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!

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.)

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.

So what’s new? 1. We’ve done a nearly complete overhaul of our current product, now branded “Social Merchandising” and 2. We’re introducing a new product called “Social Purchase Sharing”.

Social Merchandising. We’ve made improvements top to bottom.

• Shoppers who open the widget but don’t personalize it by checking for friends will now see a range of other customers and their purchases designed to give the site that buzzing busy-store feeling and to encourage consideration and purchase of more items. (The goal is to address one of the big limitations of the shopping online: lots of stuff in the stores, but no people.)  We’ve built a ranking engine that selects which customers and which items to show, ensuring the greatest relevance given limited data.
• We’ve made the value and process of personalizing the widget a lot more transparent to the user, so many more of those who open the widget will go the next step and personalize it to see their own friends in place of those the system picks. Underlying this is a simplification of the sharing rules to a vanilla Twitter-style “follow” model. (See our last post about the importance of simplicity when it comes to privacy and sharing.) We’ve also switched to delegated login for most of the friend list sources we support, including the newest Facebook protocols. (The short explanation: it’s better.)
• The widget now shows big, attractive product images throughout, so not only are shoppers seeing which of their friends also shop at that store, the purchases those friends made look particularly inviting.  Good for cross-sell and order size improvement.
• The comment mechanism has been redone to both capture more input from buyers and to show it more visibly to shoppers.
• We’ve made significant enhancements to the guts of the system to provide greater speed and reliability. These include use of a Content Delivery Network as well as a range of server-side caching and summarizing strategies. The design point was to be able to support the largest ecommerce sites out there.
• We’ve added new tools for optimizing the button that calls up the widget. It doesn’t do stores any good to have a fabulous social merchandising tool if only a few shoppers use it. We now provide a range of more interactive button designs as well as tools for doing rotation tests (randomized A/B/C tests) of alternatives. In its initial use, we’ve already seen large engagement rate improvements.

In a nutshell: you have to see it. So here’s the first screen shot we’ve released:

Social Purchase Sharing. Our partner merchants have been telling us how valuable it is when a customer posts to their social network (most often Facebook and Twitter) about their purchase. So we’ve added a simple tool to significantly increase the amount of purchase sharing online stores can generate. It’s an overlay that appears on the order confirmation page right after a purchase and makes a clear, persuasive appeal to share. The permission obtained from the buyer is also used to power the Social Merchandising widget, so the “sharing” appears both on the social networks and on the store site itself. Here’s an example of the overlay – just picture it on top of your order confirmation page. (See also our blog post on “Like” vs. “Bought”.

The TurnTo Social Commerce Suite will be generally available to online retailers at the beginning of Q3, 2010.

If you are in Chicago this week for the Internet Retailer show (IRCE), please come by booth #431 and we’ll give you a full demo.

If you’d like more information on the thinking that went into these products, please have a look at the white paper we just released: Onsite Social for Online Commerce.

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.

• 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!