Social Commerce Summit '08

The open source software movement was the first indication that our consumerist society would not be conducting business as usual online. New behaviors—creating, sharing, influencing—are becoming widespread enough to forever blur the roles of producer and consumer, celebrity and average citizen, traditional authority figure and the new truth tellers and taste makers. Kelly will discuss these and other topics of the social web using the strategic framework introduced in her new book, The Open Brand (www.theopenbrand.com). By applying the strategic framework to real world examples, Kelly will help brands understand how to open to consumer’s new expectations and interventions by becoming O.P.E.N.—on-demand, personal, engaging, and networked.

What exactly should you do to create a word of mouth marketing campaign for your company? Learn specific strategies to engage with consumers and generate positive word of mouth about your brand. Learn the five steps to starting an impactful, effective, sales-driving campaign. We're going to get specific here: Who to hire, where to start, and how to make it successful.

• Finding the right people to talk about you (influencers and evangelists)
• Giving them something to talk about (viral email, samples, buzz, and more)
• Creating tools to make it easier for them to talk to each other (blogs, discussions, tell-a-friend forms)
• Participating in the conversation
• Tracking and measuring results

Are you putting your user-generated content to work for you in the following areas?  

• Social Navigation
• Holiday campaigns
• Email marketing
• Advertising
• Cross-selling

User generated content adds authenticity and relevance to existing marketing and merchandising. It has proven to lift metrics such as click through rate, conversion, and average order value. In this session Bryan will walk through “must do” merchandising and marketing tactics, including how to test and display reviews on your site. If you have UGC on your site, at the end of this session you’ll have a testing plan to increase the ROI of UGC.

Gain insight from Bazaarvoice strategic partners on how to turn your eCommerce system from anti-social into the most well-connected eCommerce system in the room, never to be lonely again. Brant Barton, Co-Founder and VP Business Development of Bazaarvoice, will lead this “unplugged” panel discussion with select Bazaarvoice partners. No slides, no props, no laser light show or smoke effects – just captivating conversation that will keep you on the edge of your stiff, non-reclining standard conference seat. Be prepared for:

• Ideas for leveraging UGC to drive more social shopping experiences for your customers at virtually every touch point
• Perspectives from complementary eCommerce vendors on the impact of UGC and social commerce to their product roadmaps and overall business strategies
• Feedback on your performance as a business user of the solutions represented by the panelists

User-generated content is nothing if you don’t have users generating content! Every day, Bazaarvoice Community managers help customers create and test new ways to drive participation. We’ve developed several best practices that we know help our clients succeed, and we’ll share them with you.

• Learn why people write reviews.
• Go beyond the basics – think outside the box in driving response
• Building the plan– the goal is fresh, new content every week, every month. Learn how to create a strategy and plan that keeps your funnel full
• Real results – we’ll share actual numbers and some surprising results from our clients

Dell has been recognized by analysts such as Forrester as one of the leading companies that made tremendous progress with community- and user-generated content last year. Dell customers are generating ideas, supporting each other, creating marketing messages, and sharing authentic opinions about products with Dell's name on them. And it's generally accepted at Dell that the ROI is there. For one of the most measurement-focused companies in the world, how and why did they invite the customer voice into their site? Who works on these intitiatives and how are they structured? How is success measured? Where are things going? Executives at Dell will share the what, why, and how of their customer-to-customer marketing strategies.

In this two-part session, hear perspectives on the unique measurement challenges and analytics opportunities of social commerce.  Stephen Hammond of Omniture will describe how its analytics platform is evolving to enable measurement of multiple forms of social media.  Brant Barton of Bazaarvoice will present a seven-step plan for analyzing and improving the impact the Bazaarvoice solution is delivering to your business using current web analytics capabilities. 

• Hear concrete ideas for making your social initiatives more measureable
• Learn how to integrate your web analytics and social commerce solutions
• Leave with a plan of action that you can implement in days, rather than weeks or months!

Customers have always talked about your brand and your products, but now it’s on your site. What rights do you have to the content your customers post? What are the copyright considerations? Can you use ideas from customers? Are there other business risks? Being successful at Social Commerce means you keep your company out of legal trouble, and you get your legal team to buy in to these new strategies. Get educated on the legalities of UGC to protect your brand, your company and your job! And you’ll learn how to work effectively with your legal team through these issues. Dan Noonan, legal counsel for Dell, will share his experience working through many of the questions the business has asked before launching blogs, reviews, and other UGC. 

A groundswell is sweeping through your customers. Are you ready?
Your customers are using social technologies to take charge of their own experience and getting what they need – information, support, ideas, products, and bargaining power – from each other. This phenomenon – the groundswell – has created a permanent, long-listing shift in the way the world works. In this talk Josh Bernoff, author of the forthcoming book Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, will reveal how to turn the force of customers connecting to your advantage. Through carefully researched, vibrant case studies, you’ll see how to accomplish specific goals like listening better to your customers, talking with them, energizing them, and embracing their ideas – and most importantly, how to measure success and prove ROI and business value.

How will you harness word of mouth to drive business value in 2008 and beyond? You have a front row seat on our journey towards our social commerce vision, and play a trusted role in helping shape that vision. We constantly innovate and improve our products using our shared vision and feedback from you, and in this session, you will…

• See new and future products and features
• Understand how we envision new capabilities, relating to our vision
• Get introduced to our new feedback process and tools
• Have the chance to submit your own big ideas and product/service suggestions!

Every CEO wants a customer-centric culture that drives  measurable results. How do you get there? In this session, hear from senior marketing executives who  drove change through real-world examples of brand awareness, excitement, and measurable results from their social commerce strategy. See how they demonstrated value to their CEO and CFO. Learn how customer conversations became a “trojan horse” for positive, customer-centric culture change, and understand the steps, principles, and tips to accelerate this transformation. This session is for executives and employees alike to make significant, top-to-bottom changes in your organization.

• Understand the perspectives of the CEO and CMO
• Learn key principles of change leadership – for you and your employees
• Discover how to use UGC measurement to evolve customer-centric decision-making
• Get real world tips to gain executive and cross-functional buy in to your social strategy

Your company’s UGC assets can become a marketing and advertising goldmine if leveraged properly. In this “Top 10” session, hear innovative ideas on how to infuse the power of customer opinions into your on-site and off-site marketing and advertising programs.

• No less than ten ideas that you can take credit for back at company headquarters (unless your boss attends the Summit, too)
• Exciting real-world examples and visualizations of “social advertising” concepts
• Influence the Bazaarvoice roadmap and partnership strategy by providing your feedback on each idea

If you’re not using your UGC beyond your website, you’re missing the chance to use the customer voice in all the places shoppers make purchasing decisions. It’s a fact: many shoppers research online and buy in-store, so put a customer review in front of a live customer in your store, and win big. Our most innovative clients use UGC anywhere and everywhere, and these two pros will share ideas for leveraging this asset to its fullest. Just a few of the initiatives they will share:

• Go mobile – putting reviews in the palm of your hand
• Turn traditional advertising on its ear – people want to hear from others like them (not your creative team)
• Go inside – see how signage and even clothing can encourage customer interaction
• Right products -- using UGC data to improve product selection and merchandising