Here is the one social shopping article to print out and frame: "Social Shopping and The Game of Life" by Adam Michelson. It’s so far the best commentary on the topic to be found.
Conceptually, most social shopping services are still stuck in the pre-Facebook years of 2005 and 2006. Time for an abrupt wake up call:
"Most of the current social shopping ideas are lame. They are mostly derivations of either virally allowing users to put links, or very simple widgets, on social sites, or they are copycat social networking sites with some basic ecommerce built in."
"These ideas are laudable as at least they are attempting new retail concepts, but they feel like mashups of ecommerce and social networking, hoping that 1 and 1 will be 2."
What is necessary now, according to Michelson’s concept, is a strong shift of social aspects into the foreground. Also imperative are appropriate metrics which can be used to measure such social aspects.
"Once these and other core social shopping behaviors are understood, then all site features should map directly to them.”
“Today a retailer is not going to add functionality that does not directly drive conversion, decrease abandonment, increase traffic or define brand. “
“So why add social capabilities that does not monetize or directly map to pre-defined social behavior metrics? The value of the network must be derived to appropriately prioritize features.“
Michelson advocates benchmarks that would better represent social relationships and allow social growth to be measured.
"Social metrics should be defined and measured such as the:
- Velocity of social network growth
- Value of customers measured by how they help grow the network
- Network conversion rate defined as how many people invited ultimately participate and buy."
In principle, he’s not opening up a new can of worms (“The Viral Numbers Game: How To Measure Viral Success?”).
Michelson underlines the current dilemma with two key statements:
"Using 1.0 ecommerce information architecture and product management tools for a 2.0 social shopping site will create a site that is suboptimal in both ecommerce and social capabilities. 1 plus 1 will equal .5."
"A truly valuable customer is not only loyal for their purchases, but they also are evangelists that help to grow the network. We need analytical tools to show this social network value."
Maybe this is the key: the “social network value” of a customer which is calculated from both networking capacity and buying behavior.
What Michelson describes is not only for classical social shopping sites valid, but also for shopping clubs (like Vente-Privée, Gilt Groupe, etc.) and live shopping sites (like Woot!, Midnightbox, etc.). All of these shopping concepts live on their socially driven attractiveness.
Related posts:
Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo.
This is an interesting piece. I would be interested in the thoughts of the author on twitter and social shopping.
Our view is that social shopping sites such as tribesmart are using the twitter api to give relevance and context to tweets on products which appear at random and are very short lived.
Reviews and ratings generated by real users on social shopping sites, product related tweets which are fixed against specific products all help address the imbalance of power between big brand marketing budgets and the consumer.
Thanks
Posted by: Wayne | 02/27/2009 at 11:34 AM