BAZAARBLOG — PETCO continues to innovate with social initiatives – in this case, Bazaarvoice Stories – to increase interaction and drive sales on its site. PETCO knows its customers love their pets – and love showing them off at Halloween – so they introduced their "Howl-O-Ween" contest to not only highlight their consumers, but drive site traffic and sales as well. This fun contest allows all types of pets to share why "they" chose their Halloween costumes, complete with photos and videos. PETCO promoted this on their home page and in emails...

BAZAARBLOG — Today’s Wall Street Journal article (access to the full article requires a WSJ account) asserts that, while gossip bloggers and paparazzi seem to unearth every negative aspect online, consumers who review products seem to keep it positive – perhaps a little too positive, according to WSJ reporters. While the article suggests that reviews that are overly positive are at best not helpful and, at worst, edited or rejected by sites like Amazon, we have a different take on these results...

BAZAARBLOG — Golfsmith, a leading manufacturer and provider of golf and tennis gear, was one of Bazaarvoice’s first clients, and started Tweeting (@golfsmithHQ) and set up a Facebook fan page in spring 2009. Like a lot of retailers, Golfsmith is new to social media, but they’re not new to listening to their customers -- the company celebrated their 40th birthday in 2007. Right now, they’re trying to measure the impact of Facebook and Twitter for their business, and it’s an experiment at this point...

BAZAARBLOG — Proven ROI sets social commerce apart from social media. Unlike social media, social commerce explicitly ties together a company’s online, community-based activities with the bottom line. From a financial standpoint, it’s easy to see the benefits of social commerce over plain social media. Putting it into practice, however, can prove more challenging. If your company currently struggles to prove ROI on its community-based, online programs, then know: you’re not alone...

This is the final 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 research and e-commerce trends. Read the first post on growing the new US office and the second post on monetizing Twitter and social media...