I was reading an article on Brand Republic titled "Is Social Recommendation the New Currency", and at the bottom was a comment by Guatama Payment, which was especially interesting. He makes the point that the true gold is in the influencers. Ultimately I believe it's a larger audience than 1% that spread the word on [...]

Lounging on the beach with my wife, Debra, on vacation in Maui, today I read "The High Price of Creating Free Ads" in the NY times.  It is a story about the rough start that Heinz is having following the lead of Doritos, General Motors, and many others in trying to spark word of mouth [...]

Aloha from beautiful Maui!  Debra and I are on vacation with our daughter, Rachel, celebrating our 11-year wedding anniversary.
During a little downtime this week, I have seen three profound examples of user-generated content in action:
1. Today, MarketingSherpa released a new case study on how President's Choice (large Canadian grocer) is leveraging online customer reviews of [...]

About a year ago we stated to analysts and press that while electronics and books were the first to have reviews, clothing retailers (and then manufacturers) would be close to follow. Here's some reinforcement to that, Scott Silverman, Executive Director of Shop.org, who was recently quoted in eCommerce times:
Until recently, one factor that did [...]

As I promised almost one month ago, I am posting my next Word-of-Mouth Wisdom interview with Kelly Mooney, President of Resource Interactive.  Kelly gave a groundbreaking presentation on the Millennials in her Shop.org Annual Summit keynote last year.  I decided to revisit this topic, as well as her upcoming book, which I was interviewed for [...]

Today, May 2, marks our two-year anniversary.  We celebrate this day with a special press release for a very special milestone: profitability.  Two years ago, when Brant and I founded Bazaarvoice, we set our goals on getting to profitability by this time.  As a company, we worked hard as a team to get here and [...]

I'm not sure how I missed one of Pete Blackshaw's best ClickZ articles, but here it is, on April 3: Repeat After Me, We're Still in Control!
Basically his point is that we do have control on driving customers to buy from us, it's just a different lens. There are different levers and controls. Marketing has [...]

When Dell launched their IdeaStorm site several months ago (a move that we at Bazaarvoice applauded!), one customer post quickly rose to the top of the rankings and still holds the #1 spot.  Other IdeaStorm users quickly piled on, supporting the call for a pre-installed Linux option on new Dell machines.  Well it seems that [...]