This year’s Razorfish Digital Brand Experience Study was particularly interesting to me, as its focus shifted to ways consumer interact with brands online. This tells me what we’re seeing more and more – a brand’s online presence doesn’t just exist to “tell and sell”; today’s consumers want more.

Razorfish reports that “the overwhelming majority of consumers who actively engage with a brand digitally—whether by entering a contest, “friending” a brand on Facebook, or even watching an advert on YouTube—show dramatic upticks across the entire marketing funnel.” In short, digital experiences create customers.

Here are a few key takeaways.

“64% of consumers have made a first purchase from a brand because of a digital experience such as a web site, microsite, mobile coupon, or email. No other medium has so impacted—or altered—the traditional marketing funnel this way.” And these purchases aren’t limited to online activities. A nearby local coffee shop has no website, but tweets special offers and events. With iTunes, DVRs, Tivo, and hulu, there’s no need for me to hear or see most ads anymore. Brands that aren’t present online – in multiple ways – are missing out on huge opportunities to reach consumers.

And this first impression is critical – these online experiences can also impact offline decisions.

“65% of consumers report that a digital brand experience has changed their opinion (either positively or negatively) about a brand or the products and services a brand offers. For those brand marketers still neglecting (or underestimating) digital, it’s as if they’ve shown up to a cocktail party in sweatpants.” We’re seeing more and more brands putting just as much into their online presence as they do their brick-and-mortar stores. Both experiences should help consumers not just buy, but engage with, a brand.

Content must be credible and relevant to draw consumers in, and user-generated content fits both of these criteria. Brands that ask shoppers and customers to engage – by answering questions, writing reviews, etc. – are building unbiased, authentic content from people who already have an online network. More and more content on the Web is created by consumers, but enabled by brands.

As Ze Frank and I wrote in our recent paper, “Participation Chains Connect Customers to Your Brand,” each contribution drives more contribution. When I share my review on Twitter or Facebook, my followers have a chance to see it. And once people start reviewing products online, others want to chime in with their opinions – it’s why an inexpensive dog treat, Greenies, has thousands of reviews on PETCO.com.

If you haven’t read the study yet, it’s full of insights about who’s online, how often they’re online, and how they engage with brands – not just their friends – online.

Ze Frank and I were having dinner a several months ago at a fantastic Thai “hole in the wall” in New York. The conversation turned to a subject we think about a lot, albeit coming from different perspectives. We  started talking about how conversations and ongoing touchpoints really make the difference – when actions build upon each other, it can be incredibly impactful. We decided to call this the “participation chain.”

Consider a research study that involved phone calls to Dallas residents from Hunger Relief Committee. One set of residents received a call asking if the organization could come to their homes to sell them cookies to benefit the charity; the second set of residents were asked the same question, but the caller first asked, “How are you feeling this evening?” and waited for an answer. This one question nearly doubled the number of positive responses from residents. Further, once the volunteers were in their homes, almost all participants who’d been asked this question actually made a purchase.

This one question made all the difference, showing that the more time a consumer spends with you (assuming it’s a positive experience, of course) directly relates to how likely they are to spend money with you. We’re constantly creating new ideas and ways for consumers to easily interact with brands – like voting for favorite stories. So how are brands reaching out – transparently, authentically – to encourage more interactions with consumers?

We’ve all seen sweepstakes and other gimmicky ways that brands have basically tried to build their databases, but user-generated content on a site really gives brands opportunities to create real dialogue online that’s actually meaningful to other consumers. For example, we’ve seen brands have great success with topics and campaigns that don’t tie directly to products – like PETCO’s Howl-O-Ween campaign, which encouraged pet owners to share photos of their pets’ Halloween costumes. PETCO knows their target consumers love their pets and want to show them off, and this campaign gave customers and prospects a whole new way to connect with PETCO, which could pay off for months and years to come.

Amazon has a lot of ways for users to interact with their brand. Of course, they encourage product reviews, and also encourage voting on review helpfulness. They also allow users to create wish lists and registries, and customize recommendations based on the types of items they’ve purchased in the past.

Bazaarvoice clients are constantly finding new ways to interact with consumers online – responding to reviews, answering shopper questions online, and highlighting top participants in other media, like blogs. Free People does a great job highlighting their top reviewers, and a recent webinar discussed how brands make the most of their top contributors.

The new white paper Ze and I wrote together, “Participation Chains Connect Customers to Your Brand,” delves into how important an authentic brand/consumer conversation is, and the real impact it has on businesses. We also go into detail about maximizing the results of these interactions.

Download your copy of “Participation Chains Connect Customers to Your Brand.” We’d love to hear how increased interactions have helped drive increased sales (or other business metrics) for you.

Time and money are two sides of the same coin.

• Why do timeshare salespeople give so many freebies to get 90 minutes of your time? Because they know their chances of converting you to buy a condo on the beach goes way up with that much time. You’re participating in their process.
• When I managed Dell.com consumer site, I added an interactive financing calculator to a page and saw abandonment drop in half? Why? Visitors were participating in something.
• After you purchase something on Café Press you are asked to forward an invitation to that store to five friends. That works because people were engaged in purchase participation.
• Freemium models for web apps and viral loops work because participation is required.

Each of these examples demonstrate the power of participation. Once a person engages with something in a participatory way, they are more likely to engage again. And if you can get someone to participate by contributing content, you can use that content to pull others in to participation. And so the cycle continues.

This was the gist of a conversation I had with Bazaarvoice advisor and new media visionary Ze Frank in a ‘hole in the wall’ Thai restaurant in New York several months ago. Several discussions and emails later, we had the beginning of a whitepaper on a new concept we call “Participation Chains.” We are talking about all the ways we interact – or want to interact – with brands, and how these interactions build relationships over time.

In short, the more brands start conversations with consumers, the more everyone can win. Ze and I outline a variety of ways to keep interaction going, and we outline the details of building an effective participation chain strategy.

Our recent webinar with 1-800-Flowers and JC Whitney was all about results, featuring real success stories from our clients showing measurable ROI through their UGC efforts.

Duke Marr, VP of Ecommerce and Product Management for 1-800-Flowers.com, shared examples of the company’s success with customer stories. As a brand selling an emotionally connected product, 1-800-Flowers seeks to connect their customers’ passion with their products and brand.

The company launched their “Spot a Mom” Stories campaign leading up to Mother’s Day, asking contributors to share their stories of different types of moms. The spotamom.com microsite spotlighted different types of mothers, tied to specially priced categories encouraging multi-item purchases based on “mom type.”

The results were huge, with 1-800-Flowers.com beating their projected Mother’s Day sales by 9%. The campaign, which collected hundreds of stories and garnered thousands of votes, coincided with an increase in total transactions, items per order, and new customers. Social engagement tools helped to “viralize” the content, and URL tracking codes allowed 1-800-Flowers track how story content tied directly to the purchase funnel.

We’ve discussed auto parts retailer JC Whitney’s many UGC successes in the past. Geoff Robertson, VP of Ecommerce and Technology, shared some key recommendations for ROI metrics:

• Determine your high-level objectives. What do you want your UGC to do? Drive revenue? Increase profit? Increase purchases per customer?
• Choose the metrics to measure these goals. Increased conversion, reduced returns, increased items per order, etc.
• Communicate these metrics to gain company-wide buy in. Publish results weekly and fuel the involvement of others.
• Do more with your UGC. Take your metrics a step further. If your goal is to increase customer satisfaction, follow up with negative reviewers. If your goal is to reduce return rates, build a skilled team to answer customer questions quickly and accurately.

Want to watch this webinar? Request it here. And stay tuned to our blog for more on our Social Commerce Summit Webinar Series.

This blog post is guest-written by Kathy Smith-Willman, Director of People Operations at Bazaarvoice.

We recently moved (for the eighth time in our company’s history!) to a new office — our largest ever. The plan is to continue to grow into this space and stay here awhile.

We did a lot of work planning the space to be bright, open, and have plenty of places for teammates to get together, and it’s really working out well. The new, upgraded space has prompted a lot of ad hoc meetings and hallway conversations that didn’t happen as much in our old space.

We’ve really worked to create a “home” for Bazaarvoice, and I think we’ve achieved it. Check out the photos of our new space.

Many of the offices have really gorgeous panoramic views of west Austin.

The bright green adds a vibrant energy to the space.

Of course, we still have room to play. The custom mural in the game room was created by local artist Josh Davies.

Many of the materials used in the design were reclaimed/recycled.

This blog post is the first in a series highlighting Bazaarvoice interns. It is guest-written by Tara DeMarco, Marketing Intern at Bazaarvoice.

If you’re thinking about applying for an internship at Bazaarvoice, there’s no better way to learn what to expect than to ask an intern.

Harrison Yeager started his marketing internship at Bazaarvoice in January 2009. After a semester full of hard work, great experiences, and free snacks, Harrison joined the team as a full-time hire in the marketing department. He sat down with us to answer a few questions about Bazaarvoice, his internship, and the unbeatable culture at Austin’s Best Place to Work.

How did you hear about Bazaarvoice? What made you want to work here?

I first heard about Bazaarvoice through friends working here. As senior year rolled around, and I began investigating career options, I decided to learn more. I quickly realized how much I interacted with Bazaarvoice technology, and knew the company was onto something big. I recognized that Bazaarvoice was defining their space. This kind of market leadership and entrepreneurial spirit wasn’t something I saw at other companies I’d considered before. When my friends started to tell me about the great culture here, and then began to recruit me as a marketing intern, I couldn’t say no.

How did you apply for your position? What did you do to get hired?

Two friends and Bazaarvoice employees reached out to me about an internship. I submitted my resume to the marketing team and came in for an on-site interview. I was hired as a marketing intern, with one condition from my pending boss at Bazaarvoice. She would only hire me if I found a replacement for my old job, where I was working for her husband. Luckily, I found a replacement, and I was able to transition into my new role as marketing intern. I learned a lot during the internship. With a lot of hard work, collaborative input, dedication, and adding my own personality to the culture, the team decided they could use me as a full-time employee. At graduation, I was converted to Marketing Operations Associate, where I currently am a part of an awesome team.

How was your Bazaarvoice internship different from other jobs you’ve had in the past?

My internship was radically different from other jobs, mostly due to the amount of responsibility entrusted to me. As an intern at Bazaarvoice, people don’t seem to treat you any differently than they would a full-time employee. You’re given long-term projects with deadlines, integral business tasks, and the opportunity to find ways to improve the business overall. People value the “outsider” input an intern can bring. Today, as a full-time employee, I have seen this full circle while working with the new marketing interns. Sometimes I think an internship at Bazaarvoice can be more challenging and impactful than many full-time jobs.

What was the most important thing you learned in your internship?

The most important thing I learned as an intern was to stay focused on the objective, and always look for ways to improve. You should be able to justify the work you are doing by understanding the objective and the potential impact. As an intern, I always made sure I knew the end goal behind all the work I did, and how it would affect the business. Looking at process from different perspectives is a must, and this will help you identify ways to improve operations, as well as improve your own workflow and discipline.

What advice would you give others who’d like to intern here?

Bazaarvoice has an expectation that you will be good at what you can do here. If you really want to be a part of the team, you need to not only prove how good you may be at the given job, but how much you understand what Bazaarvoice is about. We look for people who believe in our culture, our potential, our market leadership, and the core of our business – the customer voice. If you can demonstrate this in the hiring process, then you are the type of person we are looking for.

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If you’re qualified for a Bazaarvoice internship, we’re hiring! If you know a passionate, talented, creative individual looking for the right place to build a career, refer them here.

Stay tuned to our blog for more on our interns and the awesome opportunities at Bazaarvoice.

We’re excited and humbled at the growth we’ve seen in the UK, as we’ve only been there since 2007.

On Friday, October 30, Bazaarvoice was named the 2009 Technology Vendor of the Year by Retail Systems magazine. The competition was tough, with eight finalists vying for the title, including several huge, well-known UK providers.

This Award comes on the heels of rapidly accelerating company growth in Europe. Of the UK’s top 50 UK online retailers, 34 have reviews on site, and we’re happy to say that 19 of these are Bazaarvoice clients.

As our sales and implementation team grows in the UK and across Europe, awards like these – in addition to the positive results and feedback we get from these international clients – tell us we’re providing a service that is needed and appreciated by top international brands.

It’s been a banner year at the London office of Bazaarvoice, with the addition of Andy Leaver, Vice President of International Sales, in July, and another high-impact UK Social Commerce Summit in October.

Today we launched BrandAnswers, which notifies manufacturers when shoppers have questions about their products across our network of retailers. With BrandAnswers, manufacturers have a whole new way to impact sales across the channel. Watch a quick video about BrandAnswers here.

We’ve seen that answers to customer questions on a site can drive sales – PETCO’s Answer Den case study showed a 72% increase in conversion. JC Whitney saw that answers decreased product returns on 80% of products with answers had a lower product return rate, with an average 23% decrease in return rates for these products. And Canadian Tire found that questions with more than three answers eliminated up to 81% of their pre-sales calls taken by the customer service department, greatly reducing those costs.

BrandAnswers notifies participating manufacturers when a shopper has a question about one of their products across all retail sites that use Bazaarvoice Ask & Answer. The manufacturer answers the question and it’s immediately posted to the retailer’s site. Manufacturer answers are badged with the brand’s logo, giving the brand even more visibility on the retailer site, and showing that the manufacturer is listening and responding to shopper queries.

Samsung sees the power of answers

Just over three months ago, Samsung launched BrandAnswers and we ran analytics to see the impact their answers have on sales on a major retailer site. We looked at TVs that are comparatively rated, have similar traffic, and are in the same price range. We split these televisions into two groups: those with high BrandAnswers engagement (an average of 15 Samsung answers per product), and those with low BrandAnswers engagement (an average of four Samsung answers per product). Here are the trends we saw over three months:

Samsung answers correlate with a 96% increase in product views, suggesting that Samsung’s involvement fostered an increase in interest for these products.

When Samsung answers questions, the number of questions doubles, suggesting that Samsung’s brand engagement influenced an increase in their community’s engagement.

Samsung fills information gaps while learning what’s important to shoppers. BrandAnswers helped Samsung address online knowledge gaps – 91% of the content Samsung provided in their answers was not already on the site. The most repeated question was, “Can I hang this TV on the wall?” From Samsung’s perspective, the answer may be obvious; however, shoppers are telling them that it’s not clear. Filling these information gaps can help turn shoppers into buyers.

Each answer creates a “ripple effect” of value. Unlike one-to-one communication vehicles, such as a customer email or phone call, answers provided online help the overall community. When a shopper asks a question, it’s safe to assume that others have the same question. Additionally, having these answers within the purchase path helps drive sales conversion, so just one answer from Samsung can help drive incremental sales beyond the one person who asked the question.

Now Samsung – and other forward-thinking manufacturers – can easily help inform consumers, increase awareness of their products, and help drive channel sales. BrandAnswers requires just one sign-in to see questions across multiple retail sites, can notify product experts via email, and can let manufacturers publish answers instantly.

The best part? Manufacturers finally have first-hand insights into how consumers consider and buy their products. This perspective will help them create even better marketing campaigns and product information, and help them gain a major leg up on competitors. Look for more interesting BrandAnswers stories to come from major manufacturers.

Oh…and the other best part…for retailers. The content is FREE to retailers, and requires no impact to IT if they are a Bazaarvoice Ask & Answer client!

There’s no better excuse to get out of the office on a Friday than to help out the Austin community.

15 Bazaarvoice employees volunteered last Friday at what was the largest Fall Service Day ever, with over 400 volunteers from the Austin high-tech industry in attendance. The event, hosted by the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Central Texas, resulted in 2,500 hours of service at Zilker Park, amounting to $50,000 in free labor.

As part of the Bazaarvoice Foundation, our commitment to serving the community, the Bazaarvoice team constructed a “Rain Garden” in the park’s botanical gardens. The rock installation will allow rain to flow from the surrounding buildings and water the plants in the garden. The team also planted tons of plants that will thrive in the rocky environment.

“Bazaarvoice always sends such a fun group!” said Shobie Partos of the Entrepreneurs Foundation. “The rain garden looks amazing, and the staff at Zilker Park are thrilled.”

Live Nation, the world’s largest live music company, has announced major upgrades to its open platform on LiveNation.com. Using the Bazaarvoice Interaction Suite, Live Nation has opened the communication channel for music fans everywhere at LiveNation.com.

Already a top-fifty ranked ecommerce site and top-five online music network, Live Nation’s use of UGC aims to make the site the go-to place for interaction between music fans and artists. Much of the site’s content is now at the control of the artists and fans who use it.

The updates include a healthy dose of UGC, with concert- and artist-specific wikis, Ratings & Reviews, fan-moderated Ask & Answer, and integrated Twitter streams. Live Nation has also taken advantage of Facebook Connect integration, enabling fans to share and discover concert information through the social network, and discover which Facebook friends are going to a show.