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Tag Archives: Facebook
Is Q&A the new forum?
Dell just relaunched their community for IT professionals, rebranding it from AppDeploy to ITNinja, and changing the interaction model from forum to Q&A. This follows the Q&A models used in other IT communities like Spiceworks and StackOverflow. It's a subtle but important change. A lot of forum discussion takes the form of Q&A anyway, but adding the formal structure of Q&A has advantages. The core difference is this: a person asking a question is generally seeking answers, while a person making a comment is often seeking an audience. The person seeking an audience tends to have a more "selfish" set of ... read more
Are you teaching a class when you should be hosting a party?
Most brands' and stores' greatest single asset is the goodwill of their customers. And most do little to leverage this goodwill for marketing gain. There's a fallacy in marketing land that just because you have a presence on social networks, you are doing "social" marketing. But when you look a bit closer, you see that most social initiatives by brands look a lot like traditional marketing and merchandising, just in a new place. The essential idea of "social commerce" is: connect your shoppers and customers directly to each other. Not only does this help turn your shoppers into customers, ... read more
One social network to rule them all? Not.
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 ... read more
Is it really coming to this: social commerce = pay-for-share?
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 ... read more
Full price is dying. Social is the perp.
As discussed in a couple recent posts (one, two), it's much harder to get people to share purchase-related information than other types of personal news and content. And the type of sharing you can get people to do in bulk ("contextual sharing") is more limited than the broadcast-to-all-your-friends type that most merchants dream about. But there's one big exception: discounts! Discount offers and social are a perfect symbiosis. Access to deals is the #1 reason people fan brands on Facebook (driving brands to offer more deals to get more fans). Deal-a-day services (Groupon, LivingSocial) and private sale sites (Gilt, Rue La ... read more
What works in purchase sharing
Last month, I wrote about the challenges of social commerce - in particular, why it's so hard to get people to share purchase-related information. And I promised I'd follow up with a more optimistic post about an approach that's working. We call this "contextual sharing". Try this: Ask a random sample of people how they feel about telling their friends about recent purchases. Most of the people you ask will probably give you an answer like this: once in a while they'll tell some friends about some purchases, but the idea of mass-sharing their purchases is repulsive. Now ask them how ... read more
Why Social Commerce is so hard
I was recently on a Social Commerce panel (photos here) for Social Media week hosted by Digitas in NYC. (Thanks Beth McCabe, Noah Mallin, Jonathan Burg, and fellow panelists Matty de Castro of Facebook and Bob Tuttle of 8th Bridge!). One of my fellow panelists put up a screen shot of the Levi's Friends Store as an example of Social Commerce and provided an opening I couldn't resist. Look in the lower right: Levi's has 2.9m Facebook fans. That's 2.9m people who have agreed to allow Levi's to send them messages in Facebook. Not bad! Now look at the Original ... read more
Next TurnTo Webinar: Beyond Facebook “Like” and Twitter
You've implemented Facebook "Like," have a fanpage, post on Twitter, but haven't seen a real return on using Social Networks? Register now for TurnTo's 45 minute Webinar taking place on Wednesday September 22nd at 2:30PM Eastern. We'll take a look at how you can increase conversions 2-5X above your baseline by providing your shoppers with a way for them to connect with people they know and other shoppers directly in the shopping cycle. See why over 50 online stores have implemented TurnTo's powerful and lightweight Social Commerce Suite. Simply email bnettle@turnto.com to register and we'll send details on the upcoming webinar. We look ... read more
TripAdvisor’s new Facebook integration shows the future of social commerce
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. ... read more
Introducing the TurnTo Social Commerce Suite
It’s a big day at TurnTo: we’re introducing our Social Commerce Suite. (Yes, we know that it’s ambitious to call it a “Suite” with just 2 products – please humor us. Also, there’s more in the pipeline…) Official press release here. 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 ... read more
What we learned about privacy that Facebook knew and forgot
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 ... read more
For ecommerce sites, “Like” is OK, but “Bought” is much better
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 ... read more
Business Week on the merging of social and shopping
Business Week just published a piece on the potential for Facebook in online shopping. They focus on the role of Facebook Connect in enabling shoppers to post questions to their Facebook network before making a purchase. It makes sense that this is the primary way Facebook Connect has been used so far in online shopping, since it's the easiest to implement. But it's just scratching the surface. The real potential is in bringing the social network to the shopping site (not the other way around). For one thing, many people are hesitant to blast questions that they know are only relevant to ... read more
AuctionBytes podcast from the Internet Retailer Conference
I had fun during the Internet Retailer Conference this week chatting with Ina Steiner, Editor of the AuctionBytes blog. We covered a lot of topics in a short time. She has posted the conversation as a podcast. Enjoy.
Facebook Connect can have dramatic benefits for online merchants
Here's what Citysearch CEO Jay Herratti told the New York Times last week regarding their recent trial of Facebook Connect: In the four months the site has been testing Facebook Connect, 94 percent of reviewers have published their reviews to Facebook, where an average of 40 people see them and 70 percent click back to Citysearch. That has translated into new members: daily registrations on Citysearch have tripled. If you are an on-line merchant, don't leave all the Facebook Connect fun to the publishers! With tools like TurnTo, a Facebook Connect implementation is far easier and quicker than you might imagine. ... read more
If your target demographic is over 35, do you need a social shopping strategy?
Last year, ecommerce sites that sell to “grown ups” sometimes told us, “We don’t need a social shopping strategy – our customers don’t use social networks.” That was last year. The landscape is changing at an incredible pace, and customer profiles in 2009 are going to look quite different. Take a look at this article about the growth rate in the over-55 Facebook population. http://www.bizreport.com/2009/02/is_facebook_going_gray.html
What should online merchants do with Facebook Connect?
The New York Times ran a piece today heralding the imminent arrival of Facebook Connect - significant as an indication of the huge expected impact of the feature. My guess is that for brands and online merchants planning their social commerce strategy, the anticipation of Facebook Connect will be matched by an equal measure of head-scratching about how to make the best use of it. Its predecessor, Beacon, had significant flaws. But for merchants, it also had a particular beauty - clarity of purpose. It did just one thing (sending "stories" to their customers' Facebook pages so friends could see what ... read more