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Tag Archives: social networks
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
New whitepaper out: Onsite Social for Online Retail
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 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 ... read more
It’s more important to bring social networks into your store than the other way around
Most of the focus on social shopping has been on how stores can build a presence on Facebook and Twitter. But new research from BIGResearch for Shop.Org suggests this is backwards. Online stores will likely benefit far more from bringing the social networks of their shoppers into the buying experience within the store. Here's why: are rarely the starting point for shopping per se. When we asked consumers, “Where do you typically start your online shopping? (Check all that apply)”, consumers told us that they are most likely to start their online shopping at merchant Web sites (almost three-quarters), search engines / directories ... 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.
Thought leaders predict social shopping among top trends for ’09
Peter Kim asked a handful of thought leaders in the social media space to give their predictions for the top trends of '09. Here are a couple related to social commerce: Charlene Li: Shopping Goes Social (also reprinted on her own blog) After a devastating holiday season, retailers will eagerly seek a way to improve results other than driving demand with deeper discounts. One option they will investigate will be how to insert people and social connections into the buying process, illuminating and influencing for the first time the Black Hole Of Consideration. As they lick their wounds in the first half ... read more
Strangers or friends?
The communications agency Universal McCann recently published a report called "When Did We Start Trusting Strangers?" looking at how much more influential the advice of strangers has become in purchase decisions since the rise of social media. Brands better not ignore this call to action -- like it or not, the phenomenon is real and powerful. And in many ways it's a good thing, putting more pressure on brands to produce superior products instead of just superior marketing. But it's not entirely a good thing. To the degree that these anonymous interactions replace authentic, personal ones, they represent lost opportunities. We ... read more