TurnTo Blog

August 25, 2011

What To Do When Shoppers Don’t Trust Your Customer Reviews

By George Eberstadt

The New York Times recently published a piece about the industry of paid customer reviews.  This story surfaces periodically.  Even if it’s only a small percent of reviews that are paid for, the perception that positive reviews are bought (or that negative reviews are suppressed) undermines the value of all reviews, even the legitimate ones.  Here’s a typical comment responding to the NY Times article:

“When I search Amazon, I only trust the negative reviews. Too many of the 5-star comments sound phony.”

So if you have customer reviews on your storefront, what can you do to address review-skepticism?

One option is to augment your customer reviews with a Social Q&A system that enables shoppers to get their product questions answered by people who actually bought the item or service they are considering.  Done right, a Social Q&A system delivers answers to a shopper question within hours from multiple buyers of the item, and it enables the shopper to continue a back-and-forth exchange with those purchasers for follow-up questions.  In other words, it provides the sort of social experience that would be very hard to fake.  So shoppers can be confident that the answerer’s sentiment is trustworthy.

Further, a store’s willingness to put shoppers directly in touch with real customers says a lot about the confidence the store has in its products, service and customer satisfaction.  This confidence produces a “halo effect” that adds to the credibility of the store’s customer reviews, too.  Shoppers might figure “why would this store fake their reviews when they are giving me direct access to their customers?”

While customer reviews will continue to be an important part of the online shopping experience, complementing them with Social Q&A is a powerful way to improve review credibility and address the concerns of the review skeptics.

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Have you ever spotted a customer review online that you just knew was not legitimate?  Tell us about it below.

Posted in Blog, Thoughts | No Comments

August 5, 2011

Ecommerce Award for TurnTo

By Andrew Pettit

Normally, we at TurnTo reserve our blog for topical posts about online commerce that will lead to spirited discussions about the state of the social web… but sometimes we win awards and can’t resist a little self-promotion.  We’re honored that we were recently named an Ecommerce Junkie Award winner.

The team at EcommerceJunkie.com selected TurnTo based upon Ask Owners, our best-in-class Social Q&A product.  As they noted, “Many of TurnTo’s retail partners have even said that Ask Owners provides more quality user-generated content than their very own customer review systems.”

They go on to say, “It has been awhile since we awarded a Junkie based on a technological feature but Turnto is certainly deserving of this month’s edition of the award!”  Aw, shucks.  You’re making us blush.  Thanks so much to the whole Ecommerce Junkie team.

Posted in Blog, Company | No Comments

August 4, 2011

Ecommerce Podcast: Social Commerce Innovations and More

By Andrew Pettit

In the most recent Ecommerce Podcast, host Shaun Ryan (the CEO of SLI Systems) interviewed our CEO, George Eberstadt, about recent innovations in social commerce and broader topics in Social, including the potential of Google+.  (This podcast series includes interviews with leaders in ecommerce to help educate online retailers on best practices and current trends.  Highly recommended!)

In discussing the state of social commerce, George noted that the quality of innovation in social commerce has increased substantially this year when compared to previous years: “After 10 years of very modest innovation in ecommerce, all of a sudden the innovation level is just exploding; new business models, new shopping tools, better shopping experiences… The macro trend is innovation…”

Sean also asked George his thoughts on the potential of Google+.  In considering the circles feature specifically, George noted that in his experience developing social commerce applications, ”People do not want to deal with that level of granularity around permissioning. People want to manage their sharing and their social graph at the level of the complete network, not at the sub-network level.”

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THE FULL ECOMMERCE PODCAST.

Posted in Blog, Company, Partners, Thoughts | No Comments

July 26, 2011

Adorama’s Approach Indicates a Change in Social Q&A

By Andrew Pettit

We’re thrilled to welcome Adorama to the TurnTo Network.  See the press release here. Adorama is one of the leading online photo gear specialists.  Though they apparently chose to skip the IR rankings in the most recent version, they were previously ranked as high as #381.

 

 

In their first full month using the TurnTo social Q&A product, Ask Owners, Adorama has seen a remarkably high engagement rate from their customer base.  Questions about popular items received an average of 4.3 social answers each, with the first of those reaching the asking customer in about an hour.  The answer rate on question emails sent to past purchasers was 9%, bringing a large number of past customers back to the Adorama site and providing valuable user-generated content for future visitors and for SEO.

While we’re delighted at the success Adorama is having with Ask Owners, we think the real significance here is bigger than just: further evidence that “TurnTo works”.  The real significance is this: social Q&A for ecommerce is no longer just a tag-along application to customer reviews; social Q&A is now emerging as its own category of ecommerce tool.  Leading online merchants are starting to take a top-down approach to defining what they want from social Q&A – and it looks different from what their customer reviews vendors have been offering them.

Before they chose TurnTo, Adorama did a competitive evaluation of alternative Q&A tools.  Presumably it would have been convenient for them to work with the product from their customer reviews provider.  But Adorama didn’t just want the most convenient solution.  They wanted an approach designed from the ground up to tap into the enthusiasm, expertise, and good will of their customer base.  In short, the wanted a truly social approach to Q&A.

If Adorama were the only online merchant we were hearing this from, we might figure it was an exception.  But they’re not. Unlike 2010, when most merchants adopting Q&A were just reacting to vendor push (hey, including ours), we now talk to many who have already developed specs and RFQs with demanding requirements.  In particular, they want Q&A to be a key part of their Social strategy, not just a customer support tool.  They see that, used right, Q&A enables shoppers to get in touch directly with past customers that can help them make smart purchase choices.  In short, they understand that with real social Q&A, customers become salespeople for them in the best sense of the word; not paid advocates, but trusted advisors.  And while they recognize that it’s simple to just accept what their reviews vendor offers, those that want to achieve this vision are looking for true best-in-breed providers – ie they are looking elsewhere.

And that is not just a nice vendor success story, it’s a sea change!

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For more details, check out the formal announcement in our Press Room.

Posted in Blog, Customers | No Comments

July 12, 2011

The Whole 9%: Social Q&A Data and the 1-9-90 Rule

By Andrew Pettit

We’ve been noticing an interesting correlation between the well-known 1-9-90 rule derived from online forums and the participation rate in our ecommerce-based Q&A system.

Initially noted by Bradley Horowitz in 2006, the 1-9-90 rule claims that online forums can be divided into 3 participation groups: Creators (1%), Contributors (9%) and Lurkers (90%). Creators will initiate content production unprompted. Contributors will respond to content others have initiated. And lurkers just read. (For a primer on the 1-9-90 Principle check out Bradley Horowitz’s post, and for some serious number-crunching check out Dr. Michael Wu’s articles.)

Here’s what we noticed. The TurnTo system emails questions from people shopping on an online store to past customers who bought the item that the shopper is considering. The people who receive those emails are a pretty random sample of the overall customer base of the store. And those randomly selected customers answer those shopper questions at an 8% rate per email sent (average across all stores using TurnTo – top stores get a 10-12% answer rate). That’s awfully close to the 9% that Horowitz observed on forums. And it suggests that from a “participation” point-of-view the composition of an online store’s customer base may look a lot like the composition of the membership of an online forum. Namely, a small percentage will initiate a dialog, around 9% will respond, and the rest will read what the other two groups produce.

This is a significant insight if you run an ecommerce business and want to build deeper customer relationships through online community. There’s a big part of your customer base that is very willing to engage if given the right invitation. You can’t count on them to actively seek out ways to contribute, but if you reach out to them, they will respond. Don’t settle for 1% when you could have 9%!

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Have you noticed online activity that relates to the 1-9-90 Principle? Tell us about it in the comments below.

Posted in Product, Thoughts | 2 Comments

July 9, 2011

One social network to rule them all? Not.

By George Eberstadt

I just got an invitation to Google+.  After a brief time with it, I’m making a prediction: the Circles thing isn’t going to work.  With Circles, Google+ is making the play to become one network spanning many types of relationship and purpose by letting you restrict your sharing and filter your view of the global feed by sub-group.  Work.  Friends.  People I follow.  There are two reasons I doubt this will work.

Reason #1: I blogged a while ago about something we learned (the hard way) at TurnTo about granular privacy control.  It doesn’t work.  There are people who will use your system, and there are people who won’t use your system, but there are very few people who would-use-your-system-if-only-they-had-more-granular-privacy-control.  Early on, we built a very similar privacy model to Google+: it provided groups to enable users to restrict what got shared with whom.  Like Google+, we offered a set of starter groups and allowed user-customization.  Later, we ripped the whole thing out.  We came to understand that (most) people want to manage privacy at the level of the network, not sub-groups within the network.  People do their work-related networking on LinkedIn and their personal sharing on Facebook.  Twitter is great for following people you don’t know personally (and therefor also useful for businesses to promote themselves).  People decide who to connect to on each network based on what they plan to share (or read) there, and then they share fully with all their connections.  That’s as granular as it gets.  An item that isn’t suitable for someone’s whole audience on a particular network doesn’t get restricted to a sub-group, it just doesn’t get shared at all (or it gets shared with everyone with whatever consequences…).

Reason #2: Different system services are optimal for different types of network; there’s no one-size-fits-all collection.  As a professional network, LinkedIn provides a great structure for exhibiting your work history.  As a personal network, Facebook has great photo sharing.  As a network of mostly-nonpersonal-following, Twitter provides great link sharing.  The network services and the community co-evolve and specialize over time.  If Google+ members really do try to maintain many different types of relationships within the system, they’ll end up unhappy with the tools the system provides.  Either the tools will be too sparse, or the tools to support one type of network will be clutter to the others.  (Would an elaborate resume system be appropriate for your Facebook profile?)  In order for a social network to provide relevant services, there needs to be some level of focus to the type of relationships the network supports.  And once the network has that focus, groups become irrelevant.

If I’m right, someone buy me a beer.  If Circles works out, the drinks on are me.

Posted in Thoughts | 2 Comments

July 5, 2011

Surprising similarities between Q&A for education and for shopping

By George Eberstadt

It is interesting to see that the same message-based approach that is finally making social Q&A work for ecommerce is also making social Q&A work for education.  Today’s New York Times profiles a new site called Piazza, which enables students to get help from classmates through a Q&A model.  As the Times describes it:

Although there are rival services, like Blackboard, an education software company, Piazza’s platform is specifically designed to speed response times. The site is supported by a system of notification alerts, and the average question on Piazza will receive an answer in 14 minutes.

That’s exactly what we see from our shopping Q&A system, Ask Owners.  By sending shopping questions directly to people who are likely to know the answer (because they bought the product!) Ask Owners outperforms bulletin board-style Q&A systems in 3 ways: many more answers, much faster answers, and higher quality answers.  It makes a lot of sense this model would be powerful for class-based communities, too.

Kudos to Piazza founder Pooja Nath.  We’re excited to see your success!

Posted in Thoughts | No Comments

June 14, 2011

Announcing two partnerships with leading store builders

By George Eberstadt

We’re very excited to announce 2 partnerships today.  Both are ecommerce platform specialists.

YourStoreWizards are stars at building stores on the Yahoo! Small Merchant platform.  We’ve been working with them quietly for a little while, and they’ve already installed TurnTo on 3 Yahoo! Stores: www.911HealthShop.com, www.LightingShowroom.com, and www.TimsBoots.com.  They’ve completely mastered the Yahoo! platform, which means A. they are super cost-effective and B. they can solve the hard problems.  They’ve even built great solutions for implementing a couple of advanced TurnTo features on Yahoo stores – the XML feed for enabling all the TurnTo UGC to be embedded as vanilla HTML for maximum SEO benefit (4 TLAs in that phrase!) and automated creation of related item clusters to ensure there’s an answerer pool available even for unpopular items.  We’re enjoying being featured on their homepage and having our own product page on their site.

SuiteCommerce is a leading NetSuite eCommerce specialist.  They’ve just finished installing TurnTo on www.kitchenwaredirect.com.au, and it looks great!  They’re fabulous to work with, and, with apparent ease, they figured out some tough challenges in automating the  TurnTo data feeds on the NetSuite platform.  Their expertise also makes SuiteCommerce a cost-effective resource for TurnTo implementation and for any other NetSuite work.  We’re thrilled they’ve chosen to feature us as their Social Commerce solution.

Formal announcements in our Press Room.

Posted in Company, Partners | No Comments

April 29, 2011

If social media is no good for ecommerce, is social commerce DoA?

By George Eberstadt

Forrester and GSI just released a study by star analyst Sucharita Mulpuru showing social networks are not effective channels for ecommerce.  The oldies – email and search marketing – perform far better.  (Available free on the GSI website here.  Data cited in Mashable here.)  In a universe of endless, self-promotional, vendor-funded studies, this one should get more than it’s share of your attention because the sponsors gain nothing (but credibility) from spreading these conclusions.

In the face of this withering evidence, we think it’s a good moment to review the distinction between social media marketing and social commerce.

  • Social media marketing is about delivering a commercial message on social media sites.  It is a hub-and-spoke model of communication where the brand is the hub and customers/prospects are at the end of each spoke.  It’s getting people to Like your fan page or to Follow you so they’ll accept your messages in their news feed.  Social media gurus say you must “listen” carefully and that your tone when you speak must be “authentic”, advice that inherently assumes the dialog is between YOU and THEM.  Social media marketing is comfortable to most organizations because it’s basically the old stuff, just in a new place.
  • Social commerce is about facilitating interaction between your customers and prospect about you.  You are not at the hub of the network; rather you provide tools that encourage discussion amongst the members (and prospective members) of your community.  That discussion about you is happening anyway, but usually only in response to extreme experiences – positive and negative.  But if you lower the barriers by providing the right tools, you can greatly increase the amount of discussion about you (and improve the tone, too).  And that leads to increased sales.  These tools can run on your own ecommerce site, on social networks, or on content sites across the web.

The Forrester / GSI study takes an ax to social media marketing, but not to social commerce.  I like the analogy Fiona Dias of GSI uses to explain why social media marketing doesn’t work: just because lots of people go to church doesn’t mean church is the right place to advertise.  Similarly, just because lots of people are on Facebook doesn’t mean Facebook is the right place to deliver your commercial message.  Context matters.  And while the Facebook context may not be right for brands to deliver their commercial messages, it is definitely a good place for brands to facilitate discussion between members of their community.

We think most brands should reconsider their social strategies – and especially their Facebook presence – in light of these findings.  In particular, they should stop using their Facebook presence as just an extension of their existing brand or ecommerce website and instead think of it as a place to host discussion among the members of their community.  They should also think about how to add tools to their ecommerce sites that facilitate dialog between prospects and customers.  And finally they should think about how to tie all of these community presences together so that dialog in one location is visible on all.

That’s social commerce, and it’s alive and growing.

Posted in Thoughts | No Comments

April 13, 2011

Is it really coming to this: social commerce = pay-for-share?

By George Eberstadt

I now count 6 start-ups offering tools that enable online stores to pay their customers for posting to Facebook about the things they’ve bought.  The flavors and features vary, but pay-for-share is the core mechanism for all of them.

The model that seems to be getting most traction looks like this:

1. Offer the customer a discount for posting news of their purchase to Facebook (and Twitter).

2. Assure the customer that by posting they are also providing a discount to their friends. (With some of these tools, I’ve been unable to figure out how the friends actually get their discount, but that’s probably a failure of my research…)

It’s essential to provide both discounts to maximize sharing.  If the store provides a discount only to the customer, she feels like a shill for promoting the store to her friends just to get a discount for herself.  But if she feels like she is providing her friends with a discount, too, then she can share away to get her own discount guilt-free.

I get the appeal of this model to stores as a way to reach new customers through Facebook, but I don’t get the economics.  Isn’t “paying” your customers to share discount offers with their friends an expensive way to get offer distribution?  Presumably, the customers who sign up are those who plan to use the discount they get for sharing, so the incremental sales / new customer acquisition / many-coupons-expire-unused arguments don’t apply (at least not much).  One store using this tool offers a customer 25% off on their next purchase of $65 or more to share about their purchase on Facebook – so a minimum cost to the store of $16 in lost margin on a future sale.  Say we cut that in half for incremental sales / expired-unused effects.  That’s still an $8 min cost per post.  And the most aggressive estimates I’ve seen of the value of a purchaser-post on Facebook are $2-5.  So that doesn’t work.

On the other hand, if my calcs are wrong, and the economics of pay-for-share really do work, and the model becomes wide-spread, what will this mean for Facebook et al?  Will they have to enforce disclosure rules?  Do paid-for posts harm the community, or only (if discovered) the reputation of the poster?

Hey, if this model proves out, we’ll probably add it as an option in our Social Commerce Suite, too.  But what I’m really hoping is that, in the end, social commerce will be about people sharing with each other just because it’s helpful, not because they’re paid to.

Posted in Thoughts | 4 Comments

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