Tastebook – User generated publishing…

Our friends over at Tastebook asked us to test their new widget.  We are happy to help out, but I thought I’d also take a step back to reflect on the significance of what they are up to.  This is a really good example of a company that “gets” the big picture we have talked about in previous posts.

When I first saw Tastebook I thought “Okay, that is pretty cool”.  You make your own cookbook by remixing your favorite recipes from places like Epicurious and Simply Recipes along with your own.  Playing book DJ is fun and the end result is a beautiful collection of your favorite recipes.  Julie created a great Tastebook which is a good thing because my cooking knowledge is limited to toast and quesadillas (unfortunately that is not an exaggeration).

Then I started really thinking about what it meant and the implications behind what they are doing are significant.  Social media is all about giving people the tools, platforms and creative license to create a web experience “their/our way”.    And sometimes you want a physical expression of that, something you can hold in your hands or give to other people wrapped in actual gift-wrap.  Speaking for myself, when I do that I want just as much control as I have in the virtual environment.   The idea behind Tastebook is just that  - user control over my physical experience of a book.  Well done!

Now, hopefully they’ll expand to things I actually know something about, like travel. Check it out especially if cooking is your thing:

 

 

Do Social Shopping Sites Have Enough Traction to Stick Around?

Today iMedia Connection featured an article “Get in on the Social Shopping Craze” by Denise Zimmerman. It was interesting to read as it explores some of the same concepts we’ve been talking about with our clients and on the RelevantMind blog.This article provides a good commentary on  the social shopping landscape, but it sites Forrester as having the opinion that social shopping lacks staying power because low traffic numbers will impede its growth and market value. I could be taking this statement out of context. And I have yet to read this research, so I’m wondering how the research giant is defining social shopping as it relates to this claim. I rarely disagree with Forrester, so I imagine they aren’t including social shopping sites like Polyvore into this category as we’ve seen in our research that those sites are catching up to retail sites in terms of traffic volume. I’ll dig a little deeper and let you know what I find out. 

Amazon + Facebook = Strong Social Shopping Relationship

The news this week made it really easy to bring the discussion back to my social shopping series with all of the talk about Amazon’s social shopping deal with Facebook. Amazon is now offering two new applications to Facebook users – Amazon Giver and Amazon Grapevine.

Amazon Giver helps you buy gifts for friends off of their Amazon.com Wish Lists or from gift recommendations based on their Facebook profile interests and favorites.

Amazon Grapevine helps you get the word out to your friends about what you are doing on Amazon.com. Let your friends know when you add items to your public Wish List, write reviews, or tag products on Amazon.

I’ve downloaded both apps and I’m excited to test them out from a user-experience stand point, though I’m sure they’re pretty tight since Amazon rarely misses the mark. What I’m most interested in is the recommendations feature. Apparently the system uses its recommendation engine to allow users to view product recommendations generated by Amazon based upon what the other person has listed as their likes and interests on their own Facebook profile.

This is huge and depending on the integration, the Facebook application may solve my number one issue on Amazon.com – relevancy. Naturally, the recommendations on Amazon.com come from items I’ve browsed and purchased – which includes items for me AND friends and family.  Recommending I pre-order the new National Album – relevant. Recommending I buy a collection of children’s books – not so relevant. However, if properly implemented, the recommendations from Facebook should be relevant my interests and, therefore, relevant to my purchase intent.

Let’s test it out. Find me on Facebook and buy me something based on the recommendations! I’ll let you know if I like it.

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…

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.

Welcome to 2008…

This is our first post of the new year, and rather than look back (or recount resolutions that will by moot by the time you read this) I wanted to make an observation and a promise.

First the observation.   Inspiration comes from many places, some of them pretty unlikely.  Of all the checks we write each month, the QA expense kills me.  I know it is important, but I get pretty uncomfortable with anything that doesn’t add revenue or users. However QA produces some really excellent reports we use to tune our search results.  And it turns out that the data in those reports is really valuable to brand managers and marketing departments.  Want to know how many people are talking about your brand or products?  How that compares to competitors?  Where are the key influencers?  How does all that trend over time? All that can be derived from the reporting QA gives us.

 Who would of thought – QA leads to a major early business line for us.  Pretty cool and just goes to show that you how important it is to look at everything and figure out how to make it work for you.

The promise is to have more fun with this blog.   You’ll see more posts about the things we are interested in, or random observations that strike us. 

Ready for DEMO fall!

After a year of work and preparation, we’re announcing the launch of our company, RelevantMind, and our product, the first collaborative product research tool designed to help people find the right information on products and services that matter most to them. Though we launched our corporate blog this summer as a platform for discussion about passionate user communities and their value during the product research process, we’ve been limited to what information we disclose about our company and the amount of access we’re allowed to share to our product leading up to launch.

Tomorrow morning, Aaron and I will be presenting our product at the DEMOfall Conference. We were honored to receive an invitation to this conference as it is the premier launch venue for new products, technologies and companies. For more than 16 years, DEMO has established a reputation for identifying the products most likely to have a significant impact on the marketplace and market trends in the coming year. Each product is carefully screened and selected by DEMO’s Executive Producer, Chris Shipley, one of the top trend spotters in the personal technology product industry and this is what she had to say about us:

“If you don’t have enough time for your interests like most of us, you dream of a service that will connect you to people, who have already solved the exact same problems and can give you the right answers, so you can focus more on the fun stuff. RelevantMind is like Cliff notes for product research – an invaluable service for saving time and frustration, from the buying process and beyond.”

While we’re excited about participating in this prestigious event, we’re even more excited about finally being able to share the beta version of our product which is now live and available in the Golf and Cycling categories at www.relevantmind.com. In the next few weeks we’ll be launching our Rock Climbing category, with Cooking, Skiing and Snowboarding being released later this fall.

We’ve already received some great press from Mashable, FrostFireBuzz.com, PR Week, and Venture Beat and hope that continues as the week progresses. We’ll be updating our blog all week with highlights from the conference. But in the meantime, check out our beta site and shoot us an email letting us know what you think – feedback@relevantmind.com.