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Tag Archives: social shopping
Trust does not equal influence – be careful how you interpret the data
The new Nielsen trust report is out. (Write up at Social Commerce Today.) Duck - here come the inflated claims from social commerce companies about how this proves the effectiveness of what they do. The problem is, it's not that simple. First, here's the data: The temptation is to conclude that because "recommendations from people I know" are most-trusted, a sure-fire strategy is to get your customers to recommend your stuff to their friends. The problem is that the whole reason friends are trusted is because they WON'T recommend your stuff to their friends - not unless they sincerely and spontaneously ... read more
The OL effect – an easy way to improve sales that you’re probably not doing
This is such an important validation of the effectiveness of social merchandising that, if we'd thought of it, we would have commissioned a market research firm to write this study for us. But, even better, it's actually a peer-reviewed article produced by a team of university marketing professors and published in the journal of the American Marketing Association, the Journal of Marketing Research. It's titled: Online Social Interactions: A Natural Experiment on Word of Mouth Versus Observational Learning. (There's also a nice write-up and interview with the lead author on Red Orbit.) The findings are straight-forward: Online, as in the physical ... read more
Surprising similarities between Q&A for education and for shopping
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 ... read more
How to Leverage Social When Visitors Are Shopping Onsite?
This is a reprint of a guest post I wrote for ZippyCart, originally published there on February 22. Beyond marketing and customer service, Social has the power to help convert visitors on retail sites. A large majority of online retailers today are using at least one of the most popular social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. These platforms have been used for brand marketing and customer service. Retailers are beginning to explore their utilities as sales tools. When it comes to selling, these platforms are in essence today’s equivalent of shoppers signing up to direct mailing lists. Shoppers give ... read more
The “Right Time” Web and Social Commerce
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.) The "Trusted Reference" Model for Social Commerce View more presentations from TurnTo Networks.
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
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
March and April Conversion Lift Numbers
Here is the conversion lift data for the larger sites using TurnTo for the last couple months. We're comparing the baseline conversion rate for the site to the conversion rate for shoppers who interacted with the TurnTo system at some point in their shopping path on the site. The 2-7X lift factors we were seeing in the first couple months of the year are still evident.
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
Recommended reading: Optaros on the power of Social Shopping
Optaros' "Social Ecommerce Ebook" makes for great reading if you are trying to optimize the performance of your ecommerce site. You can download it here. They make the points that: 1. higher levels of shopper engagement on retail sites drive improved business performance, and 2. social commerce tools are a powerful way to drive engagement. A couple highlights: From the Harvard Business Review Article, "In Ecommerce, More is More", they cite, The majority of managers we spoke to in our global study told us they believe that a broad array of information diverts attention from the core offerings. But we found it helps ... read more
Use social merchandising online to affect purchases in your store
There's a session at the next ANA Shopper Marketing Committee I'd really like to attend. (But I'm not a member - sigh... If you are a member, you can find it here.) The point of the session is so important for multi-channel retailers, I'm copying the description here. I'd put it this way: don't just use your web presence to sell; use it to create a connection to your brand that will bridge from your site all the way to your store. One of the most powerful ways you can do this is with social merchanising tools (like TurnTo) that ... read more
Do promotions help retailers’ bottom line more than investments in social tools et al?
Data from comScore as reported in the Wall Street Journal shows holiday sales up 4% over last year. Not bad considering the economy. But the growth appears to be driven largely by a huge increase in promotions: "Data from Shoplocal.com show that online retailer promotion activity is continuing at a high rate with the number of offers in the last week up 21% versus a year ago," said comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni. The strong sales numbers won't mean much if the January headlines are all about the carnage from over-discounting. (Remember the joke about making up for negative margin on volume?...) I'd ... 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
A great perspective on what social commerce really means
Paul Dunay, The Global Managing Director for Services and Social Media at Avaya, gave this description of social commerce in an interview in eMarketer: Social commerce is working with or using your social graph, which is defined as your followers or your friends, and allowing them to help you make buying decisions. Social commerce can be anything from a buying suggestion or recommendation—perhaps a tweet from a Dell outlet saying, “Hey, we have a special on this”—to something like Facebook Connect. Facebook Connect would allow you to go to a Website like Dell.com and authenticate yourself using your Facebook ... 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
Is Social the new Search?
According to a new Nielsen report, 20% of “social consumers” now discover content through their social contacts, instead of through search engines or content portals. Commerce is a type of content. This means that for “social consumers” (defined as those who spend 10 percent or more of their online time on social media), Social could become the new Search. What can online retailers do to tap into this new trend? Deploy tools that let your shoppers discover your products by looking at what friends and neighbors bought.
Are your friends making you fat?
That's the title of a recent article in the New York Times on research showing that the power of friend-influence is so great it even has a significant effect on your health. The research was done by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler using data from the long-running Framingham Heart Study and published in July 2007 in the New England Journal of Medicine. We see implications for social shopping, as well. Findings from the study cited in the article include: When a Framingham resident became obese, his or her friends were 57 percent more likely to become obese, too. A Framingham resident was roughly ... read more
TurnTo is in the Wall Street Journal today
Here's the full article: http://bit.ly/14Wl0n And here's what they have to say about us: New York-based TurnTo Networks Inc., for example, which was launched in September, helps retailers link their customer accounts with social-networking accounts and email accounts using Facebook Connect and other tools. TurnTo charges retailers a percentage of the revenue from sales attributed to the system. Tea retailer Teavana Corp. is a TurnTo client. Jay Allen, Teavana’s vice president of e-commerce, says the conversion rate—a measure of how many shoppers make purchases—for people who use the application is 20% higher than the rate for others, and their average orders ... read more
Local social shopping – now online
Would you walk into a great looking store if there are only salespeople there but absolutely no other shoppers you can see? Ever seen people peek at others’ shopping carts while waiting in line at the supermarket? Ever seen them reach out and grab a few extra products they hadn’t thought about buying before? Would you feel comfortable parking the only car at the shopping mall’s parking lot? My father told me that when I’m looking for a good restaurant, I should walk into one that’s full of people. This would be a good indication that the food is fresh and ... 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
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
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