Why should retailers pay more attention to social shopping on Polyvore?

In my last post, I ran through the basics of Polyvore’s site from a user’s perspective. Today I’m going to give my two cents on why retailers should be paying more attention to Polyvore and the social shopping trend in general.

First, who doesn’t love viral free referrals?

As I outlined last week, when I publish a set I can manually share it with my friends in many ways. But once the set is published, I’m also sharing it with my virtual “friends” – the other 135,000+ registered users – who can access to it through search or stumble across it through the many ways of exploring the site. They can see what I’ve put together and where (read: free referrals) the items came from. They can also use any of the items I’ve clipped in building their own sets which is when the connecting with strangers starts happening.

For example, I don’t know MIZZ*TIFFANY in real life – but we are best friends forever on the site because we have similar taste. Not only do I use a lot of the items she’s clipped (and vice versa) when building my own sets, but she’s introduced me to three retailers I’d never even heard of before. Thank you, MIZZ*TIFFANY for showing me three new online stores! Those retailers should be thanking her too, as I’d never have found them (and then made a purchase) on page 20 in Google search results. It makes me wonder. Do these retailers even know about Polyvore or, if so, are they using their analytics tool to track traffic coming from it?

My guess is probably not. But if I were a retailer – especially of fashion – I’d build a campaign in my analytics tool that aggregates site visits coming from any of the polyvore URLs. In doing so, they should be able to identify the influencers who are advocating for their brand. And if there is a significant amount of traffic coming from the Polyvore, they may want to run a promotion on the site.

Check out this recent promotion from American Eagle (ended last week) calling for Polyvore users to create their own sets using AE clothing. Brilliant – they’ve found a great way to engage with their target audience in a manner that isn’t disruptive and actually contributes to their social shopping experience.

And that is the key to any successful social shopping initiative. Finding the communities where your target audiences are connecting and implement a strategy that inserts you into the conversation to further their purpose, as well as promote your product.

Secondly, I firmly believe that it’s a new era for online commerce and behaviors are changing. 

Polyvore has a large, yet targeted audience of users who have come together to essentially create fashionable photo stories. And the audience is growing tremendously month over month. Check out this graph comparing the traffic rank of Polyvore to Abercrombie, The Gap, and J. Crew. Not too bad for a site that’s not even a year old.

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Not only is the traffic stacking quickly, but the average user spends 8 minutes on the site per session. And if I had to guess that number will only increase as greater interactivity is offered leaving less time spent on a retail site. In fact, as more people learn about (and use) social shopping sites like Polyvore, I’m guessing (er – hoping) that retailers start to take these new behaviors into consideration when making user experience and design decisions on their own sites. Retailers need to view the shopping experience outside of their closed-loop online experience because I firmly believe that more and more “shopping” is going to occur within sites like Polyvore, with the retail stores serving as merchandise repositories and transaction outlets. I’m not recommending that retailers start editing their online stores based on the latest and greatest Internet applications, but they do need to understand how these other sites work relative to their own sites.

For example, most retail sites currently offer zoom and/or color change features on their images – which over time has increased conversion and become a best practice in retailing. However, these images are most often served through a flash plug-in, which doesn’t allow the clipper to grab the image. So the images look fantastic and are perfectly merchandised on the retailer’s site, but consumers can’t clip them, meaning they can’t share them within other social shopping environments. And when consumers are spending more time on social shopping sites versus retail sites – they’ll be sharing (read: promoting) the products that are easy to share – which aren’t the ones served up in flash.

This is only one example of how I think the growth of social shopping sites will change the game for retailers. It will change how they communicate promotions, how they design customer acquisition campaigns, and how they evolve their own user experiences on their sites. It will be interesting to see which retailers change their strategies based on these quickly emerging trends. The only thing of which I’m certain is it won’t be the ones who view social media as a new fad and start paying attention after it’s too late.

Polyvore – A Social Shoppaholic’s Dream

We return from our brief recession conversation to remind you of the social shopping series we started a few weeks back. After a brief period learning more about the behavior that drives social shopping this fall, we spent about a month evaluating social shopping on retail sites, as well as the various communities where consumers come together during the shopping process. Again, the goal was to better understand user interactions and the impact these interactions have in the buying process. There were a few winners among the many average sites we evaluated and I’m going to dedicate my next few posts to highlighting some of the best-in-class examples of social shopping, starting with my favorite of the mix – Polyvore.

Polyvore is an easy-to-use social shopping application that enables browsers to create visual sets, outfits, collages, etc. from items they find online and share them with whomever they want. In my opinion, this is the closest consumers have to a virtual dressing room. You can’t try them on exactly, but you can check in with your friends to see if that belt really goes with these shoes – before you make the purchase.

How do consumers interact with the application and others on the site? Using the Polyvore clipper tool you add to your toolbar, you can “clip” or grab images from other sites, adding them to your “inventory” for later use in creating a set. Once you’ve “clipped” the images you need, you can bring it altogether through the application in a set – like this one here.

Once I’ve published a set, Polyvore makes it easy to share. I can send friends a link or even an ecard. I can embed it on my blog. And, of course, I’ve downloaded the Facebook widget, so the new sets are automatically added to my news feed and my profile page – further promoting my set (and the Polyvore site) to my Facebook community.

Polyvore wins! It’s an easy-to-use, easy-to-share example of social shopping. It was the first example about which I was truly excited to share with my retail client. Her response – “that’s a neat little tool, but I don’t see how we could use it” – was not so exciting. On a base level she’s right, this is a neat little tool for consumers. But if you look at the big picture, it can become a powerful promotion engine for retailers, who should start to pay as much attention to sites like this as they do to their own online stores.

Why should they be paying attention? More on that tomorrow…

Market Intelligence, in any economic condition…

Sarah used the dreaded “R” word (Recession for those that missed the last post) and it brings up for me the importance of companies really connecting with their customers. 

When times are good the rising tide floats all boats.  When times are tough things like really understanding your customers, learning from the dialogue and adding meaningful value responsive to customer needs becomes the difference between merely surviving and thriving.

The RelevantMind team has spent the last year talking about the value of consumer conversations in user communities while focusing our efforts on developing products that connect both consumers and businesses to these valuable conversations.

Through the consumer research sites we launched last fall – cyclists, golf enthusiasts, and aspiring chefs can access a curated collection of relevant conversations about the products and services they are looking for within our road bikes, golf, and cooking verticals.

While working to improve the relevancy of these consumer sites, we recognized that the data we were gathering was a valuable business intelligence resource. So we spent the rest of 2007 and early 2008 building off the underlying technology we use to power the consumer sites to launch our new suite of market intelligence tools.

As Sarah referenced in her last post – The Forrester article recommends that during a recession, advertisers focus their ad dollars on cost-effective programs with clear measurable results that engage these customers during the product purchase funnel. And our suite of tools does just that.

We empower companies with the knowledge they need to better engage with consumers during the product research process and identify and connect with influential users who impact consumer opinions during this process.

We provide quantifiable metrics allowing them to measure the impact of their existing word of mouth and overall marketing efforts and the qualitative data they need to understand the opinions of their customers, advocates, naysayers, loyalists, and competitors.

Finally, our flexible pricing structure provides a cost-effective way for advertisers to build stronger social media marketing strategies that will give them the larger share of wallet from consumers during any economic condition.

We Interupt Our Social Shopping Series…

…for a little commentary on Social Media, Marketing, and Recessions.

Last week Forrester released a research article – “Strategies for Interactive Marketing in a Recession” – in which they take the point of view that the interactive marketing industry will not only survive during the downturn, but may actually thrive due to a shift in spending.

Of course, when recessions arise, consumer spending falls and advertising spend slows down. However, neither stops completely – both consumers and advertisers just start making more cautious decisions.

In the last recession, interactive marketing spending was slashed because the majority of the ad spend was from dot-com bombs that played a part in the recession or large corporations that didn’t “get” interactive marketing to begin with.

This time around, interactive marketing has demonstrated its ability to produce a return on investment and, even more importantly, has proven that it provides much more accurate performance-analysis than offline
ad spending. And advertisers get that – they understand that interactive marketing is a cost-effective tactic for driving brand awareness, creating and enhancing customer relationships, and increasing engagement during the buying process – all which lead to higher sales conversions.

Smart consumers will continue spending their money on the products and services that they need & want but won’t break their bank. The Forrester article predicts that smart advertisers will (or should) focus their ad dollars on cost-effective programs with clear measurable results that engage these customers during the product purchase funnel with the majority of the recommendations involving some aspect of social media.

The article outlines a few ways to capitalize on the value (and low cost) of the “voice of the customer” within social applications – specifically social networks and forums stating that “forums are better than advertising at helping people in the consideration phase when they’re on the fence about purchasing. In a recession, improving consideration will be more cost-effective than blasting awareness messages at resistant customers.”

Thank you, Forrester, for reaffirming what we at RelevantMind have been preaching for a year now.

Trusting Strangers

In Sarah’s last post she brought up something that I find amazing about the Internet; people trusting strangers when it comes to making big buying decisions. Not only are people asking questions in large forums but they’re taking the advice they’re getting or even better, taking advice given to someone who already asked that question. The interesting thing is, in many cases the question has already been asked and answered.

Outside of the “religious” questions where the “right” thing to buy is more subjective (See: Mac / PC) most of the “what should I buy” questions are answered with remarkable thoughtfulness and maturity. And we’re talking about strangers here. You could assume that in such an anonymous place, people would be surly and call each other idiots for asking questions, but it’s just not the case. For some reason, there is a civility that exists and is closely guarded by the residents of these boards.

But why do people trust these strangers? I believe it comes down to looking at the very natural dynamics of a virtual community. The people that choose to take part in a forum community are often subject matter experts and enthusiasts. They LIKE what they’re talking about and often know more about the products in a real-world sense than the product managers responsible for their existence. While that’s not overtly stated, people quickly understand that these enclaves of enthusiasts are where the experts are and that if someone is going to know the answer, they’re likely to be hanging out there.

It’s similar to heading down to the IT department to ask the guys what computer they should buy (minus the religious arguments), because they’re the ones who know best and they appreciate being recognized as experts. It’s a symbiotic relationship, if there were no questions, there would be too few threads to warrant a forum. Sure, people could talk about their “cool stuff” but the conversations, more often than not, revolve around products.

In the same way someone will wander into the scary IT room and ask for expert (free) advice, people feel that they can ask people in a forum what receiver / helmet / harness / meter is best suited for their needs.

Humans want interaction at something close to parity. We’re so used to being given bad information from phone support / floor sales people / relatives / co-workers and friends, we’re just looking for someone who actually knows this stuff. In return, the responder keeps on top of current technology, and the answer exists in the forum for the others who come after and have the same question.

While the Internet is a very digital place that doesn’t manifest in the physical world, real world social dynamics dictate how these new borderless cultures evolve. Interestingly enough, it’s not a whole lot different from what we’re already used to.

Why Consumers Love Social Shopping

In step two of our social shopping exploration, we took a deeper look into why consumers engaged in social shopping. What we found was that consumers are driven to social shopping features for the same reason they shop offline with a friend or ask a sales associate if those jeans make their butts look big – they need guidance as to what to buy or need to get validation from a trusted source before making a purchase. This really isn’t anything new.

However, what we found interesting was to whom consumers were reaching out for advice and what consumers consider to be a trusted source. At first we took “trusted source” to be a friend, relative, co-worker, or sales associate. But as we began digging deeper (and reviewing some recent research), we realized that trusted sources were friends, relatives, co-workers, sales associates, AND complete strangers on the Internet. In the 2007 Edelman Annual Trust Barometer research we found that 68% of consumers trust “people like me” first for purchase advice. Essentially, social media outlets – especially niche networks and forums – have blurred the lines of “friendship” creating an emerging trust in contacts they encounter within these outlets. It makes sense – since people join niche social networks and participate in forums to connect with more “people like me,” there is no doubt that they would be more trusting of the opinions of those forum members when making purchase decisions.

In fact, each one of us in the group had a story about making a buying decision based on the advice or opinion of a complete stranger that we considered a “virtual friend.” In some cases these virtual friends saved us from making horrible purchases, helped us determine what to buy, and drove us to purchase something we didn’t even know we needed until we read about it from them. (yeah – that story was mine and cost me about $250.)

It was at this point at the process we agreed we needed to shift our focus from implementing social shopping features on the client’s retail site to learning more about these niche communities in order to integrate them into our social shopping strategy. So we spent the next phase of the project looking at how consumers were connecting online – what were they sharing, how were they sharing it, where were they sharing it, etc – instead of looking into what retailers were implementing social shopping on their sites.

This newfound power of the virtual friends’ opinion led us to take a deeper look into where consumers are most often connecting with these virtual friends.

How do you define Social Shopping?

In November, I was helping a client explore the concept of social shopping. Like many retailers, they wanted social shopping on their site, but were unable to clearly define why they wanted to do it, as the desire to implement was driven by buzz in the marketplace – not by a specific business objective. So we took ten steps back and started looking at the overall social shopping landscape while trying to learn:

• How does the retail client define social shopping?
• What drives consumers to use social shopping?
• What retail sites had implemented social shopping capabilities (with an obvious business objective in mind)?
• What non-retail social shopping sites exist and how do those sites impact (help/impede) retailers’ business objectives?

When I first asked my client how they defined social shopping all you could here were crickets. No one answered me because no one knew how to articulate social shopping beyond an application that you download so two people can shop together from separate locations through their own web browsers. True – this is social shopping of an advanced nature – technology’s best attempt at mimicking browsing Soho boutiques with your girlfriend. It’s no wonder they were struggling.

Even Wikipedia defines social shopping pretty narrowly as “a method of e-commerce and of traditional shopping which integrates e-commerce in which consumers shop in a social networking environment similar to MySpace.” But what I wanted my clients to do was define social shopping on a larger scale.

After some time with the whiteboard and an exercise in getting inside the mind of the shopper, they began to envision social shopping beyond the co-browser experience and not only limited to a social network environment like MySpace. Reading/Writing product reviews, consulting blogs, and posing questions to community members on forums are examples of social shopping. Even wish-lists and registries could be defined as social shopping.

Essentially, social shopping occurs when forums exist to foster the sharing of opinions, knowledge and desires of consumers. This exercise really helped to focus how we spent the next five weeks building their social shopping strategy. Once we had our own vision of social shopping, we needed to explore what drives consumers to engage in social shopping. We’ll explore this Big Question next.

Happy New Year!!!

I can say that since today is actually the first day of the Chinese New Year. So this is my first post in both the lunar and calendar new years. Actually it’s my first post in months. Since mid-October, I’ve been focused on two areas: First, the development of our new market intelligence product. Secondly, all things social media.

Over the course of the past four months, I’ve been working on getting a deeper understanding of the social media landscape by researching how consumers interact with the various outlets, how advertisers are trying to use them, how companies participate within them, and, most importantly what social media outlets are the most popular, most influential, most targeted, etc. This process has involved me pouring through countless research documents, spending time with companies to learn about their views on social media and help them better understand the social media space, and beta-testing and/or reviewing over 50 social media sites. FIFTY!

Needless-to-say, I’ve been swamped and I know I’m nowhere close to even seeing, much less reaching, the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more valuable content out there I’ve yet to find/beta-test/review and, at the rate at which the space is growing exploding, I may never get there. But at least I can take the next month or so to share with you what I’ve seen, learned, tested, liked, hated, and found utterly confusing. Hopefully you can check them out too and share your thoughts. Maybe I should start my own social network for folks interested in beta-testing social networks!