We all know how important reviews are when it’s time to buy; indeed we take a peek at between 4 to 7 reviews before we part with our cash. This isn’t new but what is, is sososher & of course the opportunity to review products & purchases with a twist by allowing you to upload video/image of your purchase. Sososher also offers a unique way to shop online with friends letting you add shopping buddies, recommend purchases to your friends and earn cash back – a vital differentiator to monetise the offer for stickiness.

I do think the user experience leaves a lot to be desired though. Witness the big blue rollover panel at the top when first entering the site which reminds me of web 1.0 rather than a leading edge social commerce brand.

Be interesting to see what you all think considering some of the negative comments you’ve been leaving about a previous post on social shopping, My Fave Shop. The aesthetics of that site were far superior but judging by the comments the actual experience of doing business proved the old adage of all style, no substance. Perhaps Sososher is the other way around? Worth pointing out that I don’t work for either of these companies but I’m interested in sharing new ideas and ventures that further realise how digital and social is changing our world.

Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn |nicholas.r.gill@gmail.com

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                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            In This post looks at some reasons why you should consider rebuilding your Internet news pages & pess releases.  In times of crisis, our level of news consciousness is raised, therefore making it a perfect time to look inward and ask how you would apply Web 2.0 to your communication efforts.  The Red Cross effectively demonstrated the value of NOW PR with the Haitian Crisis.  The time is ripe to strategically evaluate, modernize and rebuild your Internet media webpages & Internet news releases from News 1.0 to News 2.0.

Have you noticed that with all the new technology, Web 2.0 and social media capabilities that many (most) Website based ”news” pages for businesses, non profits and government agencies still have just lines and lines and lines of hyperlinks to traditional news release formats that do not inform, do not captivate journalists,  nor engage people into becoming your co-information partners to act. 

These same online news pages do not encourage anyone to return, to use, to publish or to share your news, or your media releases as earned media.  It’s time for new rules, new tools, and new forms of audience engagement.  But, before digging in deeper, I would like to offer a historic perspective to begin, as a frame of reference.

  A Brief Historical Perspective

I am a strong believer in looking back to be able to look forward. It serves well for context in moving forward with strategic planning and forward thinking.  I am now going to  upset the apple cart.  Are your Internet based news releases still following the traditional “papered” press format?  Why? And, how are you communicating news?

Do you know that the industry standard and widely accepted inverted AP style press release format and summary news lead dates back to the progressive era (1860- 1910), as a result of the advent of an emerging new technology and to “fit” telegraph wire transmissions?  (1892: Chicago editor’s “Who or what? How? When? Where?” advice is  use 5W leads)

^{“Three aspects of the Progressive Era may account for the change in journalism style. First, there was a surge in scientific discoveries, inventions and thought.  Second, the surge in science provoked a corresponding revolution in education. And third, the revolution in education changed not only the general public and its interest in, and thereby its demand for, the facts, but also profoundly changed the journalists who wrote the news.  The changes of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the Gilded Age, or Mark Twain’s “Big Barbeque,” followed by the Progressive Era were profound.  Science and invention revolutionized transportation, communication, business, and agriculture.  …College educated, the leaders of the Progressive movement believed, as the universities increasingly taught, that science could be used as a tool for reform, a tool to cure societal ills.  …The newspaper industry as well as the newsroom was feeling the influence of postwar changes; the physical look and content of papers was altered substantially.  Headlines became integrated into the design, simultaneously attracting readers and teasing the news content of a story. The Civil War had broken the editorial stranglehold on the front page. Readers demanded news from the battlefields; official dispatches had been featured prominently, bumping long-winded essays to later pages. While advertising sales supplanted circulation sales as the chief source of income for newspapers, advertisers too lost their monopoly of the front Printing expenses were high, but new presses could print unprecedented numbers of papers, balancing the cost. Press associations, wire services and chains afforded more news coverage. More hard news was becoming the premium.”}

If, those of us in the PR, media, journalism, public affairs professions are all jumping on blogs, Twitter and Facebook  but not even updating our 19th and 20th century press and media practices, nor Web 2.0 enabling our own “media store fronts”  are we being counter intuitive?  This could be a major strategic mistep in times of crisis or during a need for immediacy(or Now PR).  Are you still operating in the 1860-1945 era, in theory and in practice?  Hmmm… just how are your media results from your very own Internet news pages?   Do you have any audience engagement on your news pages?

^{By the late nineteenth century, E.W. Scripps had begun his newspaper chain. Like magazines which were gaining in popularity and competing with newspapers for readership, chains sought to provide specialized papers for the masses. But unlike magazines, chain papers were inexpensive and free from advertiser and special interest control.40 Scripps also realized that a heavy-handed editorial policy would be deadly:  Believe in the people; “vox populi” may not always be vox Dei, but it is the nearest thing we’ve got, and if we follow that, we shall not be far wrong — thus shall  we develop a true and enlightened democracy.41 By the end of the nineteenth century, in other words, a changing audience was controlling a changing newspaper focus.}

^{“That was the beginning of the golden age of American newspaper journalism,” T.H. Watkins wrote in his biography of Harold L. Ickes, one of the more fiery of the Progressives. It was a period that extended from about 1890 to World War II, after which the world of journalism, like every other world, changed forever… The men and women whose names survived that remarkable era are invariably described as “legendary,” and they defined the reporter’s breed for all time.”}

^{Commercial reporters were sought out of the graduating classes of such Ivy league universities as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia, where we let it be known that writers were wanted –– not newspaper professionals, but writers. . . .}

 Modern communication integration efforts have to start at “home first”  with your own Internet site.   We have all these technical capabilities. but most of our online news rooms reside firmly planted like an ancient rock going no where, rather a Guttenberg press with no ink, a space ship with no fuel, a hockey team with a stick to drive the puck.  So, there “it” sits, going nowhere.

Therefore, I assert that there is an overwhelming critical need to innovate your Internet media, and Internet press releases no matter if your are a corporation, small business, nonprofit organization or government agency.  

Here is a recent article on one problematic scenario, a lack of  updated technology, specific to government. President Obama said in this article, “that improving the technology used by the government” isn’t about having the fanciest bells and whistles on our websites – it’s about how we use the American people’s hard-earned tax dollars to make government (and business and media) work better for them.”  

Are your news websites and press releases using and applying New 2.0 technology and tool to work for the PEOPLE who need to find you in today’s Web 2.0 enabled era?

This does not mean jumping out there and getting on all the OTHER emerging external “social channels” without a strategic roadmap.   Again, taking care of your own store front first is critical first step.  Once your house is in order, then you can start applying your own news pages and press releases to the other bells and whistles out there-strategically.  Do you realize some news Internet pages do not even have strategic key words built into the back side of their Internet news pages so search engines, journalists and people can find out about your news?   Sorry, I digress.

So, with that said, I encourage communication professionals, CEOs, and leaders to begin planning now for “spring cleaning.”  As I mentioned in previous posts, its all about NOW PR or continuous communications.   But, another element to the news arena is the current media trends.  A new PR modality is evolving.   And, unless you are aware of the media trends and changes you will be literally left  behind blowing smoke into the winds of change.  More to the point, spending LOTS of money with very little results. 

A Brief Perspective on Current Media Trends

(Source: PEW) New patterns in news consumption and a deteriorating economy deepened the emerging cracks in the economic foundation of the media in 2008. In a big news year, most media continued to see audiences shrink. And, how audiences consume media is changing.   

Only two platforms clearly grew: the Internet, where the gains seemed more structural, and cable, where they were more event-specific.  This is an important to take note of.  Here is a brief look at the battering year for the news industry as measured by six key indicators: audience, economics, news investment, ownership and digital trends:

So, in determining the initial steps to restructure, revamp, update and Web 2.0 enable your Internet news pages, press releases  and News 2.0 strategy would entail some planning.

1) Ascertain what strategic function of your new Web 2.0 enabled Webpages will serve, who it will serve and how it will serve your specific target audiences. Is it journalists, Editors, your competitors or the public?  Which public?   If you have to go back and perform updated specific target audience research please do so!

2) Plan/WhiteBoard/ Wiremap what your updated Web 2.0 enabled news rooms should look structurally and functionally when incorporating new functionalities.  If you are a large organization a News 2.0 Camp might be a good idea.

3) Do the same for your Web 2.0 enable press releases as well.  Plan/WhiteBoard/ Wiremap/Revamp the structure of your press releases. Get out of the stone age, and innovate as this is not the early 1900’s.  I think, we are just a tad bit beyond that era now, are we not?    Risk changing, adapting and innovating but strategically.  Dare to develop a new press release standard that is Web 2.0 enabled for the “new wire”

Let’s take a virtual field trip,  after reading this blog post go out and look at how some others are doing it? Let’s compare notes on the good, the bad and the ugly and those who are applying bleeding edge New News.  A strategic blending of Web 2.0, Now PR and social mobility.

Here is an example of the good, Now PR and News 2.0

(Source: Mashable.com) With the widespread adoption of social media in the non-profit sector, people’s ability to act and support communities in need like Haiti has only been increased. There’s no greater example of this than the incredible fundraising job the American Red Cross did with social and mobile channels. With its texting campaign, the American Red Cross raised more than $20 million.  “The speed and quantity with which the American public retweeted and posted to Facebook the need for donations to help with relief efforts in Haiti was (for anything we’ve seen at the Red Cross) unprecedented,” said Wendy Harman, the social media manager at the American Red Cross. “This was the first time I truly felt like people were using these tools to take action for good. They actually texted “Haiti” to 90999, more than 2 million people did it… the impact was huge — that money is providing people with basic needs like water. I have no doubt it wouldn’t have spread so widely without social media.”  Overall, Americans raised more than $200 million to benefit Haiti in only 7 days.  Simply astounding.

What might you include in your new Internet News Room as a Web 2.0  innovation? Ask your employees.  Ask your media contacts how might your Internet News Room better serve them?

Need help? I am available to assist with strategic planning sessions to help get your organization strategically moving towards         PR 2.0. Email me at alicemfisher58 at yahoo dot com, follow on Twitter@unlimitedpr, or join others of us at  unlimitedmarcom.ning.com!

TechCrunch’s comparison of Blippy to Facebook’s (now defunct) Beacon targeting platform raises the obvious question:  is Blippy a good idea or not?  Apparently, as the TC post contends, some retailers don’t think letting their consumers share their purchase details online makes for good business.

May those retailers and/or product brands wither away.

Blippy is a great idea.  What right-minded retailer or product brand wouldn’t want to see not only in realtime what SKUs consumers are buying, but also what the friends and followers of those consumers are saying and asking about those purchases.  Talk about an amazing customer feedback petri dish.

And beyond the CRM and data goldmine, the social commerce opportunity appears to be a trend to watch.  Just look through the depth of comments that a typical purchase posting generates on Blippy and imagine how this digital word-of-mouth phenomenon multiplies not just the brand power for retailers and the products they sell, but also the sell through of additional units at no incremental customer acquisition marketing expense.

But let’s face it, these are the basic core user and business dynamics that VCs care about.  I’m also interested in some very specific personal level use cases that Blippy can enable.  You know, the types of information that are really important to people, such as:

Wife Purchase Tracker — when I enter the family credit card I’m now able to get a realtime update on what my wife is purchasing.  What a better way for me to then ping back to the retailers that she buys from to say:  “Oh, hi, it turns out we accidently made a purchase from you guys.  Turns out we don’t really want to buy those knee high suede boots after all.  Please cancel our order.  Thanks.”  What a helpful family budget management tool you are Blippy!

Dating Profile Tracker — what a better way for the single daters out there to really get to know their friends and acquaintances?  Imagine a young lady meets a new guy — let’s call him Rick — on Match.com.  His profile is stunning:  good education, good job, does charity work — he’s perfect.  Or is he?  With a simple Blippy integration on Match.com, she then peruses Rick’s purchases on Blippy.  Oops, bad idea.  Seems that Rick has a penchant for frequenting the local liquor store where, thanks to Blippy, we see that he’s a fan of Wild Turkey and chewing tobacco.  Time for the lady to move on from Rick.

Vegas Tracker — now this one could be a real problem for the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce who has rebuilt the image of Sin City on the “What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas”.  Thanks to Blippy, what gets purchased in Vegas can be viewed on Blippy.  Man, talk about putting a real damper on party weekends for the jet set.  Do spouses really want that level of over-the-shoulder viewing of how many times their significant other stopped by the Cesars sportsbook?  Then again, Blippy’s terms of service doesn’t require you to link EVERY one of your credit cards to your Blippy account now does it?

2009 As Told in Google Wave (very, very neat)…

Social Media = Social Commerce…

What the experts are saying about Social Media…

Real-Time Twitter ads on your iPhone…

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Bio  (I am seeking a strategic social media opportunity).

What insights can we possibly draw from with the deluge of communication intelligence available with respect to the use of social media and social commerce?  We are seeing a new stage, yet again, in the evolution of communication, wherein social media is intersecting with the advent of the new social paradigm.  Determining how to aggregate and make the most of the social context from personal profiles, social media sites is worthy of discussion.

 I propose to fellow PR professionals and academia that there is a need to fill the gap between our traditional media, journalism and public communication training and practices with an opportunity to strategically plan for the concept of Nowism or NOW PR.  The real key here is the sustainability of the strategic integrated communications across multiple mediums.

But, how will PR professionals strategically move PR forward in this new era of Now Communications?

What is the real value of real-time communications?

If you are still putting out a single print press release in newspapers, doing little to no content updates on your Website, placing a single print advertisement in a local real estate booklet targeting potential home owners or in a poultry magazine for local chicken farmers, then ask yourself if is this still your best most effective strategic communication medium for results?

Recently, Forrester published a report, “The Future of the Social Web” where they sketched a timeline of the development of the Social Web, dividing its evolution into five eras. And, according to that report, the first era of the development of the Social Web started to explode the social relationships among users. 

 In the social functionality phase, social relationships resulted in a greater social functionality where several websites started to add social functionalities to help users interact with their peers and to make use of new applications and tools within the context of their own personal social networks.

We are now in the next era/phase, that of Social Colonization, whereby technology platforms like Facebook Connect or Google Friend Connect have standardized social functionalities among websites and a majority of websites now include many social functionalities.   More specifically, in  January 2009, Compete.com study ranked Facebook as the most used social network by global monthly active users, followed by MySpace (see more on Facebook statistics).

If not right now, then very soon these  globally grouped identities, profiles and networks will allow PR professionals, organizations, agencies, businesses and people  to usher in the next era as a result of the interplay between Social Media, Data Mining and Electronic Commerce.

The challenge will be…is… to figure out how to theoretically adjust to these near real-time communication developments as it pertains to PR and public affairs professionals, social commerce and social technologists.  How will communication planning fit within the changing dynamic of our Social Context at any given minute and right NOW.  

Hence, there is a need for beginning a dialog on the future of strategic communication planning, now. What is the value of communication relative to the time between publication, consumption and influence? Just having a blog, a Facebook account, or Twitter profile does not make a social media strategy.  I see blogs and tweets, but no comments, no real engagement.  And, understanding the value of  continuous content doesn’t stop there. There are two other factors:

• Relevance to the target audience/consumer
• Ability to take action/engage (therefore possibly adopting new behaviors)

 The Internet provides users the opportunity to merge information as a result of social communications, social networks, financial data, healthcare information, insurance data, usernames and passwords, PINs, accounts, networks, emails and more.  Linear measurement is dead. 

As we sense the future, the PR profession will undoubtedly change as we have known it and now know it.  Our collective thoughts on where and how to strategically plan for near continuous communications is multi dimensional and will largely depend on how well PR firms/media, MarCom and public affairs professionals will be able to successfully adapt and plan for and apply new information management and communication models which will be derived from near continuous aggregated Data Mining tools as a result of the many Social Networks.

The potential of the Internet, social media and social commerce is the ability to consolidate and manipulate information with new applications of real-time data aggregation with the ability to ultimately take or enact more  immediate action. But, you have to stand above the ground swell and take a look at all the chatter.

The reason being that a person or target audience’s ability to take any action used to take years, months, weeks, then it was moderated with at least a 24 hour lag time…  now there is nearly no lag time.  New communication models will require immediate analysis and immediate communication. The new models of analysis will be a result of some of the following concepts:

• Novel aggregate media, social communication, social commerce algorithms
• Mining semi-structured disparate, fragmented communication mediums and data
• Classification and ranking of disparate, fragmented communication mediums and data
• Social clustering and analysis
• Aggregated media clustering and media analysis
• Aggregated SMS text Mining and analysis

• Privacy preserved data modeling
• Statistical methods of social media context
• Aggregated internal, parallel and external distributed data mining
• Interactive online media mining
• Contextual multimedia mining (audio/video)
• Aggregated Website, link mining
• Aggregated Real-time Graphical Mining

PR professionals will be required to formulate how to make use of new information management for advanced strategic communication planning and tactical approaches as a result of the evolving Nowism of communication from social networks and social commerce. Are you ready?

Are you considering tbe Nowism of communications and planning for it? “The boundaries” of what the web is  or has to offer has become much more blurred.  It is very deep. It does go beyond Google’s link popularity ranking.   Is Twitter part of the web or part of something else?   Now the web, in a sense, is just everything, all the time.

In 1998, the NEC laboratory at Princeton published a paper on the size of the internet. Who could get something like that published now? You can’t talk about how big the internet is.  What is the circulation of total readers? Or, AQH? Because what is the metric? Social commerce isn’t like traditional media or “Web 1.0”. You don’t pay for eyeballs, average quarter hour listeners or clicks.

Possible future PR, media and communication applications providing a sort of “Visual Digital Sky” of aggregated communications might include: 

• Aggregated Real-time Social Commerce statistics
 • Aggregated Social Media Context
• Aggregated Real-time Blog Communication Trends/ Context
• Aggregated Community Trends
• Aggregated User Content Recommenders
• Real-time Communication Trends Discovery
• Real-time Blogs/Social Networks Community Dynamics
• Aggregated Near Real-time User Reviews Ranking on Brands, Products & Services
• Blogs/Social Networks Summations
• Real-time Abuse/Fraud Detection
• Immediate or near real-time User Profile Modelling
• Near Real-time Event Detection & Tracking of Social Media communications (see Twittermap.tv or Twittermap.us & aggregate it)
• As a result, instantaneous Online communications/Advertising/News ( see Topix.com)
• Aggregated Information Retrieval
• Aggregated Sentiment Analysis
• Aggregated Language Processing of Global Communications
• Aggregated Semantic Tagging/Cloud SEO/SEM

• Aggregated Social Networking Search (see 123people.com)
  • Aggregated social network analysis with near real-time graphical analysis of complex global communications

We are seeing some of the above mentioned already, for example:

1) Consider Omgili. Omgili is the best way to find out what people are saying about anything and everything. Omgili is a way to find “subjective information”. As opposed to traditional search engines, which search for sites and pages, Omgili finds consumer opinions, debates, discussions, personal experiences, answers and solutions. Let’s say you want to see the buzz now about healthcare now. Omgili also allows on to create chatter graphs such as the one I added to my website for demonstration purposes.

 2) MicroBlogging Relevance and Influence aggregators like Twitalyzer to evaluate the activity of any Twitter user and report on dozens of useful measures of success in social media, and the top real-time influencers on Twitter.

2) Individual reverse social media tracking such as 123people.com

3) Reverse Image Mining like TinEye:  http://www.tineye.com/faq#what

4) Twittermap.us or Twittermap.tv allows you see the aggregated live buzz on the street anywhere in the US or World and all twitter accounts from in a zoomed in locality

Audiences demographics, social context for a social commerce is near real time.

Are you prepared for Now PR?

If you would like strategic advisement or help please contact me via email at alicemfisher58@yahoo.com                       Follow Me on Twitter                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Resume & Profile: http://bit.ly/3kuiuV

A comment on my recent post about social commerce pointed to the Wikipedia article on social commerce, which was started in September of 2007, according to the history. Which is funny because I started the first Wikipedia page on social commerce in December of the previous year but, despite the help of multiple friends interested in the space, we couldn’t prevent the Wikipedia police from taking the page down. The reason for the takedown was that they wanted citations and not just of blogs and links to startups that were in the space.

Wikipedia is nearly infinitely more flexible and up-to-date than its precedessors–the multi-volume encyclopedias. Yet, still, here is just one example of how it refused to accept new knowledge because it was stuck on looking for validation from the very same backward world of paper.

What exactly are rogue retailers? It’s a classification I made up for companies that have stretched the boundaries of traditional retail by offering highly engaging experiences that drive transactions.

Some of these companies, such as Gilt Group, Woot!, or Ideeli, are more like traditional retailers. They market products, employ buyers and hold their own inventory like a typical ecommerce operation. But I separate them out because they have atypical approaches when it comes to sales techniques either offering consumers an invitation-only luxury shopping experience, a deal via a short-term sale, or a combination of both.

Retailers are taking note, as you’ve probably noticed by the increase of “one-hour” online sales from premium retailers such as Bloomingdale’s and Neiman Marcus, and I’m glad they’re paying attention. But the companies I think they really need to watch are the social shopping sites that aren’t true retailers but have tremendous influence over transactions at traditional retail outlets such as Polyvore, Looklet, and Fashism.com.

Retailers should (and some of them are) start to take these new behaviors into consideration when making user experience and design decisions on their own sites. They may be able to incorporate features similar to those offered on these sites into their own experiences. But they can’t expect the same results as the value of the features is mainly driven by the size and participation of the sites’ communities. And the power of these communities has a tremendous impact on what I call the consideration mindset.

The consideration mindset is a state of mind where consumers make various considerations as they move though the first three phases of the purchase funnel. In the coming weeks I’ll go into more detail about the consideration mind-set and how I think these new platforms will continue to disrupt the linear purchase funnel.

But, in short, it boils down to this. Retail sites exist so you retailers can sell you things that exist in their stores and on their sites. Rogue retail sites exist so you can connect with like-minded people to create experiences, ensembles, photo montages, etc. to make a statement, get an opinion, express your creativity, etc.

See the difference? Retail engagement tactics = conversion focused. Rogue Retail engagement tactics = consumer focused.

Retailer should continue to focus on conversion on their domain. But they need to view the total shopping experience outside of their closed-loop online experiences and take advantage of these consumer-focused properties to increase the consideration (and advocacy) for their products.

Marketers need to figure out ways to use these sites to reach consumers to create awareness and promote advocacy without disrupting the flow of the community. Merchandisers need to actively participate by engaging with consumers, providing them with content and/or recommendations for promoting their brands. And buyers should be gathering insights that help drive smarter decisions from an inventory standpoint at both the sku and ensemble level.

Polyvore has really led the charge in changing the retail landscape by creating a platform so popular among fashionistas that smart retailers have had to revise how they communicate promotions and design more targeted customer acquisition campaigns. It has even impacted how some retailers have evolved their on site experiences. As of now I consider it to be the mother of all game-changers. But over the past few weeks, I’ve been testing and/or evaluating other retail experiences that are sure to be game changers as well. Stay tuned this week as I break down the best and the worst of what I’ve seen.

I got credit for a great post on social commerce I didn’t write.

As for whether 2010 will be the year for social commerce, I’m not sure. I think 2009 really accelerated the social advertising trend. Some of my posts are here.

Social commerce still has a ways to go. I named this as a key e-commerce 2.0 trend back in 2006 and didn’t explicitly distinguish it from social advertising. I should have.

Well, it seems that the Mike Arrington’s pointed critique of social marketing practices is getting even the very large players to move quickly.

Today, we’re adding a fifth principle that clarifies a specific use case that we feel is particularly damaging to the user experience: promotions that include hidden renewals without specific opt-in will not be permitted. Because it’s our belief opt-out offers are misleading and do not have the best interests of the users in mind, we will be updating our Terms of Use this week to better clarify this for users and developers.

via MySpace Says Zero Tolerance For App Scams, Changes Terms Of Use

There is a simple principle at work here. Visibility is key. There are many shady things quietly going on on the Net today.  Once someone shines a big, bright light it becomes harder to hide. Everything starts with visibility.

eMarketer published a recent study that digs into the adoption of  social commerce on Facebook, Twitter and Retail sites.    According to the results,  people have long shared product opinions with friends and family through word-of-mouth. Today, social media tools enable consumers to extend their connections and conduct commerce in powerful new ways.

As people spend more time on social networks, retailers feel pressure to be there as well. Twitter is a hotbed of experimentation for retailers that see it as a channel for customer service, promoting the deal of the day and more. Facebook and its third-party developers are creating e-commerce applications on the site. Meanwhile, retail Websites are bolstering their social commerce features.

“While user ratings and reviews are a mature form of social commerce with proven benefits, e-commerce on social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, is in an early stage,” said Jeffrey Grau, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, “Social Commerce on Facebook, Twitter and Retail Sites.” “People are spending more time on social networks and are able to conduct more of their regular activities on these platforms. E-commerce on social networks has barely tapped that potential.”

But forward-thinking retailers want to bring their Web stores to the environments where their customers like to spend time. As a result, almost three-quarters of the merchants in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide have a presence on at least one of the major social networks or social shopping sites.

Social network users are a highly coveted group of consumers. Across all age brackets, they were more likely than average to make an online purchase, according to a May 2009 survey by Anderson Analytics.

What’s more, social network users are sharing recommendations with greater frequency than generally expected. A Q1 2009 Razorfish survey of social network users found that some 29% reported sharing their views online at least every few weeks, while 10% said they made such contributions at least every few days.

“Leading companies know they cannot afford to wait for customers to visit their sites,” added Mr. Grau. “They need to place their virtual storefronts where their customers congregate. This implies the nature of e-commerce is shifting from a transactional experience to a social one.”

Le congres de la Direct Marketing Association vient de s’ouvrir a San Diego. 12 000 congressistes, 130 conferences, un salon a perte de vue.

Au vue du nombre de congressites presents dans les salles de conference en ce dimanche ensolleille, cette DMA09 semble tres dynamique.  Avec, cela n’etonnera personne, un nombre important de conferences dedies au Social Marketing. La question pour les marques n’est plus de savoir s’il faut s’y mettre , mais quelles strategies mener et comment les mesurer.

Dans une conference pleiniere, Scott Monty, Global Digital and Communication Manager de Ford a decrit la strategie menee par le constructeur. Notamment :

- Twitter : une dizaine de comptes differents, parce que le conducteur qui s’interesse a un pick up Ford n’est pas necessairement le meme qu’un prospect s’interessant a un coupe.

Un exemple, l’adresse Twitter de la Ford Fiesta :

http://twitter.com/fordFiesta

- Tous les employes sont encourages a utiliser Facebook et Twitter, si cela peut les aider a mieux servir les clients et prospects. Dans les faits, seuls 1% le fait, mais a l’echelle d’une grande compagnie comme Ford, c’est deja beaucoup. D’autant qu’on peut imaginer que ces 1%, a travers le monde, sont ceux qui ont le plus d’amis et de followers, et ont une  inflence importante sur leurs communautes.

Une autre conference, de SilverPop, une des grandes agences Email marketing, a montre comment l’e-mail, loin d’etre a abandonner, fonctionne main dans la main avec les reseaux sociaux. Dans leurs emails de fidelisation, les marques incitent les destinataires a partager le contenu avec leur communaute.  Et pourquoi placer les icones de partage en bas de la page ? C’est a tout moment dans le texte, des que cela fait sens, que l’on peut proposer de partager le contenu.

A condition, toujours et encore, que le contenu soit interessant. Encore une fois, la creation a le dernier mot…

SilverPop a publie un white paper sur le sujet,  je v0us l’adresse sur simple demande.

A demain, stay tune !

Paul Dunay is global managing director of services and social marketing at Avaya and author of “Facebook Marketing for Dummies.” He talks to eMarketer about the future of social commerce as it shapes up on brand Websites, Facebook and Twitter. (eMarketer)

Spent the day at the Lift Summit and heard some great practical ideas about how to utilize social media to promote social commerce. So many content providers, books, blogs and magazines go on and on about social media, but in the end don’t we all want to figure out how to make money from it? I know it is a question I hear often. Today some great speakers made a lot of sense on how to achieve that objective. The last speaker of the day was the author of Socialnomics, Eric Qualman. He played a great YouTube video to start off the presentation and I want to share it with everyone. It reminds me of all the times in the past that a new medium has launched and a large majority of people would always say “it’s just a fad and will never last”. Well, I for one am convinced that social media is not a fad and the result of it is social commerce. Opportunity is knocking, are you going to open the door?

As social media and network marketing merge, EIRO Research intends to be at the forefront of that revolution taking place… also known as social commerce.  Not only to be active in the changes taking place… but innovators.  Later this fall, EIRO Research will launch a new viral social media application.  I’m not privy to what it is or how it will work, but if it is done with the same level of quality and innovation that they’ve put into everything else they’ve done thus far… I’m sure it’ll rock!

Why would any company want to capitalize on the changes taking place in social commerce?  Here’s why…

Frequently we hear B2B clients tell us that they want their shopping experience to be like that of Amazon.com.  Is it just because they are #1 on the Internet Retail Top 500 list?

Initially, our first reaction was always to be a bit surprised.  After all, the overall user experience at Amazon is not exactly intuitive.  Unless you are looking for a specific item, general window shopping can be overwhelming.  Try looking a toaster and you’ll see what I mean.  Were it not for the search navigation on the left (showing that toasters appear in 24 departments, 1587 of them in Home and Garden alone) I’d probably drop right off to another site.

So then what are they looking to replicate?

It’s the product detail page.  Getting this page right is the Holy Grail for product marketing.  As the journey to arrive at a purchase decision is becoming ever more non-linear (great article on this at McKinsey Quarterly), losing the customer in the process is not a good thing.  Amazon clearly understands that digital gives choice and is taking a One Size Fits All approach by throwing every e-commerce tactic possible at you on one really long page

• Social commerce: shareable lists, ratings & reviews, consumer images, product discussion forum
• Cross selling: related  accessories, service plans and commonly bought items
• Competitive shopping: Price checks from other retailers
• Pricing and Availability: Quotes for shipping and expectations on when the product will ship and be at your door

This is fantastic for the everyday B2C consumer, but it’s not the highly personalized experience that your B2B buyer is increasingly expecting.  An even bigger challenge is how to provide this enriched product detail page when you may  have hundreds of thousands of SKUs.  Though do you need to do this for every single product on the site?  Probably not.  So take a tiered approach: identify the bare minimum that every SKU requires and build up to your flagship products – the ones that will carry the most information.

• Long Tail: These could include your drop ship and infrequently purchased SKUs.  Just make sure you have the basic specs, contract pricing and details on related products
• Middle of the Pack: In addition to lead time & availability, provide technical documents, product literature and promotions.  These should all be automatic if your ERP and master data worlds are in harmony
• Flagship Products: Here’s where you go over the top.  Video libraries, product registration, testimonials, social commerce, product RSS feeds  and related blogs should all be easy to find

Finally, use this approach to identify the right governance model for these pages.  There will be a lot of cooks in the kitchen for the  flagship pages.  Who is responsible for updates?  Who can approve changes?  How often do they happen?  Once you have all of this in place, start looking at your goal differently.  Rather than chasing after Amazon, your competitors should be chasing after you.

Find me on Twitter

While scanning for worthy Information Retrieval papers in the recent SIGIR 2009, I came across a paper titled “Learning to Recommend with Social Trust Ensemble“, by a team from the University of Hong Kong. This one is about recommender systems, but putting the social element into text analytics tasks is always interesting (me).

The premise is an interesting one – using your network of trust to improve classic (Collaborative Filtering) recommendations. The authors begin by observing that users’ decisions are the balance between their own tastes, and those of their trusted friends’ recommendations.

Then, they proceed to propose a model that blends analysis of classic user-item matrix where ratings of items by users are stored (the common tool of CF), with analysis of a “social trust graph” that links the user to other users, and through them to their opinions on the items.

This follows the intuition that when trying to draw a recommendation from behavior of other users (which basically is what CF does), some users’ opinions may be more important than others’, and the fact that classic CF ignores that, and treats all users as having identical importance.

The authors show results that out-perform classic CF on a dataset extracted from Epinions. That’s encouraging for any researcher interested in the contribution of the social signal into AI tasks.

However, some issues bother me with this research:

1. Didn’t the netflix prize winning team approach (see previous post) “prove” that statistical analysis of the user-item matrix beats any external signal other teams tried to use? the answer here may be related to the sparseness of the Epinions data, which makes life very difficult for classic CF. Movie recommendations have much higher density than retail (Epinions’ domain).
2. To evaluate, the authors sampled 80% or 90% of the ratings as training and the remaining as testing. But if you choose as training the data before the user started following someone, then test it after the user is following that someone, don’t you get a bit mixed up with cause and effect? I mean, if I follow someone and discover a product through his recommendation, there’s a high chance my opinion will also be influenced by his. So there’s no true independence between the training and test data…
3. Eventually, the paper shows that combining two good methods (social trust graph and classic CF) outperforms each of the methods alone. The general idea of fusion or ensemble of methods is pretty much common knowledge for any Machine Learning researcher. The question should be (but it wasn’t) – does this specific ensemble of methods outperform any other ensemble? and does it fare better than the state of the art result for the same dataset?

The last point is of specific interest to me, having combined keyword-based retrieval with concept-based retrieval in my M.Sc. work. I could easily show that the resulting system outperformed each of the separate elements, but to counter the above questions, I further tested combining other similarly high performing methods to show performance gained there was much lower, and also showed that the combination could take a state of the art result and further improve on it.

Nevertheless, the idea of using opinions from people you know and trust (rather than authorities) in ranking recommendations is surely one that will gain more popularity, as social players start pushing ways to monetize the graphs they worked so hard to build…

Najnowszy raport “Razorfish Social Media Influance Marketing Report” przynosi ciekawe spostrzeżenie, że klienci korzystający z social media nie ufają sobie nawzajem. Ba! Bardziej ufają reklamom telewizyjnym i recenzjom internetowym napisanym przez ekspertów. Trochę to bez sensu A może nie?

Jakie źródła uważamy za autentyczne?

Z raportu Razorfish (próba 1000 osób) wynika, że aż 71 proc. konsumentów dzieli się rekomendacjami ze swoimi znajomymi on-line, ale tylko 33 proc. konsumentów ufa takowym. Wprawdzie, jeszcze mniej ufają oni reklamom internetowym (31 proc.), ale już 47 proc. z nich bardziej ufa recenzjom anonimowych ekspertów (47 proc.) i reklamom telewizyjnym (52 proc.).

A na końcu porównuje to z 73 proc. zaufaniem jakim obdarzamy opinie naszych offline-owych przyjaciół.

Można by powiedzieć, że to podważa prognozę Jermiaha Owyanga z Forrestera, o czekających nas pięciu erach rozwoju social web, aż do social commerce w okolicach 2012 roku. Jednak tak wcale nie jest.

Te dane, według mnie, obrazują tylko fakt, że zaufanie pomiędzy obcymi ludźmi znającymi się tylko poprzez internet, nie różni się wiele, od tego zaufania, jakim obdarzamy znajomych np. z wakacji. I mieści się w zdrowej normie

Więc mrzonki co niektórych marketerów mówiących: “To założymy sobie stronę firmową na Facebooku, zbierzemy tam grono wiernych fanów i… będziemy im łatwo sprzedawać nasze produkty” – można wsadzić tam, gdzie wszystkie inne bajki mówiące, że bez ciężkiej pracy staniesz się piękny, bogaty i mądry.

Nawet Paris Hilton musi popracować

Razorfish na podstawie swoich danych, wyciąga ciekawe wnioski dotyczące zachowania marek w takiej sytuacji, które najplastyczniej podsumował CEO tej firmy, Bob Lord:

Zapraszam do przeczytania raportu:

Kliknij, aby przeczytać ten raport. Warto.

]]> http://blog.comsysto.com/2009/07/09/collective-intelligence-ein-innovatives-verfahren/ Thu, 09 Jul 2009 11:09:37 +0000 DamirAbdic http://blog.comsysto.com/2009/07/09/collective-intelligence-ein-innovatives-verfahren/

Collective Intelligence - ein innovatives Verfahren

Zu entwickelnden Methoden (Collective Intelligence als Kernkomponente des Web 3.0)
Die Herausforderung des Projekts besteht darin Methoden und Verfahren zu entwickeln, die die klassische Business Intelligence durch den Web 2.0 Ansatz bereichern und erweitern. Die dadurch gewonnenen Daten verfeinern die bestehenden Benutzer- und Kundenprofile, und können zum Zwecke der Kundenbindung, bzw. der Neukundengewinnung genutzt werden. Der CI-Ansatz bietet die Möglichkeit Daten aus verschiedenen Quellen auf semantischer Ebene miteinander zu verknüpfen, um dadurch neue Zusammenhänge entdecken zu können, die zuvor nicht erkannt werden konnten. Informationen über Personen, Transaktionen und Produkte werden durch Collective Intelligence “verstanden” und miteinander in Beziehung gesetzt.

Business Intelligence + Web 2.0 (Social Commerce) = Collective Intelligence

Zu entwickelnden Softwaremodule (explizite, implizite und abgeleitete Intelligenz)
Die zu entwickelnden Softwaremodule sollen in der Lage sein alle drei Arten der Intelligenz zu generieren und in einer Reihe von Widgets (Content-Blöcken) zu kombinieren und anzuwenden. Die Widgets präsentieren sich als Aggregate aus unterschiedlichen Datenquellen, die für jeden Benutzer in Echtzeit indivuduell zusammengestellt werden.

(Damir Abdic)

Collective Intelligence Methods and Modules

Zu entwickelnden Methoden
Die Herausforderung des Projekts besteht darin Methoden und Verfahren zu entwickeln, die die klassische Business Intelligence durch den Web 2.0 Ansatz bereichern und erweitern. Die dadurch gewonnenen Daten verfeinern die bestehenden Benutzer- und Kundenprofile, und können zum Zwecke der Kundenbindung, bzw. der Neukundengewinnung genutzt werden. Der CI-Ansatz bietet die Möglichkeit Daten aus verschiedenen Quellen auf semantischer Ebene miteinander zu verknüpfen, um dadurch neue Zusammenhänge entdecken zu können, die zuvor nicht erkannt werden konnten. Informationen über Personen, Transaktionen und Produkte werden durch Collective Intelligence “verstanden” und miteinander in Beziehung gesetzt.

Business Intelligence + Web 2.0 (Social Commerce) = Collective Intelligence

Zu entwickelnden Softwaremodule (explizite, implizite und abgeleitete Intelligenz)
Die zu entwickelnden Softwaremodule sollen in der Lage sein alle drei Arten der Intelligenz zu generieren und in einer Reihe von Widgets (Content-Blöcken) zu kombinieren und anzuwenden. Die Widgets präsentieren sich als Aggregate aus unterschiedlichen Datenquellen, die für jeden Benutzer in Echtzeit indivuduell zusammengestellt werden.

As a continuation to my previous post on Social Commerce, this one follows the implementation of a Social Commerce project I led as a technical director for almost 1.5 years. The project was for a very well known instrument manufacturer that set on a mission to create a very unique site offering engaging eLearning content, entertainment videos, Social Networking and eCommerce.

Site Features

With a laundry list of features, and a highly customized online eLearning system, we set out to deliver the following core site features/functions.

> User and group-level blogging and forums
> Live Chat sessions
> Streaming HD eLearning and entertainment video content (live and pre-recorded)
> Streaming audio content (live and pre-recorded)
> YouTube-like video sharing
> Flickr-like photo sharing
> News articles
> Wikipedia-like library of articles
> eCommerce Store
> End-to-end site search
> Single sign-on user accounts

Technology

To deliver the site, a combination of platforms and technical solutions were used.

> Community Server
- User for all social networking features and functionality
> AspDotNetStorefront
- Used for all eCommerce features and functionality
> Custom eLearning System
- This was built on a customized eLearning database, layered with rich .NET and Flash user controls (e.g. video players, chat with instructor, note taking etc.)
> Custom Flash Video Player
- These were used throughout the site to stream video content at multiple angles, resolutions and chapters/sections
> LHTTPD
- Used to allow for “scrubbing” across a video at any position and start the stream at that position without having to wait for all of it to buffer.
> FFMPEG
- Used to convert multi-format video content to Flash format when users and content producers uploaded their video and audio files.
> Representational State Transfer (REST) Web Services
- The core API that wrapped Community Server and AspDotNetStorefront API was built on REST for improved response times, scalability, compatibility.
> CuteChat for Community Server
- Used to deliver the live chat sessions