turn to

Together with our partner, leading Yahoo Store builder FastPivot, we produced this webinar on Social Commerce strategies on Wednesday.  Here are all the slides plus the complete audio (controls are just under the slides). Thanks to the many attendees!

The FastPivot part runs through slide 35.  They provide a broad overview of social media marketing packed with actionable recommendations.  Starting at slide 36, we do an 18 minute discussion of Onsite Social for e-Commerce.  If I do say so myself: it too is insightful and practical.  Enjoy!

I gave this presentation at the MIT Enterprise Forum of NY a year and a half ago.  The NY Times Bits blog piece today on comments by Venrock’s Brian Ascher about the “Right Time Web” made me dust it off.  I tidied it up a bit (but not much).  My predictions about the imminent arrival of the “Trusted Reference” model in the e-commerce world were at least a year too soon - I left those unchanged.  (Brian’s colleague David Pakman also blogged about this in the spring.)

Amazon has just hooked up with Facebook to add social shopping features powered by the shopper’s Facebook friends list.  (NY Times article. WSJ article.)  My guess is that this will prove to be the watershed moment for social commerce.  Where Amazon leads, others follow.  Amazon pioneered customer ratings and reviews, which are now found on commerce sites across the web.  Amazon pioneered community cross-sell tools (”customers who looked at this also looked at that”, “customers who bought this also bought that”), which are now provided to online merchants by at least half a dozen vendors.  And while Amazon may not have pioneered the integration of 3rd-party social graphs into online stores (we’ve been at this for a few years), the ecommerce world is likely to take its cues from Amazon in this area, too.

Here’s what it looks like on my Amazon profile page:

And this is just their initial feature set; lots more must be just around the corner.  Merchants interested in the potential of “on-site social commerce” should check out what Amazon has done here and keep an eye on where they go next.

(For those interested in archeology: before Facebook built the one-social-graph-to-rule-them-all, Amazon had social-graph-building aspirations of their own.  They called it “Amazon Friends and Interesting People.”  Dig here to learn more.)

If you sell online and haven’t seen TripAdvisor’s new Facebook integration, check it out.  It’s a great example of what the future of social commerce is going to look like.  Go to any destination page on www.tripadvisor.com and look for the blue box to the right of the image.  Here’s what it looks like for me for Zurich:

There are three aspects of this application that point the way to the future.

Context.  You could get the information displayed here - which of your friends has been to a place you’re researching - by going to the TripAdvisor Cities-I’ve-Visited app.  But would you?  Here, TripAdvisor is delivering the social information in the context of your normal research path, rather than forcing you to detour to get it.  That makes you much more likely to consume this influential content.  For online merchants, context is just as important.  Shoppers do product research on product sites, not on social sites.  So it’s more powerful to bring the social references into the normal shopping path than it is to bring product information into the social environment.

Data source integration.  This tool combines two data sources - one from TripAdvisor and one from Facebook.  TripAdvisor has a database of places that many of their members have been.  It comes from a popular app they built a few years ago called “Places I’ve Visited”.  These data are combined with Facebook’s who-knows-who data, enabling TripAdvisor to tell you which of your friends have been to a particular place.  (Note: this has nothing to do with Facebook’s “Like” functions!)  As a merchant, you have a database just like TripAdvisor’s that you can leverage in a similar way: your purchase history data.  A mash-up between this data set and friend lists from Facebook (and other sources) is the key to delivering socially-enhanced shopping experiences.

Message-based communication.  The backbone of social commerce, to date, has been customer reviews.  Though highly effective, they’re not really all that social.  The shopper who posts a review never knows who will read it.  The shopper who reads a review can’t reach the person who wrote it.  There’s no direct communication between shoppers.  But in this TripAdvisor app, a visitor is offered a channel to connect directly to people with knowledge of the topic.  This is not passive Q&A where questions just hang around waiting for someone who can answer to happen by.  This is a message-based model where shoppers can actively reach out to one another.  My question about Zurich is not just posted on the Zurich page, it’s sent to the inbox of people who have been to Zurich.  That deepens and extends the engagement of the current visitor, who is called back each time their question is answered.  And it re-engages the past visitor who receives and answers the question.  This direct, message-based communication is also in the (near) future of social commerce.

In short: keep it simple.

In the first version of TurnTo, we were determined to set a gold standard on privacy control.  We provided a multi-level model for authorizing purchase information sharing.  We had forward and reverse models for specifying friend relationships.  We let users create groups of friends then share with groups while excluding individuals or sub-groups.  We provided time-based controls that let users specify review periods.  And that’s just the stuff we implemented; our plans went even further.

You know how that movie ended: no one used these functions.  And we’ve been stripping them out of the system one by one ever since.

Here’s what we learned: when it comes to sharing purchase information, there’s them that do, and there’s them that don’t, but there’s no one in the “I would if only I had more granular controls” group.  The best way to serve your users is to keep the model very simple so that it’s obvious at first glance what sort of information sharing is going to happen.  It’s OK to be very open, very restrictive, or anywhere in between, as long as the rules are obvious.  Granular controls don’t help you increase your audience. At best they’re ignored, and at worst they cause confusion and bad feeling.

In contrast, Facebook has been moving in the opposite direction.  They wanted to make their environment more open to enable functions that would be valuable to their members.  But they felt a significant part of their membership might prefer the old, more restrictive model.  So to keep everyone happy, they added granular privacy controls.  “Everyone can have it just the way they want it.”  But in trying to keep the old and the new at the same time, what used to be simple got complicated.  And that hasn’t worked.  People get their settings wrong and are surprised.  People feel duped if their settings change without warning, or they feel coerced if pressed to change settings they were happy with.  Or they feel burdened by having to learn complicated rules for something that used to be simple. Or they lose confidence in the system and back away.  And what about those conditions where A meant to share only with B, but B shares everything with everyone, and A didn’t see that one coming?  Now Facebook has added the Bandaid of bundling those granular controls into higher-level preferences.  “You want it small, medium, or large?  Don’t worry about the details.”  That might help - we’ll see.

But if Facebook had asked us, we would have told them this: it’s OK to change, even radically.  (You of all companies know that and have shown the guts to do it.)  Decide on the basic approach to privacy you think is best for your users and your business.  And throw everything else out.  Some users will gripe about the changes (like they did when you introduced the news feed).  But then they will see the wisdom of your new model, their behavior will adapt (some may share less, others more), and they will thank you thank you thank you for keeping it simple.

After over a year in the market helping a few dozen innovative online retailers add social shopping features to their stores, we thought it was time to synthesize and share the big lessons we’ve learned.  So here [drumroll] is our new whitepaper: Onsite Social for Online Commerce.  In it, we get specific about things like:

• How to leverage social networks for Social Merchandising within your store
• How to most effectively encourage shoppers to share news of their purchases with their social network friends
• Why adding Social to ecommerce sites requires different strategies than for content sites
• What sort of results are realistic to expect

We’re just putting it out there - no registration required to get it.  If you find it thought-provoking, we hope you’ll get in touch with us and pass it on to others.  Enjoy!

A new study out from Facebook and Nielsen shows that adding even a small social element to an advertisement dramatically increases the effectiveness of the ad.  We’re excited about this research because it provides some pretty solid guidance on the effect merchants can expect from adding social elements to product merchandising on their online stores: increased conversion rates, increased loyalty/repeat-purchase rates.  Their chart tells the tale:

First: we wholeheartedly agree with the ideas underlying Facebook’s big announcements today. People want to be able to interact with their friends on sites all across the web, not just within Facebook.  And sites don’t all want to have to become Facebook apps to support this.

TurnTo has been working to enable contextual delivery of social networks on ecommerce sites since our founding in 2007.  And we’ve proved that the benefits for both shoppers and merchants are significant.  So we applaud Facebook, appreciate the validation that their heading in this direction provides, and are already hard at work incorporating their new API.

We also think that to derive maximum advantage from an Onsite Social strategy, ecommerce sites should not rely exclusively on the new Like-based functions that Facebook is providing, but should - more importantly - leverage their purchase transaction data.  Here’s why:

It’s useful for your shoppers to see which of their friends know about your store and the products you sell.  Facebook’s API takes care of the problem of determining who you shoppers’ friends are.  But how do you determine what those friends know about?  Facebook’s new Like button lets shoppers register a connection to items on your store that they, well, like.  But Like does not equal know-about.  And many people who buy from you - and therefore REALLY know about you and your products, will never click Like.  In other words, there will be loads of false positives and false negatives.

If you were a content site, this might be the best you can do.  But as a commerce site, you have a unique asset: the purchase transaction.  You already have a massive set of people who really do know about you and your products, and the list grows every day.  They’re called: customers.

So go ahead and use the new Facebook plugins.  But also, and more importantly, leverage your transactional data to socialize the shopping experience on your site.  That’s where the big opportunity lies.

Online Media Daily reports today on a study by ICOM — a division of direct marketing agency Epsilon — which finds that there is no universal influencer, and that consumers are influencers strictly within product categories, rather than across all categories.  In other words, just because that blogger or Twitterer has thousands of readers/followers doesn’t mean they will be influential with YOUR customers.

Then the piece goes on to note:

One of the first studies to seriously cast doubt on influencers’ limitless authority was released by Canadian research firm Pollara in mid-2008. Based on the responses of some 1,100 adults, it found that self-described social media users put far more trust in friends and family online than in popular bloggers, or strangers with 10,000 social network “friends.”

Nearly 80% said they were very or somewhat more likely to consider buying products recommended by real-world friends and family, while only 23% reported being very or somewhat likely to consider a product pushed by “well-known bloggers.”

So if your goal is to activate the people who are influential with the consumers you are targeting, shouldn’t you be looking for your influencers within those consumers’ friend networks?

Forrester retail guru Sucharita Mulpuru recently published her latest TechRadar report on Social Commerce.  Available from Forrester here.  And for free download from ATG here.

We were pleased to be included as one of a select group of vendors profiled in the report.  It’s a great resource for retailers in planning their approach to social.  Here’s the chart that summarizes it all in one place: