This blog post is guest-written by Jacob Salamon, Bazaarvoice’s European Marketing Manager.

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.

Bazaarvoice provides customer reviews for more than 60% of the IR500 – the nation’s top internet retailers – so we start thinking about the holidays in July. We continue to see that reviews help drive holiday sales, and now’s the time to start.

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.

Our friends over at Free People had some exciting things to say about Wordle – a visual representation of keyword frequency on your site.

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 of the many unique elements of our culture here at Bazaarvoice is our formation of tribes. Bazaarvoice employees are encouraged to bring their personal interests into the workplace, forming “tribes” to educate and learn from their coworkers.

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!

This blog post is guest-written by Jacob Salamon, Bazaarvoice’s European Marketing Manager.

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, so we sat down with Rebecca Lieb, Econsultancy’s Vice President of North America. Look for more insights in the coming weeks in this three-part blog series.

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.

This post was guest-written by Kathy Smith-Willman, Director of People Operations.

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.

We recently went on a national press tour, and one of the highlights was Brett’s video interview with Taylor Buley at Forbes.com. Brett talks about how Oriental Trading Company uses customer reviews to transform their internal culture – internal teams work together to improve all aspects of their products and customer service. They’ve improved more than 700 products so far! You can read the full case study for all the details.

He also talks about how GEICO uses reviews to improve its products, too. Three years ago, who would have ever thought you’d use reviews to buy insurance?

Brett talks about how all types of companies are using reviews and other input to change all areas of the business – reducing return rates, improving service, etc. – and how online reviews create focus group-like information that helps companies determine exactly what they can improve. All without adding a huge new department in the company.

Brett also talks about how Twitter and Facebook will never have the impact of customer word of mouth on branded sites. Read the Forbes article in its (I love this) “Disruptions” section, “Where Social Networking Cashes In.”

Building on the explosive success of last year’s first Social Commerce Summit in London hosted at The Magic Circle Headquarters and world-famous ABSOLUT ICEBAR, Bazaarvoice is excited to announce the launch of our second-annual UK Social Commerce Summit. The 2009 Social Commerce Summit London event will be hosted on 7 October at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, followed by a champagne boat ride down the River Thames to our illustrious after-party at Buddha Bar London.

We’re bringing the best in Social Commerce! From notable keynotes and client presentations, to real-world training and roundtable discussions, Bazaarvoice’s Social Commerce Summit London is the definitive event for driving social commerce strategy and ROI.

Our keynote speakers include:

• James Caan of BBC’s Dragon’s Den
• David Rowan – Editor of WIRED Magazine UK
• Ian Jindal – Editor-in-Chief of Internet Retailing Magazine
• Ze Frank – Designer, Speaker, and Popular Video Blogger
• Jonathon Brown – Director of Multi-Channel at B&Q

You’ll also experience engaging seminars on customer-centricity, measuring ROI, breathing “Customer Oxygen,” and the Bazaarvoice product roadmap. View the full agenda online.

The Bard once asked: “Can one desire too much of a good thing?” We hope not. With a day full of informative and entertaining keynotes, real-world training and sessions, and plenty of time to network with peers, this year’s Social Commerce Summit in London is sure to be a hit. Brush up on your Shakespeare, because the social commerce event of the year doth cometh in October!

The fear of negative feedback is one of the biggest factors causing some companies to hesitate in embracing customer-generated content. But Bazaarvoice clients know that “bad” reviews are really just opportunities to improve.

Improving your offering

The most obvious positive potential in negative reviews is the opportunity for your company to improve its products and services. Customer feedback helps companies discover weaknesses in their offering, and act on them to deliver a better customer experience.

Oriental Trading Company uses information gathered in negative reviews to work with manufacturers to improve hundreds of their toys and party supplies. This proactive quality management allows the company to discover and fix quality issues much earlier in the production process, saving the company the expense of excess inventory of faulty products after an item is introduced.

QVC uses negative reviews to take action on products and customer service and delivery issues, often by reaching out to directly customers. For example, when they recently discovered that a product had issues with quality and delivery, they contacted 900 customers with an offer to replace the product. They worked with the vendor to return the remaining product inventory and improve it. Internally, QVC executives hold monthly meetings to discuss all aspects of customer feedback to determine areas the company should emphasize and improve.

Building trust in your brand

The mere presence of negative feedback on your site builds transparency in your brand. Customers see that your online community hasn’t been white-washed with rose-tinted marketing speak. And taking this feedback a step further – listening to and acting on the opinions of dissatisfied customers – can build invaluable customer trust in your brand.

QVC took this step further to let customers know exactly what they do about poorly-reviewed products. In an online blog post by their Senior Vice President of Customer Service, Dan McDermott, the retailer detailed their process of low-rated product examination, improvement, and in some cases, elimination. Negative reviews are “how we learn and bring you products you want,” the email said.

Acting on negative feedback proves to your customers that you are listening – which is often all they really want. Ignoring your dissatisfied customers can be disastrous for your brand, especially with the presence of so many outlets for customers to voice their dissatisfaction. See the #amazonFAIL Twitter-storm fiasco as an extreme illustration of what can happen when your customers feel your brand isn’t listening.

If your customers have negative feedback, they will find a way to share it – whether you allow them to do so on your site or not. Plugging your ears and pretending you can’t hear it won’t make your customers’ dissatisfaction go away. Embrace negative feedback as an opportunity to improve your offering and build trust in your company, and you’ll find that “bad” reviews can be great for your brand.

Rosetta Stone, the leading provider of interactive language-learning solutions, launched Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews™ to help customers share their experiences with learning new languages. Now current customers can easily exchange their opinions on a wide range of language-learning solutions covering more than 30 languages, and new customers can browse customer-generated reviews to learn which solution is applicable to their interest and skill level.

Since the launch in April 2009, Rosetta Stone has already collected thousands of product reviews, with over 95 percent of the reviews having a 4 or 5-star rating. To further help visitors determine each review’s relevance, an extensive reviewer profile that highlights the reviewer’s previous experience with the language; reason for learning the language; next language to learn; and number of Rosetta Stone products owned are provided with each review.

According to Tom Adams, CEO of Rosetta Stone, “The positive response to Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews has been outstanding and we are eager to further listen, learn, and communicate with our customers and help them in their language learning journey.”

Read more about Rosetta Stone’s launch in our press release, and check out our related blog posts to see how other clients have used Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews to drive customer engagement for their own brands.