Ever heard of Long Bets?  It's a fascinating site, one that can provide profound insights into the future of information technology, consumerism, even civilization itself, thanks to the predictor-challenger-argument format.  Many of the bets are indeed long, as in 148 years long, but others have already been won or lost.  One of my favorites, for its relevance to our industry, correctly predicted that in 2007 blogs would outrank traditional media sites, specifically The New York Times, in search engine results for top news stories.  The challenger of this bet just happened to be the CEO of New York Times Digital.  That one must have stung.  

On a related note, last week we placed a bet of our own at Bazaarvoice.  Not long in the way (duration) implied by Long Bets, but long in terms of our bullish outlook on user-generated content.  We expect this bet to pay off for our customers and their consumers in a big way and in the near term.  

Last Monday, we announced the launch of Bazaarvoice Radius, the industry's first ecosystem of partner relationships, integrated solutions, and best practices designed to drive strategic adoption of user-generated content.  That's PR talk, so what do I really mean?

For almost three years, since launching our first Ratings & Reviews customer way back in October 2005, we've been working with clients to integrate UGC into their online marketing programs and complementary e-commerce applications, thereby extending its value to the enterprise and to the end consumer.  Thanks to these integrations, our clients can measure the bottom-line impact of UGC and their customers can use UGC in a variety of contexts to discover and shop products and services with more confidence and greater trust.  

Bazaarvoice Radius is both a partnership program and an integration platform that brings our best thinking on the many multi-channel and enterprise uses of UGC, integration resources and tools (Web Services APIs, XML Data Feeds, etc.), and expert assistance (our team) together under one umbrella, accessible to our clients and partners. 

In summary, the goal of Radius is to accelerate UGC adoption and marketing innovation.  Our clients want ideas and integrated solutions, and our partners want opportunities to extend their solutions to support UGC and social commerce.  It's a perfect marriage. 

Check Radius for information on your current partners and/or vendors you may be evaluating.  If you have questions or suggestions, let us know, as the program will evolve rapidly with your feedback!  

As expected, we recently sold out the Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Summit. When we announced the summit we limited attendance to 200 and we had more than enough interest to fill that limit. If you were not able to get in, we will be posting blog entries on some of the takeaways from the conference, and clients will have access to many of the presentations after the event. We may expand the size of the event next year, but not by much. In our experience, smaller events provide much better sharing of best practices and networking.

We're very excited about the summit as it is the first time we're bringing together clients, prospects, partners, social commerce gurus, authors, entertainers, and mixing in a lot of fun  through an authentic Austin experience. Attendees and partners will interact with forward thinking marketing leaders from WalMart, Intuit, Sears, Dell, The Home Depot, PETCO, QVC, Ice.com, Macy's, Nike, Sam's Club and many many others. 

If you are a client, partner or speaker who is interested in attending or speaking next year, email us at summit@bazaarvoice.com

After Omniture's acquisition of Offermatica late last year, I made a note to catch up with Chris Duskin, who is now part of the Test&Target team at Omniture.  Testing, optimization, and targeting solutions have come a long way since my first experiences with Offermatica, Optimost, and others, so I wanted to tap Chris for ideas on how to apply these advanced technologies to the task of optimizing social commerce and social influence marketing.  I've spoken with a number of customers and prospects about their plans to invest in this area, so I hope this interview is helpful to those efforts.  

1. Let's discuss Omniture Test&Target – I associate Test with Offermatica and Target with TouchClarity, two companies and technologies that Omniture acquired separately.  Why do they fit together so cohesively?

The capabilities that TouchClarity and Offermatica delivered separately didn’t really overlap and are even more powerful when used together. People often think of basic A/B testing as being on one end of the online optimization spectrum and fully automated one-to-one predictive targeting as being on the other. But in between are a variety of other capabilities like geo targeting, targeting to marketer-defined behavioral segments, multivariate testing, and automated champion-challenger tests. Marketers can benefit from all these capabilities and, with Test&Target, can use them together to truly change the game for their business. You may learn from a one-to-one campaign on your home page that a particular behavior is predictive. Well, you might then target the segment of visitors that hasthepredictive characteristic in a landing page campaign. At the same time, you might be running a multivariate test (MVT) on your registration page and an A/B test on calls to action throughout your site. Test&Target averages about 14 active tests or campaigns per customer at any time, which is a testament to the impact of putting marketers in control, enabling them to try ideas quickly, and automating key parts of the optimization process.

2. Our customers are often interested in A/B testing the impact of customer reviews and other user-generated content.  What are the key considerations and test design factors to keep in mind when planning this type of test? What types of impact should customers look for, beyond the obvious like conversion?

Every test will have a specific goal and will be associated with a success metric. A company’s initial tests typically focus on conversion rate or revenue per visitor, but more sophisticated tests also consider metrics like registrations, cart abandonment rate, newsletter sign-ups, and participation in a site’s community. With product reviews, a key event is always review contribution. But whether people page through reviews as a result of your test is also important since it reflects meaningful engagement with the content.

In addition to thinking about success events, marketers should also consider visitor segments when creating their tests. Different types of visitors will respond differently to your alternatives. What matters to the person who frequently contributes to reviews might not matter at all to someone who only reads reviews, which of course suggests that I need to target different experiences and content to different types of visitors. We published an interesting case study from CNET related to this concept. On their mp3.com site, they relocated an artist photo widget to the top of the page for visitors who had previously interacted with that widget in its original, below-the-fold location. They saw a double-digit increase in engagement for those customers. And, the best part of the story is how quickly they turned a simple idea into an effective test using Test&Target. It took less than an hour to create the visitor segments, design the test, and launch it. Nobody from IT was even involved.

With product reviews, there are a lot of opportunities for testing and targeting beyond the product detail page. How can I use product review information in gift registries? Do star ratings in the cart reduce abandonments? Do I get more reviews when I target a homepage review solicitation to past purchasers?

3. The possibilities of behavioral targeting based on social engagement are virtually limitless – how should companies leverage the behavior of writing a review, asking a question about a product, or simply using reviews (sorting, searching, etc.)?

When people interact with UGC, they’re telling you something about what is relevant to them. Marketers can use these signals to target more and more relevant experiences. Of course, they’ll need to use testing to evaluate their efforts because people’s interests change - what was effective last year, last month, or last week might be less effective today. Companies using Test&Target to capitalize on this opportunity have developed a culture of optimization that embraces the ongoing and iterative nature of testing and targeting. Marketers are empowered to make site changes without waiting for IT, can try new ideas quickly, and can use predictive models that respond instantly to changes in interests. Gone are the days when you had to write one MRD to put up a new promotional banner and another MRD to pull it down a week later.

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A good friend and ex-Dell colleague (and Bazaarvoice client) passed away on Friday, April 25, 2008, after a courageous and inspiring battle with brain cancer. I want to celebrate and share the piece of his life I knew, and the words of wisdom he left for all of us. Two months after I joined Dell in March 1999, a curly-haired Harvard grad moved into the cube next door. Over the next seven years Rich and I worked together to help build Dell’s consumer eBusiness to a $3.5B business, and then on Dell’s CRM and segmentation strategy (he worked on corporate strategy while I worked in Consumer division). But what he worked on is not as important as HOW he accomplished his goals.

Rich exemplified leadership. In fact, he had the rare quality of being a Level 5 Leader, as outlined by Jim Collins’ book, Good to Great. He excelled through confident humility amidst a (typical) corporate environment of politics, ego and alpha aggression. He always put decision in terms of what was right for the business, and helped others grow in the process. Everyone loved to work with Rich or for him.

So many of us were awestruck at Rich’s knowledge and wisdom. Rich often put up ‘observations’ on his small whiteboard in his cube. One time he made the observation that time and quality of mission statement are inversely related – graphed on the board, the more time spent on the mission statement the less it resonates. So true. And so funny.

Rich was a devoted father and husband. He excelled in this role as much as he excelled at work. We often played basketball together before work, but for a lot of the year, he also found time to teach children’s Bible study. Rich always left at 6pm to get home in time for dinner with his wife and growing family (now three children: David, Josh and James). Here you see pictures of him at my 30th birthday holding our new sons.

Occasionally we would joke in Spanish to each other, and I gave him the (inside joke) nickname of “El Bueno”, because in every way he was good. He was bound for greatness, and achieved it quickly at Dell accelerating his career to be Director for Global CRM and Customer Experience, reporting to Dell’s CMO.

Two months after I left Dell in early 2006 Rich called to seek advice about his decision to leave. He was interviewing to be President of Peruvian Connection in Kansas City. His Dell career was skyrocketing, and Rich could get a senior exec job at any other large company, but we agreed leading this growing multi-channel retailer (with much better margin than computers!) was his dream job.In February the recruiter responded to my endorsement of Rich:   

Thanks for your endorsement of Rich Lloyd.  We had him tested, and the management testing center said he's brilliant.  Rich seems to be a rare combination of raw intellect and leadership capability.  Off the charts in both categories.

They saw what I didn’t have to tell them. He got the job, and on March 28 he sent this email:

This is my final week here at Dell and I want to say thank you to all of the mentors, leaders, and colleagues, and truly, friends, that have meant a great deal to me in my nearly seven years here.  I am moving on to become President of Peruvian Connection, a private, direct-sales luxury apparel company based in the Kansas City area.   

I came to Dell in 1999 seeking the world's best post-graduate business education — and I got that, and then some. Along the way I met some truly remarkable people and was given some incredibly rewarding and enriching assignments.  I want to thank all of you for a great experience, and in particular, four great bosses/mentors in Mike George, Tom Vogl, Bobbi Dangerfield and Kurt Kirsch, who believed in me and in my potential…  People who were great business leaders, but even better people.

Many people would say the same good things about Rich; he was a great boss and mentor to many people I know. He impacted many others through the example he set at work and home.Rich and I kept in touch sporadically as he thrived at Peruvian. I saw him at a couple conferences and he was in great spirits. He was very happy in Kansas City and at his job, making a bigger impact on a smaller scale. I had to bottle some of his wisdom, and interviewed him on my blog here.

In August 2007 Rich was diagnosed with Brain Cancer. He moved back to Utah with his family to seek treatment, and kept everyone who knew him up to date through his CaringBridge journal. Like hundreds of others, I read every alert. Over the last 8 months he shared his ups and downs, but ALWAYS with a sense of hope, optimism, strength and gratitude. I never read or sensed despair from Rich or Marianne (his wife). He inspired hundreds (perhaps thousands) of people through his battle. Even up to –  especially up to – the very end.

Rich is in a better place now, and he left us something that can put us in a better place on earth. In the midst of his battle with Cancer, Rich and his family came up with a phrase that captured Rich’s outlook on life. They called it “LIVE RICH”, yet it has nothing to do with money. As you’ll see, it has everything to do with living RICHLY. A week before he passed, Rich recorded his words on what it means to LIVE RICH (Thanks to Rob Sorensen for sharing). I will be thinking about Rich and the example he set for the rest of my life. I hope you (and everyone you pass this along to) do as well. Life is short. Live Rich.

Below are Rich’s own words from his recording…

1. SEIZE THE DAY: Every day is a precious gift from God

“You’ve got one life.  You’ve got a limited amount of it.  You don’t know how long it’s gonna be.”
 
2. LIFE IS ABOUT PEOPLE NOT THINGS: make memories with the people you love

“And so I just think about every day we have to make choices, and their outcome might seem small but the significance of making that choice might seem teeny, it might be I go to my son’s soccer game or I drag myself out when I’m cold and tired go see my sister speak in church and all these choices get harder when you have a trial or this adversity like we’re experiencing.  But just because they’re hard doesn’t mean they’re not worth making. So just remember that your choices lead to other choices, and they need to be good choices. “
LIVE RICH. Live Richly.

———

More…

    * Hear Rich’s own words on How to LIVE RICH
    * Read his inspiration journal of his battle with cancer on CaringBridge
    * Read Rich's Obituary
    * Donate to the Lloyd Children Missionary and Education Fund through any Wells Fargo Bank

Austin, TX is the Live Music Capital of the World. So, it's fitting we bring live music to the first annual Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Summit!

One of the nation’s hottest up-and-coming bands, the Band of Heathens, will be providing their authentic Austin brand of Country, Blues, and Soul music at the Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Summit, in May.  In 2007, the Band of Heathens was named Best New Band at the Austin Music Awards, no small feat for a band in the Live Music Capital of the World.  When you see them live, you will see why.  The Band of Heathens’ music brings to mind timeless acts like Little Feat, the Rolling Stones, Otis Redding, and the Band, with lots of 3 part harmony and foot stomping soul.    

This year finds the Band of Heathens everywhere from brief appearances in Barack Obama Superbowl Commercials to touring across the country from the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, to Mountain Stage in West Virginia, to the CMA Music Festival in Nashville, and back home for the Austin City Limits Festival.  We are excited to have them at the Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Summit just one week after the release of their new self titled studio album.  Tune in to XM Radio channel 12 (X-Country) to hear the Band of Heathens regularly.

Also…there will be a special, exclusive surprise from the Band of Heathens and Bazaarvoice for everyone attending this year's summit!

With the explosive growth of international markets, Bazaarvoice has expanded the Client Services team overseas starting with their first Community Manager, focused on the needs of its UK and European clients. Anna Skaya, our International Community Manager, gives us a quick look into the growing UK online community.

by Anna Skaya, International Community Manager

Londoners are huge talkers! On the mobile, at the tube stations, or in queue at the loo, there is a constant exchange of information on every level and in every direction. Plus – with the reputation of being the most international city in the world – it happens in every language! It is no surprise that I am finding that the online community in the UK to be just as vocal.

Word of mouth IS London. I know it firsthand – as a recent arrival, I already know where they serve the best Sunday Roast, or where to find the best tikka masala, or that I can get the coolest knickers at Primark (no kidding!) – all without ever opening a guidebook or patrolling the city.  Londoners LOVE to talk. On the tube and in the pub, as well as on blogs, and our client’s sites - everyone is doing their part to make me feel like a local.

So far, I have been genuinely impressed with my clients, and some of the biggest UK names like Screwfix, Wickes, Boden and Halfords are driving the UK online industry. Their fresh ideas and forward-thinking Ratings and Reviews and Ask & Answer branding is reaching the best audiences, and growing a fantastic online community. 
What I’ve learned so far…

Brits are positive about products! Our recent study proved that UK shoppers are even more positive than US shoppers when it comes to reviews. 88% of UK reviews have a  4 and 5-star ratings, and 80% of UK reviewers have written six or more online reviews – showing huge brand engagement. I love this stat – I think it shows that the market in the UK is smaller, allowing for more consumer loyalty with set brands. UGC makes that connection and loyalty with the brand even stronger! I knew this story really hit on something big when I saw it picked up in almost a dozen publications this week, including Internet Retailing, New Media Age, NetImperative, and more!

This is tremendous news for our client here – the need for word of mouth and the excitement generated by these stats truly show the importance and necessity of the customer voice in the industry. As we gear up for our Social Commerce Summit in Austin, look to the UK to be driving many of the new ideas on social media, blogging and consumer intelligence. And I’ll be bringing all the learnings back to the UK for our clients who can’t make the trip to across the Atlantic.

UK clients embrace multi-channel marketing! While use of reviews overall continues to build in the UK, what really sets this market apart are the fresh ideas and new brand voices – there is just so much room for creativity and innovation here!  Boden’s post-purchase email is a great example of how they extend their personal voice beyond their site while collecting more reviews, and their “weekend getaway” email is terrific – and so innovative that Kelly Mooney (author of The Open Brand) blogged about them!

My favorite frills and lace client, Figleaves, recently blogged on their uber-fun blogleaves to encourage customers to become their lucky 10,000th reviewer. Way to get the whole community pumped up about your milestone! And check out the ultimate use of multi-channel far beyond the website, even on a double-decker bus! 

This is only the beginning! We are rocking it in the UK – the energy is high, and there is so much to do! My favorite part? Meeting my UK clients in person and helping them innovate with their customer-generated content. It makes the 300 days of rain all seem worthwhile!

Apologies for the several week delay between posting partner interviews, but I am pleased to share the following interview with John Squire, Chief Strategy Officer of Coremetrics.  John has been quite busy recently, driving the launch of Connect and preparing for a major product release in May, but he took the time to share his outlook on a variety of industry issues.  We welcome your comments and invite you to suggest questions and topics for future partner interviews by emailing partners@bazaarvoice.com.

1. It’s 2008.  By now, every online business understands that without a web analytics solution, they are flying blind.  That said, not all businesses are sophisticated users of web analytics.  On average, how would you grade the industry overall?

I think it’s fair to say that most online business owners recognize that flying blind is far from ideal.  Understanding an issue and actually working to overcome it are two entirely different activities.  I would give the entire industry a C- overall.  That said, there’s certainly a class of businesses that are far and away excelling at their use of web analytics.

2. What are companies doing extremely well?

Looking at the leaders in the field of using web analytics to manage their business, a casual observer would likely conclude the secret to their success is that they are actively and constantly monitoring the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) of their web business.  That’s a common trait among each of these, but what we’ve seen that separates the high performing companies from the distant followers is that their organizations truly embrace the notion of data driven decisions.  I realize that is easy to say, but these companies look at both the macro trends of their business and constantly break down each KPI to understand the causal factors that drive those trends.  From that, they build business models that describe how a % increase or decrease in those causal factors will impact the value created servicing their online visitors and customers.  It isn’t easy!  Businesses that lead in this area work hard to map their online and offline investments to their topline objectives: Sales, Leads Generated, Advertising Revenue Generated, Bookings, Applications, and the many metrics for Customer Satisfaction, Engagement, and Service.

3. What big opportunities are routinely being overlooked and why?

The odd thing about the online business is that there are so many articles, case studies, and books available on the best practices online businesses are deploying, that it can be daunting to know where to start.  What I see is that many companies don’t start or don’t value the importance of constantly evaluating their business for improvement.  I think there are two areas where a majority of business owners have huge opportunities:

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Part 1 of this post hit a nerve.  I received many emails from long-time industry friends as well as employees in our company.  It makes me happy to know that a lot of you are thinking about the same profound issues that I am.

As I promised, Part 2 is more focused on the forces shaping global commerce that we directly see in our business, working with our clients and partners.

5.    Digitally archived word-of-mouth: Blogs are here to stay (see BusinessWeek for a recap).  Word-of-mouth online is not a phase.  It’s a permanent shift.  Word-of-mouth has always been with us (that’s why I named our company Bazaarvoice).  More than 70 of the top 100 retailers in the U.S. have, or are launching, customer reviews today.  When Brant and I launched Bazaarvoice three years ago, only five retailers in the U.S. offered customer reviews, including Amazon.com.  Over the past three years, we have served 10 billion reviews to shoppers (see our recent celebration of this and real-time counter) and are on a current run-rate to serve another 20 billion over just the next year of our business.  Customer reviews are word-of-mouth.  People speak the same way about products online as they do offline.  We are literally seeing word-of-mouth for the first time in human history.

        Luxury retailers are still vigorously debating this – not wanting to give up control and open up their brand.  Like I do almost every week (it seems), I spent time on Wednesday in NYC debating this with the head of online marketing and merchandising of a luxury apparel retailer.  Meanwhile, Best Buy and Wal-Mart have been launching incredible multichannel campaigns (see them here and here), leveraging the power of customer reviews to drive sales online and offline.  Wal-Mart and QVC have all of their online merchandisers plugged into our reports.  They are having intense conversations with their suppliers to reduce returns, increase customer satisfaction, and ultimately evolve their offerings.  The end-game?  Better products and services for all of us.  I knew we were on to something big when we started Bazaarvoice.  But I had no idea it would affect this much change, this quickly.  The fact that Wal-Mart launched customer-review-focused, in-store nationwide campaigns only six months after they launched with us online has staggering implications for the retail industry.

        And it’s not just limited to retail.  Any market where word-of-mouth plays a significant role in driving the transaction are good markets for the type of transformation we offer.  We are, or soon will be (due to signed agreements), powering customer reviews for some of the largest manufacturers of consumer products, banks, credit unions, insurance companies, portals, travel sites, and healthcare companies.  We are doing this globally, in 20 international languages.  We have four offices now – Austin, London, Paris, and now Singapore.  This is a global movement.  As an entrepreneur, it is impossible for me to not be passionate about helping clients lead this transformation.  Word-of-mouth online is an incredibly disruptive force, and I mean this in a positive way if harnessed correctly.  Why did I start this company after seven years at Coremetrics?  Because I knew it worked - but I didn't realize that it worked as well as I know it does now. 

        Seven years ago, Michael Porter wrote about the Web’s incredibly disruptive impact on the five forces (standard material for any MBA program).  When I read this article in 2001, I thought, "Porter is late to the game".  Now when I re-read it in the context of the social media movement, I think he was incredibly visionary.  Smart companies are reaping the rewards of that disruption, while others have been too slow to change and are going out of business.

6.    Six degrees of separation (tip of the hat to my brilliant and passionate friend, Mitch): Millennials are growing up connected to social networks, namely Facebook.  Their network of friends is intact for as long as they’ve been in “the system”.  They will be able to track their friends’ progress throughout life’s many stages – forever.  I’ve been a programmer since I was 7 and have communicated online (via BBSs) since I was 8 (launching my own when I was 10).  So I can relate.  But I can’t imagine all of the implications of all of this connectedness.  What does it mean, as a human being, to be able to so easily track your friends evolution in life as they go from preteen to teen to college to career to marriage to parenthood and, ultimately, to death?  A typical Millennial is connected to hundreds of friends on Facebook.  By comparison, I personally keep in close touch with only one of my early childhood friends (a few more are reconnecting via Facebook, but I have missed decades of their life and its hard to relate to them anymore). 

        How will these Millennials be shaped by this as shoppers?  As people?  Obviously, social media everywhere will be an expectation.  Ubiquitous Web access, via mobile, is rapidly coming.  How will companies adapt?  Typical Facebook banner-ads are getting .005% click-thru rates, as reported on the Web 2.0 panel at Shop.org last week by those helping their clients experiment with them.  That’s pathetic performance!  Millennials don’t want the disruption by brands when they are in the modality of friending – unless they actually help them enhance that experience.  Being on Google, Yahoo!, or Live.com and clicking on a paid-search link when they are in a shopping modality is a whole different story, and obviously that works – ridiculously well.  Facebook applications, however, are performing when they give unique value to these consumers.  On that same Shop.org panel, the Victoria’s Secret PINK Facebook application was pointed as one good example. 

        What are the long-term implications of this connectedness?  I don’t know, but we’re determined to help figure this out by working with all of our clients.

Thank you again for an amazing three years in business.  It is a true honor to work with such smart clients, and I look forward to seeing you soon at our Social Commerce Summit. 

I’ll warn you upfront that this is my most personal post on this blog and may not have much to do with the word-of-mouth industry.  I would argue, however, that it has a lot to do with the mindset of consumers.  And, of course, they carry word-of-mouth.  You decide, should you decide to read on.

We’re approaching our 3-year anniversary (May 2) at Bazaarvoice, and I’ve been restless thinking about this incredibly transformational time in history.  I’m on my way back from an exhilarating week in Philly and NYC, and I’ve literally had 12 hours of sleep over the past three days.  My journey has included a $320 taxi ride from NYC to Philly at 1:30am and many other moments of craziness that I may share with you one day over beers.  Here are some of the forces of transformation I have been churning on:

1.    Civic duty: Bill Gates leaving Microsoft to focus, with his wife, on spending his mindboggling billions on the most important causes in the world.  The places where their money can affect the most impact.  Like Andy Grove recommended in High-Output Management (one of my favorite beginning management books), you should spend your time on the highest leverage activities – those that impact and empower that greatest number of people in your organization.  With Warren Buffett being one of the smartest people in history and realizing his own strengths and weaknesses, knowing that Bill and Melinda Gates would do a better job than him on impacting change through charity, entrusting them with 85% of his equally mindboggling billions – this was the most incredible personal initiative that I can think of in my lifetime.

        Civic duty is very powerful, and I believe we are in a transformational period where more people are getting involved.  From the beginning of Bazaarvoice, we have focused on charity, and this has nourished the soul of our company.  I’m convinced that our usual involvement in this area has led to faster and more profitable growth than our peers (fellow rapid-growth companies our age).  In Judaism, we call this tzedakah.  Perhaps the Web connects us and creates more accountability in this area, where a virtuous cycle of giving kicks in.

2.    Free-market regulation: I have always been a Republican.  I am also Jewish and most of my fellow Jews are not Republicans.  I am also an Austin native, where most people are Democrats.  And I am a Wharton MBA alum, where I presented all day Tuesday, on my own dime, on the subject of leadership and teamwork (teaching is giving and learning).  If there was ever a free-market focused school, it's Wharton.  This whole mortgage mess has great people, such as the Board of Directors at Shop.org, talking about free-market regulation in a way that I never heard in my professional career.  The exotic instruments created, the ignorant (or knowingly false) assumption that housing prices would climb forever, the forced sale of Bear Stearns, the sleepless nights for Paulson and Bernarke, and the near collapse of our economy.  It’s hard to sleep when I feel an obligation to study and learn from this period in history.  I grok business.  And it really has me thinking about the wisdom of unregulated capitalism.  As a result, for the first time in my life I will be voting for a Democrat in this presidential election (not my only reason for the switch).  The dot-com bubble bursting, which was personally so painful for me as an early pioneer as the founder of Coremetrics with 100 of our dot-com clients going out of business, pales in comparison to the trillions that will be lost globally as a result of our mortgage bubble.  I know from my conversations in the industry that many of us are rethinking unregulated capitalism.  I think this will mess will lead to greater consumer involvement in government, and the Web will be an extremely powerful force in that.  Just wait until everyone can vote online.

3.    The health of our planet: To be transparent with you up-front, I drive a 2008 Audi S8, which has a 10-cylinder, 450-horsepower motor.  It is an incredible machine, a real dream car for me and a reward for my entrepreneurial success, but it’s also a gas-guzzling monster.  So you can either skip this paragraph, or read on. 

        An Inconvenient Truth was just that – too inconvenient.  Hybrids haven’t really made a dent (well less than 5% of all cars sold are hybrids), and the truth is they are mostly gas-powered anyways – more of a symbolic gesture really.  The Tesla (see my previous post on them) and the Chevrolet Volt – that’s real change (but generating electricity also consumes resources).  I keep reading about the two-stroke cheap motors in China spewing massive emissions.  These small motors are even worse than huge ones. 

        Companies are moving toward green, both for attracting a new age of green-aware consumers as well as to ensure their longevity.  I have blogged about this many times over the past three years (see Aug-06, Dec-06, Jan-07 for three insightful examples).  It is a huge trend.  But I’m restless because we’re not making progress as fast as I thought we would.  I sometimes feel like we have a freight train speeding towards us, with rapid worldwide population growth not helping.  As I’ve blogged about previously, I’m ultimately hopeful that entrepreneurs will successfully affect real change by capitalizing on the multi-trillion dollar opportunities.  The venture capitalists are all over it, and that's because the entrepreneurs are all over it.  One only needs to look at the rapidly rising price of oil and commodities to realize that there are ridiculous amounts of money to be made if you can find real alternative sources of energy.  But I’m pretty sure it is going to take government regulation to get there, as my faith in unregulated capitalism has been somewhat shattered (see #2 above).        

        The implications for companies is obvious – attract green-aware consumers through their actions and affect real change to ensure their longevity (e.g., are they dependent on gasoline or other diminishing resources to survive?).

4.    The war on terrorism: This is too thorny to really dig into publicly, and I’m not educated enough about all of the issues to feel confident in my proposed solutions.  I pray that our government is.  In any case, this is a huge problem for the human race, not just the U.S., and I have no idea what happens if we stop being vigilant.  It is pretty obvious that the actions of our current President are easy to criticize in hindsight, and there has never been a costlier war.  As I travel throughout Europe, it is clear to me we need a President that will be able to repair our relationships with other countries.  I look forward to seeing solutions vigorously debated in the upcoming Presidential campaign (and I’m sure it will continue for long afterwards) and being open-minded to solutions proposed then.  I’m hopeful that the Web will bring us together, as the human race, to debate these issues and find reconciliation through understanding each other.  Given the increasingly global nature of business, this is incredibly important to businesses as well as the disruption could be exponential.

I would love to hear your perspectives on my rants above.  After almost three years in business, having much pride for what we have accomplished as a business and team, I can tell you that the best part of my job is working with our incredibly smart clients.  Thank you!

I'll post Part 2 (update: Part 2 is live now) of this trend piece soon, and I promise to make it more focused on word-of-mouth and our business.  And I'll end on a better note, too.

And now I’m going to catch up on some sleep! 

Mitch Joel, President of Twist Image, saw Brett (CEO of Bazaarvoice) at Shop.org and did his 99th "Six Pixels of Separation Podcast". In this podcast, Brett reveals many of the key statistics and findings we've had over the years, both from research and analyzing the data from user generated content from our client base (190+). This was really well done and wanted to share it with you. Click to hear the interview…the interview starts just about half way into this podcast..