E-commerce Link : Demystifying Social Computing
The five steps to sales success
February 2008 By Ken Burke
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Ubiquitous social computing means it’s easier than ever to publish views through blogs and online video and to find like-minded others online. And as consumers interact, they tend to place less trust in messages delivered by merchants. Forrester also found that 36 percent of consumers don’t want e-mail even from their favorite retailers—but 68 percent said they trust “others like them” to make sound product recommendations, and 56 percent said friends and family were their top brand influencers. This shift, if managed wisely, can be leveraged by merchants to build their businesses.
You see, the question isn’t whether customers are talking about your brand—it’s how and where. Merchants must join the conversation or else risk being sidelined. But take heart: Social computing can actually be a cost-effective means of driving acquisition and conversion. To survive—and thrive—in the brave new world of social computing, take the following steps.
1. Survey the landscape
The technologies and tools for social computing are inexpensive. Wise merchants are investing time and human resources where customers are most likely to respond. Tools like social networking sites, vlogs, RSS feeds and podcasts are good places to start. Social computing is all about putting power in the hands of your customers—and that starts by letting their existing habits dictate your strategy.
Brand monitoring firms track where your key audience is spending time online. Or, for a less costly alternative, consider using the following do-it-yourself tools:
• IceRocket.com—for searching blogs and MySpace activity
• Technorati.com—for searching blogs
• Qoogle—for searching YouTube video content
• Google Alerts—alerts that e-mail notices of new articles, blog posts and Web content that contain the keywords you choose.
Use your existing analytics package to learn more about your customers, including:
• Where they are;
• what kind of Internet connection they have;
• what browser they use; and
• which sites refer them to you.
Once you’ve identified your customers’ social computing habits, start communicating with them. Stay true to them to realize the highest ROI.
2. One essential feature: customer reviews and ratings
Regardless of their Internet sophistication or their usage of other social computing technologies, consumers say there’s one feature they can’t do without: customer reviews and ratings. Forrester reports that more than 75 percent of online shoppers rely on reviews for candid product advice, while Internet measurement firm comScore found that even when making a purchase offline in a physical store, 25 percent of shoppers consult online reviews first.
Many merchants balk at the prospect of seeing their sites plastered with negative product feedback. But these fears are largely unfounded; customer review platform provider Bazaarvoice found that positive reviews outweigh negative ones 8-to-1. You can further boost the reliability of reviews by:
• Including reviewer profiles that indicate their level of expertise and familiarity with the products at hand. At Burpee, for example, reviews can reveal the expertise level and location of the reviewer so that shoppers can focus on ratings from others whose garden climate and green thumb abilities most closely match their own.
• Adding sound and motion via video reviews to show products in action and give reviewers a further opportunity to show their personalities.
3. RSS: Distributing product information in quick-scan format
RSS—which stands for Really Simple Syndication—enables you to offer a text-based list of your products. Shoppers can view the list in any number of formats, from a headline-style feed on their iGoogle or Yahoo! homepages to a drop-down list of links anchored directly in their browsers. The list keeps shoppers up-to-date from beyond your e-commerce site, allowing them to pick and click links that take them directly to the information that’s most relevant.
The key to successful RSS content is to keep it new and fresh; therefore, consider making feeds first and foremost for new products, just-reduced items and seasonal promotions.
Offer product-specific variations, such as apparel by gender, particular brands, products within a specific price range—and consider letting shoppers customize their own feeds. Amazon.com allows shoppers to pick from several drop-down options—product category, discount amount and maximum price—to create RSS lists that are most relevant to them.
4. Blogs, vlogs and podcasts: Enriching content, engaging dialog
Blogs—running diaries of events and insights contributed by an individual or group—give you an opportunity to showcase expertise and open a dialog with consumers. It’s a great forum for letting your brand’s personality shine through; you can be more casual, irreverent, erudite or geeky on a blog than your product pages might otherwise reveal.
Depending on your audience, consider whether to limit your blog to text and words or whether you want to branch out into showcasing video snippets—in which case the blog can be called a vlog. Podcasting is another extension of blogging, giving shoppers a continually-updated feed of audio clips.
To boost effectiveness in any format, follow these best practices:
• Brand the blog environment with a look and feel consistent with your site, and link to your homepage.
• Blog about a topic your brand “owns” authoritatively, one for which you can provide fascinating and compelling content. Peruvian Connection has focused its blog on textile arts, aligning the brand’s luxury apparel with serious connoisseurs of fabric finery.
• At the same time, don’t forget the commerce. Include links to current deals and specific products that are mentioned in the blog; maybe use the side columns of the page layout.
5. Social networking sites: The ultimate frontier
If your customers are wild about MySpace or busily creating applications in Facebook, then it’s time to dive into the world of social networks. These sites offer the ultimate opportunity to interact with customers: They can literally call your brand a “friend,” or decide it’s not worth the effort. So, serve them with a page that offers up plenty of extras: custom wallpaper, badges and instant-messaging icons to decorate their virtual spaces, and plenty of custom content to keep them coming back.
Social networking pages are ideal venues for encouraging shopper participation. Members of Gen Y—the demographic most heavily engaged in these sites—are more likely to want to share their opinions, according to Forrester Research; leverage this willingness to share by soliciting feedback, offering interactive contests and allowing them to weigh in with you and each other.
Focus on customers
The world of social computing can seem sprawling and chaotic. But by following your customers’ cues and offering relevant and timely features, you can use social computing technologies to cement a brand connection, create a loyal following and give shoppers the tools to make informed purchases—all of which ultimately boosts the bottom line.
Ken Burke is founder and CEO of MarketLive, an e-commerce technology services provider based in Petaluma, Calif. He can be reached at ken@mmlive.com, or visit www.marketlive.com/sitereview.
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