Social Commerce Trends 2011

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Social Commerce Trends Report 2011 Embracing Customer Centricity through Digital Democracy May 27, 2011

Transcript of Social Commerce Trends 2011

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Social Commerce Trends Report 2011Embracing Customer Centricity through Digital Democracy

May 27, 2011

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Table of ContentsUse the Table of Contents Generator (under Layout), Using the edited Default TOC style.

Title of the White Paper Goes Here.

Table of ContentsEmbracing Customer Centricity through Digital Democracy ................. 3

The immediacy of social gives brands consumer insights that drive business impact .................................................................... 4

Brands build trust, test markets with immediate social feedback .......... 5

Social initiatives based on core business goals help convince wary executives ............................................................ 5

It’s a conversation, not a campaign ...................................................... 8

Successful Facebook results combine social networks with consumer/brand interactions ........................................................ 9

It’s key to be relevant, be everywhere consumers are, and be brand-consistent ................................................................... 10

Social media must scale across the organization ............................... 11

Social media starts with people and grows with collaboration ............ 12

The authentic consumer voice can have a huge impact on brands ..... 15

Social gives consumers direct input to brands, creating wins for brands and consumers .......................................................... 15

Social – and its impact – continues to evolve ...................................... 17

Your next steps ................................................................................... 17

About the experts ............................................................................... 18

About Bazaarvoice .............................................................................. 19

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Each year, thought leaders from major brands with expertise in social gather at the Social Commerce Summit, hosted by Bazaarvoice, to present the trends that shape best practices in social media.

These four guiding principles represent the key drivers of successful social strategies:

The immediacy of social gives brands consumer insights that drive business impact. With 24/7 feedback that social media provides, brands know how to improve products faster than ever before. These consumer insights, when acted upon, lead to bottom-line results across the organization.

It’s a conversation, not a campaign. Messages no longer happen simply between the brand and the consumer;

now conversations happen between the brand and the consumer, as well as consumer to consumer. These conversations must be tailored to the specific needs of consumers, wherever they happen, while remaining consistent with the brand.

Social media must scale across the organization. Social requires organizational collaboration; it’s important to set up the entire organization to scale with social initiatives. Avoiding silos, establishing leadership, and helping team members participate all provide the most direct path to success.

Social gives consumers direct input to brands, creating wins for brands and consumers alike. Authentic conversations between brands and consumers allow for perfect markets, where the needs of consumers converge with brand offerings at exactly the right time. And corporate cultures change within companies when the customer voice is brought to the forefront.

This paper explores these themes with input from brand leaders and social experts who spoke at Social Commerce Summit 2011.

Embracing Customer Centricity through Digital Democracy

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Speakers at the Social Commerce Summit shared their views of the future of social.

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When the needs of the brand and the consumer converge at the same time, perfect markets can emerge. Until now, brands developed products based on focus groups or a perceived need in the marketplace; however, with real-time feedback available via social media, brands can now understand exactly what consumers want, even before they create new products, rather than waiting for products to be returned or focus groups to give opinions. This eliminates much of the risk for brands that take advantage of this immediate feedback.

With social, a brand can launch a product one day and, within hours, gather direct customer feedback that can reduce the product improvement cycle to weeks instead of months. Then brands can take that information and immediately make marketing and product adjustments to improve sales and bottom line results.

Bazaarvoice research into millions of customer reviews shows that more than half of four-star product reviews tell brands how to make it a five-star

product, and more than half of all one-star reviews suggest an alternative product. This proves the power of social conversations that brands can now access. For brands that listen and act on what they learn, real business impact follows.

Keys to uncovering results

Bazaarvoice Social Analytics Director Chris Kerns gives three key recommendations for achieving measurable results.

1. Align social goals with business goals. Digital

initiatives exist for a handful of reasons,

which have already been determined for your

business. Social initiatives should support

these same goals.

2. Brands should create a technical

infrastructure to measure these goals, building

mechanisms such as A/B testing, Google

analytics, or putting other tools in place to

quantify results.

3. Consider and define measurement goals

well before the launch, not at the last minute.

When brands begin with the goal and metrics

in mind, better programs generally result.

The immediacy of social gives brands consumer insights that drive business impact.

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Brands build trust, test markets with immediate social feedback.

Hair care brand Nexxus used social to test the market, then successfully launch their new ProMend product line, developed to reduce split ends in just a few uses. To test their claim on actual consumers – and because Nexxus felt consumers may be skeptical about the bold claim – they began by reaching out to existing Nexxus brand advocates. They asked them to accept a free sample and write an honest review about their experiences, and the product passed the test.

By the time ProMend launched, each product had more than 30 reviews with average ratings of 4.4 to 4.7 stars, and Nexxus shared these reviews across all advertising channels and with major retailers’ websites. Not only did the feedback help market the product, the real-time feedback ensured that Nexxus wouldn’t stumble on its bold claim upon launch, saving them money in potential product returns and ensuring their ongoing consumer trust.

Social initiatives based on core business goals help convince wary executives.

Many brands see major hesitation from executives when the marketing department initially proposes adding customer reviews to a public website. This was the case at Argos, one of the UK’s largest multichannel retailers.

David Tarbuck, Multi-Channel Program and Operations Manager for Argos Ltd., confirms, “We thought about launching reviews for 18 months before we did it. The major points we had to overcome included, ‘What will customers say?,’ ‘Will we be in control?,’ ‘What will we do with the information?,’ and ‘How will we manage the content?’”

Tarbuck and his team convinced management that adding reviews would provide additional information for customers, increase conversion, and allow customers to tell Argos what they think; it was time to start the conversation.

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“We now have 900,00 reviews, and each week over a million customers read reviews,” says Argos’ David Tarbuck.

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The ability for Argos to know about product issues quickly has changed several areas of their business. For example, when the Argos team receives negative feedback, they amend product text and images, or give feedback directly to manufacturers to improve products. Today more than 70 people in the organization regularly read and act on reviews.

“We aim to remove lower-rated items,” Tarbuck says. For example, the very first review of a three-piece furniture set was negative, so they immediately took action to improve the product, and now consumers rate it highly.

“Now we have 900,000 reviews, our average rating is 4.3, and each week over a million customers read reviews,” Tarbuck says. “We use reviews across channels to communicate, including print, emails, an iPhone application, and through social sharing.”

Shawn Morton, Director of Mobile, Social Media and Emerging Media for Nationwide Insurance, aligns Nationwide’s social media initiatives with the business’ core goal: sell more auto insurance. After launching reviews in 2009, they saw an average rating of 4.7 stars out of five, with 96% of customers recommending them. By focusing on the core goal, they have seen a 40% increase in quote starts and a 19% increase in quote completes, showing that customer reviews drive policy growth.

They’ve also seen a 103% increase in site visitors looking for an agent, indicating that reviews drive sales through Nationwide’s agent channel.

For Morton, gaining executive buy-in began with finding one person on the executive team to act as a champion. He explained how customer input helped other industries improve online sales, and how he believed it could work to sell more auto insurance. Once he got the executive team’s attention, he and his team focused on issues he knew were critical to the success of the program.

“Our plan focused on five core areas that were most important to our executives,” Morton says, which include the following:

1. Governance. They worked out details around regulations in social media for their highly-regulated industry.

2. Monitoring. They explained how they would discover all social conversations about Nationwide.

3. Engagement. Morton’s team set clear parameters for how they planned to respond, who they respond to, and who responds.

4. Commerce. It was important to see exactly how customer reviews on product pages would drive sales.

5. Measurement. No executive would buy in without understanding the results expected and how they would be measured.

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In short, Morton and his team aligned their social initiatives with a core business objective: sell more car insurance. This plan made executives comfortable by addressing their core needs and tying the program back to the main business goal.

“ Everybody’s speed of choice is one click away…” – Alex Tosolini, Vice President, Global e-Business for P&G

Alex Tosolini, Vice President, Global e-Business for P&G, refers to business life as a “Volatile Uncertain Complex Ambiguous (VUCA) World.” He focuses on putting business ownership first to deal with these inherent issues. Before taking on the latest social endeavor, he recommends companies think about the business objectives and strategies first, and then how social can support them. He recommends asking, “How well do I know the broad business challenges for this Brand?” Tosolini works to keep common sense at the forefront of all activities.

“Everybody’s speed of choice is one click away,” Tosolini says. “Consumers can make product decisions in a click. Retailers can change their product offerings online in an instant, manufacturers can provide new content in a click – all this takes weeks or months in a store environment.”

Core metrics vary from company to company. For Adobe, conversion matters, but sentiment and the quality of participants are also important.

“Marketers are always worried about how to prove out the ROI of marketing campaigns and the predictability of these campaigns,” says John Travis, Vice President Brand Marketing for Adobe. “If I invest X, how much can I expect to get back? From a social perspective, we are putting a lot of effort into how to measure things like volume of conversations, sentiments, quality of followers and how they participate, reviews, and testing customer comments in a headline versus an agency-created headline.”

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P&G’s Alex Tosolini focuses on putting business ownership first when dealing with ambiguity.

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“It used to be that businesses talked to consumers, which they called advertising or marketing,” Clay Shirky, author of Cognitive Surplus and social media consultant, says. “People are getting used to the idea that consumers have a voice, but the big change is that now people in the audience can talk directly to each other, and there is much more of that conversation than between brands and consumers.”

“I worry about campaigns because they cost a lot and are discrete, finite occurrences,” Manish Mehta, Vice President for Social Media and Community for Dell, says. “They need to be aligned with a bigger relationship you want to build with a customer. It’s not a sustainable way to build loyalty and lifetime value of your customers.”

The evolution of social has led to brands and consumers getting in sync. Today, conversations happen between the brand and consumer, as well as between consumers and other consumers, and the scale increases exponentially as more social tools become mainstream, including Facebook and Twitter. Sometimes the consumer actually leads the conversations with

brands. Savvy brands are learning to listen, communicate, and share in new ways to ensure their message and their brand are represented well in the new digital democracy.

This “human element” is critical for brands to keep in mind. For example, Keller Fay research has found that consumers want to help other consumers – altruism is the main reason for writing reviews, and people read reviews and seek other social proof to reduce risk in making purchases. And with the advent of digital and social media, consumers want information from brands everywhere – it’s up to brands to create a consistent experience across all channels. Taking all these factors into account is critical for brands to effectively reach consumers as humans.

“It used to be easy,” Tracy Benson, Senior Director, U.S. Marketing and Portable Electronics, Best Buy, says. “We could control the conversation from the brand down. We could also see how that impact would play out at the local store. Today, media is becoming a consumption and conversation tool. The internet has become primarily a place people play and discover.”

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It’s a conversation, not a campaign.

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Successful Facebook results combine social networks with consumer/brand interactions.

“ For every share that happens on Facebook via Ticketmaster, Ticketmaster generates more than five dollars in ticket revenue.” – Dan Rose, Vice President of Partnerships and Platform Marketing for Facebook

Dan Rose, Vice President of Partnerships and Platform Marketing for Facebook, encourages brands to “take the marketing funnel with awareness at top and action at bottom, and turn it into a circle where you have you and your friends at the middle. Make it faster and easier to find and share with friends.”

For example, Ticketmaster benefits from the friend-focus of Facebook because people tend to go to concerts with someone else. They added the capability for Ticketmaster customers to share the news about their recent ticket purchase with friends. For every share that happens on Facebook via Ticketmaster, Ticketmaster generates more than five dollars in ticket revenue, and they track these results daily.

Restaurant reservations site OpenTable added the “like” button for its restaurants and sees a 25% increase in reservations and a 200% increase in member registrations at OpenTable.com, once the Facebook user sees the restaurants on Facebook.

To gather more product reviews, Benefit Cosmetics allows customers to add reviews on the Benefits Facebook page, then those reviews flow automatically into Benefit’s product pages. Within two weeks, through Facebook, they got fans to review 80% of their products.

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Facebook’s Dan Rose recommends turning marketing funnel into a circle, with the user and his friends at the center.

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It’s key to be relevant, be everywhere consumers are, and be brand-consistent.

“You want to be able to recognize the brand’s voice – it’s the hardest thing to get right, in my opinion. – Marisa Thalberg, Vice President of Global Digital Marketing for The Estée Lauder Companies

At The Estée Lauder Companies, many consider founder Estée Lauder the original social networker; her motto was, “Telephone, telegraph, tell a woman.” This core company belief made the transition into social media a brand-building proposition, rather than just a sales campaign. The firm focuses on keeping communications consistent within each brand and personalized by the type of woman each brand attracts.

To Marisa Thalberg, Vice President of Global Digital Marketing for The Estée Lauder Companies, social media is the ultimate conduit to high-touch relationships, building on Lauder’s one-to-one selling in stores. Social media lets consumers feel a sense of connection with the brand and with each other. On Facebook, Estée Lauder tries not to push a marketing message; rather, they want to be authentic in the brand voice and make it appropriate for social media.

“You want to be able to recognize the brand’s voice – it’s the hardest thing to get right, in my opinion, to make the voice consistent but make it relevant to social,” Thalberg says.

Social also enables an “unprecedented intimate brand relationship,” Thalberg says. “Ultimately, communications are merging and uniting around our consumer. She expects us to come to her, so we need to foster a continuous, intimate, varied experience for her, depending on where she is and what she wants, when she wants it.

“Brands can validate the consumer, but now she also validates our brands,” Thalberg says. “Social media enables association with brands to literally act as badges. [Social users share] the brands they associate themselves with, such as the bag you carry. This is where brand equity is so powerful.”

“Social is fundamental to Adobe,” Travis says. “We have always engaged with our customers – Adobe labs and forums are part of our DNA. Digital for us is the backbone of our marketing; we spend greater than 70% of our total marketing spend on digital. We’re trying not to think of social as a media type – it’s a fundamental shift in our culture, customers want to engage with us. We continue to see how we can integrate it across everything we do.”

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Social media must scale across the organization. New social media requires new types of organizations – and they usually cross departmental borders. Social media expert Jeremiah Owyang points out that, while social media initiatives can start out being owned by one department, this one-to-one model cannot scale.

Owyang recommends that organizations who wish to pursue social move as quickly as possible to the hub and spoke model, where a core team gives guidance and sets parameters that allow multiple areas of the organization to participate in social.

How social organizations evolve

Owyang lists the organizational types that evolve with a brand’s social media efforts.

1. Decentralized. Anyone can do anything in

the company in social, with no organization.

2. Centralized. Typically run by corporate

communications; most companies start here.

3. Hub and spoke. The majority of the

companies Owyang has interviewed fall into

this group. There is a hub in the organization

that sets guidelines and gives direction, but

actual participation takes place across the

organization. This is the most common type

of successful social organization today.

4. Multiple hub and spoke or dandelion. Large,

usually tech, socially-advanced brands

reach this organizational level. Owyang

recommends this model for most brands.

5. Holistic or honeycomb. Only 1.5% of

companies are here, where the entire

organization uses social media in an

organized way. This is the model with the

highest level of maturity, and it’s difficult to

achieve. A few brands that exemplify

this include Best Buy, Dell, and Zappos.

Jeremiah presented “Program Plan: The Social

Media Center of Excellence” and “Invest in Scalable

Social Business Programs” at Social Commerce

Summit 2011; you can read his recommendations

on his blog at web-strategist.com.

Jeremiah Owyang has worked with top brands to develop the shares best ways to scale social organizations.

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He also recommends:

1. Get ready internally. Focus first on governance and process, then on education to emerge as a center of excellence.

2. 1:1 will never scale. Leverage the crowd for the first response, then interact in escalation.

3. Integrate social to increase relevancy and reduce costs on creating content. Use other people’s content, such as customer reviews, to build credibility.

4. Standardize with social media management systems, which help you manage potentially thousands of accounts you have for all your brands. Invest in this now before your individual business units roll out their own sites.

5. Remember the future is more than social marketing; it cascades to support, product innovation, and then to the supply chain (with your partners).

Social media starts with people and grows with collaboration.

“Several years ago, integrated marketing was a big buzz,” Christa Carone, Corporate Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for Xerox, says. “Now we’re talking about brand

consistency across these media. I’m helping to drive that. What I’ve learned is that you have to start with your people first and a commitment to the integrity of the brand, then give them some kind of guidelines so they can get started. I’ve been fascinated looking at how the community evolved. When you let people go [ahead with social media], they’re excited, they’re smart – have high aspirations where you can take social – it’s really exciting to see this creative energy.

“It’s unsettling for some people in our organization to feel empowered,” she continues, “because in the past we’ve said ‘No, you only speak to the media if you’re in PR,’ for example. Now we’re saying, ‘Anyone can speak.’ We have our guidelines for developing Facebook pages, Twitter handles, and lines are blurring between personal and business online personas. We hope to empower our sales force more to use social.”

With Best Buy’s Twelpforce – where more than 3,000 Best Buy in-store employees answer consumer questions via Twitter – and other digital and social initiatives, Best Buy has made the most of its early-adopter clients to build multi-way conversations that support their core business goals.

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“[The evolution of our social strategies] is happening fast, from an organizational perspective,” Adobe’s Travis says. “Part of being a leader in social is being genuine. We’ve reorganized our organization to be a hub and spoke, not to regulate but to provide shared learning, a lot of dialog between the hub and spokes.”

“We have corporate communications, but we also have call centers and so many other touch points,” Kimberly Kadlec, Worldwide Vice President, Global Marketing Group for Johnson & Johnson. “We need to start to empower some of the areas beyond marketing

and advertising. Whatever touches your consumer needs to have a consistent tone and with a human voice; we’re focused on that.”

“We try to get our marketing people into the call centers at least once a year so we stay connected,” Steve Fuller, Senior Vice President and CMO for L.L.Bean, says. “It humanizes our customers; when customers become numbers, bad things happen. It also simplifies marketing and promotion messages. Talking to your customers will often give you a very different perspective around a marketing effort’s effectiveness.”

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Johnson & Johnson’s Kimberly Kadlec, Xerox’s Christa Carone, and Adobe’s John Travis discuss how they put customers at the center of their brands.

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Key social lessons from Dell

As an early social media adopter, Dell’s Mehta shares key lessons Dell learned in creating an advanced social infrastructure.

1. Integrate where customer and business

value are realized. For example, product

development sees customer reviews and

social chatter as an early warning system and

marketing uses social media to drive demand.

“When Dell originally started with social

media, we just saw it as a corporate

communications tool,” Mehta says. “Today we

have 18 major functions in Dell using social,

though they vary in level of involvement. We’ll

continue to innovate how to bring social to

every person in the company.”

2. Chasing shiny objects is a formula for

ridicule. He recommends not chasing every

trend. It’s important to understand the

expected outcomes and be willing to turn

things off quickly.

“At the end of the day it’s about pragmatic

approaches that build the business day to

day,” he says. “Smart business fundamentals

never change. Use social to apply these same

business fundamentals.”

3. Make your IT organization a partner. Walk a

mile in the IT team’s shoes.

“Be clear with your objectives, why you want

to move so quickly, why you want to be

aggressive without being radical, and listen

to their concerns,” he says. “This will help

both parties be ready. The earlier you bring in

IT as a partner, the better.”

4. Never stop innovating – ever. “When you think

you’re done, get paranoid,” he says. “Listening

is fundamental to Dell and we’re building

a system that lets every employee listen,

for example.”

5. There is business value in social. It’s

measurable in many forms; there is not just

one number. “You should instrument your

involvement and engagement with external

communities for business value,” he says.

“The faster you start to measure, the better.”

6. Campaigns are capital intensive. You cannot

buy fans and followers for life. Mehta believes

campaigns must align with the bigger

relationship a brand wants to build

with a customer.

7. Look across the entire customer lifecycle.

Social can be used everywhere – really.

“Human Resources was only using LinkedIn

before – now they are seeing how other parts

of the social web can also benefit their part of

the business,” he says. “We haven’t perfected

social in all groups, but we have proven that it

can drive value and be measured.”

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“Customer conversations are only a means to an end,” L.L.Bean’s Fuller says. “There’s value in these conversations, but if you’re not acting upon them, you’re missing it. The real power is in the action that you take and the change that they can facilitate.”

“People have always had a lot of time,” Shirky says. “They now prefer to use their time creating and sharing – not just consuming media, like television.”

As consumers, “we are moving from the informational web to the social web,” Facebook’s Rose says. “Your life online is starting to mirror your life offline. Today what we do online feels a lot like how we live.

“Over the last five years, the internet has started to be rebuilt around people,” he says “We are moving from the ‘what’ to the ‘who,’ moving from wisdom of crowds to wisdom of friends – becoming more social. We get our news from friends and family. We find jobs from people around us. We trust our friends more than we trust the critics. When I go to my Facebook newsfeed, I see what my friends are doing and buying – exactly what I see in my real life.”

The authentic consumer voice can have a huge impact on brands.

“Our response changed the way customers interacted with us – they saw we were listening and we cared.” – Bert DuMars, Vice President E-Business and Interactive Marketing for Newell Rubbermaid

When brands join the conversations, major transformation occurs.

Bert DuMars, Vice President E-Business and Interactive Marketing for Newell Rubbermaid, worked with the Rubbermaid E-Marketing team to create a cultural shift in this 100-year-old brand by adding customer reviews to its product pages. While brand team members initially balked, getting this customer input turned out to be the most important thing that has happened to the brand, because now Rubbermaid knows the “why” behind product returns and dissatisfaction, and can make changes immediately. Also, when reviewing positive reviews, brands can see how consumers

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Social gives consumers direct input to brands, creating wins for brands and consumers.

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articulate their product features and benefits, and reuse that insight in marketing campaigns.

Rubbermaid looks for and reacts to one- and two-star product reviews, including a recent example involving a sink mat.

“Our Consumer Insights team determined, based on customer feedback and two flu outbreaks, that antibacterial products could be popular in the market. The team then created an antibacterial sink mat,” DuMars says. “However, they were less stain resistant, and consumers gave us negative feedback. We reached out to these consumers who told us that they did not want antibacterial sink mats – they wanted the sink mats to make

their sinks look better. We were able to fix the problem before thousands of them were returned to stores.”

“These aren’t high-priced items, but our response changed the way customers interacted with us – they saw we were listening and we cared” he says. “Once we reached out to them, we got amazing responses, such as, ‘I am so happy to hear that my “single voice” may have made a difference.’ It was a big emotional hit and a big win to create brand advocates from this initially negative experience.”

At L.L.Bean, the customer has always been at the heart of the brand. Since 1912, the company has had a 100% satisfaction guarantee; they have always welcomed criticism of their merchandise or services. Online customer reviews were a natural progression when they were added in 2008.

“In 2010, we sent out over eight million outbound requests for feedback,” says L.L.Bean’s Fuller. “It’s important to know what our customers are thinking.”

With more than 300,000 reviews in place on their site, the company fuels its marketing programs with customer-generated content.

“Our number one non-sale email had a customer-written headline: ‘I am in love with this doormat,’” Fuller says.

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Newell-Rubbermaid’s Bert DuMars proves that even low-priced products benefit from customer input.

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The fourth annual Social Commerce Summit highlighted just how seriously major brands take social programs – brands that range from highly-regulated insurance companies to consumer packaged goods to business-to-business brands, not just retail. While brands continue to explore new ways to implement social initiatives, they’re focusing on finding their authentic voices and creating infrastructures that involve their entire organizations.

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Social – and its impact – continues to evolve.

Your next steps.These insights should answer some questions, but raise even more. With direct input on more than 1200 of the world’s top brands’ social programs, Bazaarvoice has the knowledge to help build social equity for you.

Visit bazaarvoice.com to schedule a demo, where we’ll help you understand how to connect to consumers, drive measurable return on investment, and gain invaluable insights into what’s important to your customers – right now.

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About the ExpertsSpeakers quoted in this paper participated in Bazaarvoice’s Social Commerce Summit 2011, held in April 2011.

For more information on this and future events, visit socialcommercesummit.com.

Tracy Benson Sr. Director, US Marketing & Portable Electronics, Best Buy @mobitweet

Christa Carone Corporate Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Xerox @ChristaBC

Bert DuMars Vice President E-Business and Interactive Marketing, Newell Rubbermaid @bwdumars

Steve Fuller Senior Vice President & CMO, L.L.Bean @flyingpoint

Kimberly Kadlec Worldwide Vice President, Global Marketing Group, Johnson & Johnson @kkadlec17

Chris Kerns Director, Social Analytics, Bazaarvoice [email protected]

Shawn Morton Director of Mobile, Social Media and Emerging Media, Nationwide Insurance @smorty71 smorty71.com

Jeremiah Owyang Social Technology and Interactive Marketing Expert @jowyang

Dan Rose Vice President of Partnerships and Platform Marketing, Facebook @drose007 facebook.com/drose

Manish Mehta Vice President for Social Media and Community, Dell @ManishatDell

Clay Shirky Writer and Consultant on New Technology and Social Media @cshirky

David Tarbuck Multi-Channel Program and Operations Manager, Argos Ltd.

Marisa Thalberg Vice President of Global Digital Marketing The Estée Lauder Companies, Inc. @executivemoms

Alex Tosolini Vice President, Global e-Business P&G

John Travis Vice President Brand Marketing Adobe

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About Bazaarvoice Bazaarvoice’s Software as a Service (SaaS) social commerce solutions have powered more than 200 billion customer conversations on more than 1200 brand web sites like Best Buy, Blue Shield of California, Costco, Dell, Macy’s, P&G, Panasonic, QVC, and USAA in 68 countries. The company connects organizations to their influencers through a unique network that reaches hundreds of millions of consumers around the globe, enabling authentic customer-powered marketing. Through syndication, analytics, partnerships, and consulting, Bazaarvoice brings the voice of the customer to the center of their clients’ business strategy, proving “social” can drive measured revenue growth and cost savings for manufacturing, retail, travel, and financial services companies. Headquartered in Austin, the company has offices in Amsterdam, Dusseldorf, London, Paris, and Sydney. For more information and access to client success stories, visit bazaarvoice.com, read the blog at bazaarvoice.com/blog, and follow on Twitter at twitter.com/bazaarvoice.