been one of our most active advisors, giving feedback on our products and recently gave a memorable presentation/interview with Kelly Mooney at our Social Commerce Summit in May.

Last week we brought Ze to town and I asked him to address the whole company about what participation and community means to the audience as well as brands. After his talk, I got input from some of our employees about what struck them most about what Ze said.

Several of our Community Managers commented about how volume of user-generated video grows more slowly than review volume. Video is the “latest thing” to use in conjunction with customer reviews, and sometimes gaining traction is tough. Ze encourages us to narrow our focus and ask customers to post a video based on a specific idea or concept, rather than under the broad focus of a review. Encouraging them to send a video showing them doing something specific with a product can gain participation.

Focusing consumers also helps their contributions to remain relevant and helpful. If brands provide the tools and guidance around how to participate, and what to contribute, they get more meaningful participation. This struck me as very relevant to what we do. It’s why Ask and Answer is better than a forum, for example.

Ze is fairly tangential in his speaking, which is fun to watch, and he encourages us to remain that way when solving problems, and developing products and features. To Ze, the journey is as important as the destination – there are many ways to solve a problem – and we should continue to be curious and learn all along the way. Tangential possibilities can create alternate paths that should be explored.

A true individual, Ze has used his own site to display his own thoughts, as well as the insights of those who read/interact with it. His idea of the Internet as a community where anyone and everyone can participate leaves the mind open to all the possibilities of this huge resource. One size does not fit all – either for participants or brands.

For me the biggest topic we discussed is with regards to how a brand participates in the conversation. And not only how, but where, what do they say, how do they say it? The message from brands has always been so crafted, communication so guarded, the whole process managed by outside experts. How can a brand start communicating in real voice, through real people without radically changing what that brand means? This is a point of view that we will continue to evolve and develop, along with our clients, along with Ze.

So these are just some of the things we were left thinking about once Ze left. Tell us what he (or his site) makes you think about.

We all love good customer stories, especially ones that show how UGC changes the business from the inside out. It’s great hearing anecdotal stories from our clients, but getting to test, analyze, and actually prove value is even better. One of our premier UK clients is dominating both worlds – not only did Boden raise the bar on growing their online community (since launch, they’ve gathered over 70,000 reviews!), they also made sure that these results went towards helping prove ROI and bottom line benefits for the business.

Being a ‘big deal’ in the catalogue business means always making sure that your investments are making you the returns you expect - exactly the kind of thinking we admire in our clients. Working on a joint case study, both Boden and Bazaarvoice teams made sure to cover many different aspects of conversion and ROI.
In the end, the data speaks for itself. Using segmentation analysis, we compared users who read reviews (those who clicked on the ‘read all reviews’ link) and those that didn’t. Double digit increases in both sales conversion and average order value point out that the user-generated data on the site is helping drive solid numbers. Make sure to check out the full case study – fantastic results all around!

Being able to drive direct ROI for one of the most beloved, influential, and smartest apparel brands in the UK is a big deal – being able to tie direct stories to how this is changing the business from the inside out is even more powerful. To supplement the Case Study, Boden also asked their renowned design team and garment techs what they thought of product reviews on the site. Turns out close to 90% of the internal teams read reviews, either on the site or through an internal system, and over 85% say Ratings & Reviews will directly affect their work in the next season.

Here are some direct quotes for the designers themselves:

“I find this really really useful, and read the comments regularly. This is so that I can decide if we want to place more repeat orders, based on if we think the garment will return more highly than expected. Also, I like that you can filter the comments by rating, date etc.”

“It does tend to confirm for me that there is no one opinion about a product, and not all product shapes suit all figures- It’s nice to have lovely glowing reviews alongside those that are slightly more critical- good to have a balance. It’s nice to know that our products are making some people happy and that they’re taking time out to review them!”

Word of mouth full circle: letting the customer speak directly to the design department, then listening to that feedback and letting them help build a better product. Johnnie Boden must be so proud of his fantastic team!

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!

Doug Floyd, Social Networking Manager at Jewelry Television shared how JTV created its social commerce strategy.

At first, JTV pictured social commerce as a series of one-way messages, which the company would broadcast to various domains. JTV’s successful social commerce strategy today manifests as a complex communications network, with information coming and going from a variety of sources. The company now embraces this level of exchange, and fosters it with a combination of flexibility and preparation.

1. Build to Scale

Manage the company’s concerns regarding UGC by setting expectations early. Create policies that clearly define the different types of content, as well as how the company should distribute it, and who owns it. Lay out how open you want to be, and ensure members of your organization understand the company’s comfort levels. Sustain long-term success with buy-in at multiple levels within the company and on-going, internal training.

2. Flexibility Fosters Relevancy

Leave a trail to let people know where else to find you — tell them where else they can interact. Revisit these avenues and establish where your community thrives. Once you find your community’s voice, listen, and stay flexible enough to keep in tune with your customer’s vision.

3. Provide Your Users Multiple Outlets

Keep in mind that some users may choose one domain over another, while others may use different domains for different purposes. For example, one of JTV’s “Top 10 Reviewers” have published over 297 reviews with a 99 percent recommendation rate and an average star-rating of five. When she wants to contribute constructive feedback, she tends to use JTV’s blog.

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.

Conversion rates and other metrics help make measuring the effects of UGC on retail Web sites fairly intuitive. With our latest case study, we hoped to better understand the effects of Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews on non-retail sites, where proving ROI can seem more difficult. Specifically, we hoped to grasp how Ratings and Reviews affect consumer interest during the research phase of the buying cycle. Cars.com, a content-heavy site that provides easy to understand information to some 10 million car shoppers a month, served as a great test case.

While Cars.com does not sell anything on their site directly, they do provide consumers information to make well-informed buying decisions, and they display vehicle ads from dealers and private sellers across the country. To determine how the addition of Ratings and Reviews affected their consumer base, we looked at various intent-to-buy metrics, including:

• Number of page views for lead-related “Thank You” pages
• Click-through rates to dealer maps from inventory pages
• Click rates to the “Finance and Loan” calculator from inventory pages

Inventory pages with reviews out-performed those without in each of these ready-to-purchase metrics:

• Reviews improved lead conversion by 16%
• Reviews doubled the click-through to dealer maps
• Reviews increased visitors seeking financing options using the calculator by 45%

This illustrates that even businesses without sales on their site can examine other metrics to better understand how user-generated content affects later buying decisions, community, and consumer loyalty. Take a minute to read the full case study.

So it’s natural that we are fanatic about measuring the real impact (in terms of P&L) of our solutions. In fact, we have over 40 case studies, and have published 21 of them (so far) to our web site. Many more are coming related to the impact of Ask & Answer, Stories, and international deployments of our social commerce solutions.

While these case studies are listed on our site, many have asked for them and may not have seen them. So, I thought you may find it useful to see the list here. We also have PDFs of these case studies if you’d like them. Just email info (at) bazaarvoice.com, or you can download them directly from the site. Also, check out our white papers and research.

1. Customer reviews drive 196% increase in paid search revenue for Office Depot
2. Reviews help Cars.com drive “intent to buy”
3. Huge French retailer, Mistergooddeal, drives 40% conversion increase
4. User-generated content drives sales for Zales
5. Ratings & Reviews drive conversions for UK retailer
6. Ratings and reviews increase time on site
7. Reviews significantly reduce return rates
8. Paradox of choice
9. Customer review content in email marketing drives sales
10. SearchVoice Reviews quickly increases natural search traffic
11. SearchVoice Reviews drives organic customer acquisition
12. Use Net Promoters scores to identify solid influencers
13. Photo reviews drive conversion, enhance customer experience
14. “Sort by Rating” option drives conversion for Golfsmith
15. “Customer Favorite” categories drives sales
16. Social navigation drives sales at PETCO.com
17. Omniture/Bazaarvoice help major online retailer uncover results
18. The Answer Den drives orders, traffic, and sales results for PETCO.com
19. Ask & Answer attracts new users, increases conversion
20. Ask & Answer™ decreases product-related support costs
21. philosophy drives new site traffic with Mother’s Day campaign using Bazaarvoice Stories

Usually the CFO has a louder voice during tough times. Investments and expenses are scrutinized. They’re looking for cost-cutting programs and investments that grow revenue scaling against operating expenses.

So what marketing investments do you make when planning for difficult times?

When marketers talk in terms of opex scaling, the finance department perks up like you served them a double latte. With scaling, costs either decrease over time as revenue stays flat or increases, or costs don’t increase as quickly as revenue does. Therefore, revenue may grow year over year at 20%, but operating expenses grow only at 15%…thus netting 5% higher net profits.

CFOs like revenues, but they’re even more interested in profit and margin dollars. PE ratios and most methods of valuation are based on EBITDA and cash flow. Your goal is to show them how you can impact those numbers.

Unfortunately, there’s a problem with most marketing campaigns and site functionality investments during tough economic times. Traditional marketing campaigns aren’t as efficient because the purchasing bar is higher for the consumer. Consumers must have strong reasons to buy. The natural reaction of marketers is to discount products, but this has bigger implications for the brand.

There are also problems with introducing new site functionality during tough times. As employees get stretched thin, they don’t have time to use or optimize the new functionality, so the new, cool function doesn’t end up being the competitive advantage everyone hoped for, and its value depreciates over time.

So, you and the CFO are looking for investments that scale opex (growing revenue and impact while maintaining costs), don’t damage the brand and margins, and don’t require a lot of resources to get up and running.

These are all great reasons to implement user-generated content (UGC) on your site. In fact, consider proposing UGC as both a positive career move and a win for the company, as the ROI will get the thumbs-up from the CFO and the CEO.

Word of mouth: an excuse to buy

We all know that a “dirt cheap” deal can get people to click and check out. The CFO will like the revenue but hate the short-term margins, not to mention the impact to your brand.

But when customers are persuaded by the relevant and credible word of mouth by people like them, they have a new excuse to buy. Discounts aren’t as important when they find a product, service or experience that is a “must-have” based on the reviews they read. Customers feel confident making a purchase when they read reviews, answers and experiences from others.

What’s more, UGC brings new customers to your site while converting the ones who are already there. And promotions that include UGC increase average order value – no mean feat in hard times.
User-generated content is a marketing annuity.

At Bazaarvoice, we have published several case studies proving that more user-generated content – in reviews and questions answered by the community – equals higher conversion, average order value, traffic from SEO, lower returns and new opportunities for merchandising and marketing. We’ve seen conversion rates increase anywhere from 10% to 100%. Return rates (high cost) can drop as much as 67%.

So from day one, every new piece of user-generated content, whether it is a story, Q&A or a review, adds incremental impact (revenue) over time. The CFO can appreciate the concept of net present value and annuity revenue!

UGC (can) require very little effort

Bazaarvoice clients can immediately see the impact of UGC and start to leverage it. UGC is a highly leveraged investment because your customers are creating the content that helps sell products, so with a small percentage of one person’s time, you have a program that grows in impact (scaling!).

UGC costs stay relatively flat

Traditional marketing programs and campaigns only scale moderately, and that’s only if the costs per impression decreases or the advertising effectiveness increases. There is room to optimize campaigns; however, to bring in more customers, you typically need to increase costs proportionately.

With a hosted UGC solution, companies can predict their monthly costs and yet the potential revenue impact actually grows over time – the more UGC you accumulate, the better your revenue results get. You can then multiply the scaling by using UGC in more marketing tactics such as email campaigns. So, UGC offers a one-two punch: it scales itself and fuels your existing marketing programs!

There are two responses to tough times – retreat and cut costs or be intelligently aggressive. When you’re intelligently aggressive, you choose effective marketing investments that hit the “marketing bulls-eye,” driving long-term, sustainable P&L impact.

Investing in a scaling word of mouth program is the best investment you’ll make – before, during and after a recession.

Now, go make friends with the CFO!