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Online Shoppers Trust Each Other

Philip Wilkinson on Apr 06, 2008, in E-Commerce

New research out from eMarketer again, argues that shoppers are increasingly trusting each other when it comes to finding credible information advice about products or companies:

The fact is that knowledgeable and trusted peers provide valuable advice and insight to people trying to find the right products to buy and gain the advice and information they need. In fact, JupiterResearch reckons that online social network users were three time more likely to trust their peers’ opinions over advertising when making purchase decisions:

 So, what does this really mean… Well, I think that people are actually getting more savvy in how they find and absorb information and that people are now looking to credible expert sources and trusted peers compared to just lists and lists of anonymous or not-related reviews. Ultimately no-one wants to be fooled by advertising or biased reviews, and having trusted sources from experts, opinion leaders, peers, and friends - can really help people feel more confident in their product research.

Social Graph + Research + Shopping -> 2008 is the year..
 

Data Portability & The Shopping Social Graph

Philip Wilkinson on Mar 11, 2008, in E-Commerce, Social Media

There has been a lot of talk about the social graph and the best practice for extending, enhancing, and sharing it. Something which we’re following very closely here at Crowdstorm due to the role this graph can play in improving the product research process. Let’s say you are looking for a new 27″ LCD screen for your bedroom and have no idea where to start - a few recommendations or comments from friends and colleagues you trust will help point you in the right direction, especially if they are actually knowledgeable in that space.

Now to get to this kind of implementation, there needs to be that motivation and incentive to use “the crowd” in this way, but firstly you have to provide an easy way to bring in existing social graph connections without having to force people down the “add this person” route over and over again. So, this has led us to heavily research the space of importing connections from other applications and sites into the Crowdstorm registration process:

In an Mark Zuckerberg interview about data portability on facebook on ReadWriteWeb, he stated that “data portability is an important direction in which the web is moving and that fundamental openess between sites is inevitable, yet Facebook must be strict about privacy controls”. The argument is that other applications should not be allowed to share user data as the user loses control over it, which is actually a load of codswallop.

The fact is that you should give people free choice and enough good information to help them make it - which would include whether or not to to give your data access to a piece of software or application and allow what it can do with it. Zuckerberg knows this but is actually stalling while they try and figure out how a feature like this would stop a competitor replicating their site and making it better, porting all that data across.

In my view, the user controls the data, not the site. The process should go along the lines of:

1. Import the social graph data from any chosen site or service
2. Add value to it by enhancing the data within (such as adding trust between people or contextual shopping knowledge)
3. Utilise that data as part of the service to improve the consumer offering
4. Allow that enhanced social data set to be exported again to any other source

This process continually improves the social graph data set through collaboration and sharing. So, back to steps (1) and (4) here, what are good examples of sites that allow exporting of social graph data?

	Twitter	You can bring back a list of people you follow and those that follow you, and while you can’t invite them into the new network - you can get it to find existing people on it and connect with them.
	Flickr	As per Twitter, you can find existing Flickr contacts on the new network and agree to connect, but can’t invite directly via email.
	Gmail	You can authorise access to the gmail contact list and then manually select which of those contacts to invite into the new network directly or connect to people already in it.
	Yahoo Mail	As per gMail / googlemail.
	Facebook	As far as we can tell, you can import most bits of user data from their API except email addresses which means you could at least match up people on the Crowdstorm network who are also connected on Facebook, but not invite them directly.
	OpenSocial	Google’s api specification allows the importing of people relationships and emails depending on what is allowed by the site that implemented the protocol e.g. Bebo
	hCard	A microformat that can be imported into the network and link to other relevant hCards.
	CSV / VCF	Text based file formats for manually uploading lists of contacts and email addresses - only for tech savvy users.

We’re still looking into the Hotmail and AOL mail side of things as it’s not entirely clear what data services they have available for contact importing. So what have we missed? Anything important?

I’ll follow up with another post on our implementation of this and other good examples from around the web - just as soon as we’ve figured it out ourselves!

Technorati Tags: ecommerce, enhancing, graph, crowd, social

Social Marketers Create Communities to Maintain Influence

Philip Wilkinson on Feb 14, 2008, in E-Commerce, Social Media

A february report from those guys at Jupiter, talking about how social marketers should create and engage communities for their brand - in particular highlighting that “the effect of consumer-created content on consumers’ purchasing habits and brand opinion will greatly increase over the next 12 months”:

Source: JupiterResearch

The question of course is where should the conversation take place - everywhere or just the company’s own site.. I think we all know the answer to that one..

Online Shopping and the Difference Between Men and Women

Philip Wilkinson on Feb 12, 2008, in E-Commerce

The Huddlemind blog did a nice piece on the difference between the way men and women purchase products. The gist is that they reckon men search on technical details and want the whole shopping process to be as painless as possible, where as women want opinions, ratings, and choices.

I’m kind of in the mindset that both men and women often do both and it’s not so clear cut. It also depends very much on the product category. I will analyse every single new technical detail about buying a new car where as my wife goes mainly on brand and what looks nice. In contrast, she will spend ages studying the details of a hotel to stay in where I just want to go to a nice five star one with a spa!

So - should you split a shopping site to cater for men and women completely differently?

Search & Filter Updates - pre Typhoon Update

Philip Wilkinson on Feb 08, 2008, in E-Commerce, Products

We’re having to write some new features and code for the next site iteration Project “Typhoon” due in the next few weeks, and thought that we should put some of them live at least on the current site to get some testing and feedback from everyone.

So, as of this morning (taking no responsibility for the bugs) - we’ve deployed a new Site Search and much better Filter Options for browsing attributes and review content types (e.g. video, expert reviews). So in more detail:

Site Search

Before we had some sort of weird hybrid thing whereby you would type something in the box and then it would display the results in a small cramped lightbox. Often there were no results as it was locked down to only matching exact terms for the two categories (cameras and games) tha we have deployed.

Well, know we’ve opened it up to be a full search results page that queries not only products but every single piece of review content we have brought into the platform. That includes expert reviews, user reviews, videos, question and answers, and thoughts:

So we obviously still need to work on relevancy of the thing and of course keep importing more and more content to get better results - but now is a great time to get some feedback on how we could do better when it goes into the new release. So please give it a go, for example with terms such as Canon Eos 40d

Improved Filter Options & Content Types

We’ve split out Expert Reviews & User Reviews so they have their own objects now and also replaced “comments” with Thoughts which is designed to be short pieces of text that people just want to say about a product or about the category generally (e.g. strongly recommend buying blu-ray now as HD-DVD has lost). We’re debating whether we even let people leave these thoughts without having to login… what do you think?

Really would appreciate any feedback so far and any bugs you find.. What would you improve?

Philip Wilkinson on Intruders.tv 2008 - future of ecommerce

Philip Wilkinson on Feb 06, 2008, in E-Commerce, Products

I got collared by the Intruder chaps (Vincent & Eugene) the other week whilst coming out of the OpenCoffee event in Waterstones. Here’s how it went:

Crowdstorm version 2 - iterate, iterate, iterate!

Philip Wilkinson on Jan 24, 2008, in E-Commerce, Entrepreneurship, Products, Social Media

One thing which has been really interesting over the past 5-6 weeks is that having an actual site live is a very useful thing. We debated for quite a while whether we were going to put the current version live, bearing in mind the list of bugs and elements that didn’t quite seem to work correctly, going through the following points:

• You actually have deployed something which is a great morale booster
• You learn a lot from how people use (or don’t use the site) through asking them, and mainly analysing detailed statistics on usage
• It’s a chance to get out of a development environment and really see what the real world issues that are thrown at you are.
• People stop asking you when you are going to launch!!!
• Users who come to the site think that it is a finished version and may not be patient with the flaws
• You have to keep fixing the bugs in the live environment which takes up valuable development time
• Investors start asking for traffic figures on the site and to see “traction” when you’ve only just launched and know you need to put another 20 things live and perfect them before your plan really kicks in.

Well - what “have” we learnt directly in relation to Crowdstorm then?

1. Not implementing a menu bar sucks in terms of navigation!
2. Developing the site with a graphic design team and then implementing everything in one big chunk is wrong and inefficient (I’ll explain why further down in this post)
3. We shouldn’t let design get in the way of functionality and usability - it may look great but not if people can’t use the thing
4. Use some good quality analytics packages - we have a combination of our own internal tools, Google Analytics, and Clicktale
5. Make sure you get the blend right between people who want to browse and people who want to search and know what they want.
6. Some design elements and layouts on the web have evolved in a certain way for a reason - being adventurous is good but need to pick the right battles
7. Don’t try and gain traffic too quickly so that you can get feedback and improve the proposition before the masses arrive

Iterate, Iterate, Iterate!

The first version of Crowdstorm was a big step for us in terms of trying to build functionality and a design with no historical work to base it on. We took the concept and vision, built 75% of the functionality, then got a graphic design team in to come up with our look and feel. Once the graphical work was done and we were happy with any changes, we then tried to match the CSS / XHTML up with the technical feature set to create the finished product. There was no real way to go back and tweak things without losing time and money.

Fast forward to Jan 2008 - and Crowdstorm V3. This time we have a great team who have had me drill the words “iterate, measure, deploy” until their ears bleed. In a small team of 5, we’ve got two technical developers, one front end interface designer, a search engine specialist, and a product / commercial guy (that’ll be me then).

We build a basic wireframe of a page, write what we want from it, look through any data from the existing site to back up our ideas for change, then code a designed page up in CSS / XHTML. We look through it, play around with a few elements, then go and simplify it by reducing 20% of what we have on it. Once we’re happy with this first version we get the front-end hooked up to the technical backend and deploy it on our beta site behind the scenes, then move on to the next page.

Even then, we’re constantly going back to the older versions and trying new things with the implemented design and refactoring in the technical implementation. We run the analytics software on the pages and get people to try it out too. The main thing I’ve found is that this works very, very well, but it does rely on having all the team on-board in order to understand that nothing is set in stone and everything they do will change.

It’s what I love about the web - seeing a product as a living, breathing entity that evolves every waking minute of the day!

UK online ad spend to triple by 2019!

Philip Wilkinson on Jan 22, 2008, in E-Commerce, Entrepreneurship

Predictions out on monday from the Advertising Association and World Advertising Research Centre (WARC) and published on StrategyEye - stating that UK online ad revenues could hit £21.97 billion by 2019, up from £15.98 billion in 2007. Now that is some long-term prediction from those people with the crystal ball!

It actually does make sense even in the short term as even if you believe the “predicted” downturn in the global economies, online ad spend is most likely to actually increase as advertisers look to place their money in the most cost effective and trackable channel - the internet.

Look for ongoing increases in display ads, online classifieds, search marketing, and vertical-niche channels.

The ramifications of the Apple Macbook Air - thin

Philip Wilkinson on Jan 16, 2008, in Fun

You know we like to think of ourselves as a company that filters the wheat from the chaff for you when it comes to product reviews - well, with so much Macworld coverage going on, we thought we’d bring you the single best video of the new Apple Macbook Air:

“Have Apple considered the real ramifications of going thin? All those fat laptops are now going to have a real fat complex as this video shows. Oprah - help them!

2008 Prediction - online ad spend continues to grow

Philip Wilkinson on Jan 07, 2008, in E-Commerce, Products, Social Media

With markets “potentially” in down-turn’s or corrections, it’s always interesting to consider that the internet actually benefits from those sorts of times as with money tight, marketing executives will continue to gravitate toward the internet, looking for more measurable ad formats to buttress their positions.

This year alone, the US will hit $27.5 billion in terms of online ad spend:

(Chart courtesy of emarketer)