At the Live Shopping Days 2011 conference, Exciting Commerce’s own Marcel Weiss gave a presentation on the regularly recurring information architecture patterns seen with many of the services found in the social web. He spoke about the transferability of this pattern to the realm of e-commerce.
Marcel Weiss has gathered the recurring themes under the umbrella term “Social Web Pattern”.
The Social Web Pattern consists of four cornerstone principles:
- The Follower Principle
- The Stream
- The One Click Gesture
- Share Connection to other web services
The Social Web Pattern has already been elucidated in the e-commerce context in our German blog when Groupon announced their new platform strategy.
Etsy is also exhibiting the Social Web Pattern with their Activity Feed and Circles.
If the information architecture of services such as Quora is looked at very closely, one can learn a great deal for their own startup.
Decisive is how to correctly interpret the observed mechanisms according to the context of your own web services.
Groupon applies the Follower Principle with a clear separation between merchants (“Groupon Stores”) and end users. Etsy does not. Everyone in the Circle is equal. This has a reason: while Groupon engages local merchants and their potential customers, Etsy’s community of handmade craft producers can also at the same time be customers for others Etsy users.
A relatively basic example of how the One Click Gesture could work for a Groupon-like deal platform:
As end user I see in my stream a deal which I find interesting (example: discount theatre tickets). At this point I am not yet sure if I want to buy it. I click on a “maybe” or “interested” button.
My ambivalent interest on the tickets is communicated to my network of friends. Very similar to how clicking on “Like” on a website transfers the content to my Facebook newsfeed. My friends can then react and contribute their opinion like “hey, we can both buy tickets and go together”.
The dissemination of the deals would ideally be strengthened and would lead to an increase in revenues.
We will continue to follow this topic on future posts here on Exciting Commerce.
Originally posted in German by Marcel Weiss, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.
It was great presentation showing the pattern of social website towards ecommerce websites. Social web in future will help getting more customer engagement to small business owners.
Posted by: Ecommerce Services | 05/07/2011 at 09:43 AM