Our friends over at Tastebook asked us to test their new widget.  We are happy to help out, but I thought I’d also take a step back to reflect on the significance of what they are up to.  This is a really good example of a company that “gets” the big picture we have talked about in previous posts.

When I first saw Tastebook I thought “Okay, that is pretty cool”.  You make your own cookbook by remixing your favorite recipes from places like Epicurious and Simply Recipes along with your own.  Playing book DJ is fun and the end result is a beautiful collection of your favorite recipes.  Julie created a great Tastebook which is a good thing because my cooking knowledge is limited to toast and quesadillas (unfortunately that is not an exaggeration).

Then I started really thinking about what it meant and the implications behind what they are doing are significant.  Social media is all about giving people the tools, platforms and creative license to create a web experience “their/our way”.    And sometimes you want a physical expression of that, something you can hold in your hands or give to other people wrapped in actual gift-wrap.  Speaking for myself, when I do that I want just as much control as I have in the virtual environment.   The idea behind Tastebook is just that  - user control over my physical experience of a book.  Well done!

Now, hopefully they’ll expand to things I actually know something about, like travel. Check it out especially if cooking is your thing:

Om Malik over at GigaOm wrote an interesting post today “Shocking:  New Facts about P2P and Broadband Usage“.  In it he cites some stats from Arbor Networks and makes the following comment:

• 10 percent of subscribers consume 80 percent of bandwidth.
• 0.5 percent of subscribers consume about 40 percent of total bandwidth
• 80 percent of subscribers use less than 10 percent of bandwidth

  This supports the arguments made by some of the larger ISPs, including Comcast. In a recent interview, Comcast Cable CTO Tony Werner told me his company would try and deal with the tiny number of subscribers who use most of the bandwidth by slowing down their connections during peak times.         

  I don’t agree with the premise that the stats make a case for the ISP’s.   In fact I think just the opposite.    ISP’s like to use the highway analogy (I thought it was a  bunch of tubes) .  The reasoning goes that since bandwidth is a limited resource, like the lanes on a highway, certain entities should be given preference (access to the fast lane) while individual bandwidth hogs are regulated to the slow lane.  Unless they pay of course.  

Simple, easy to understand and with an emotional appeal.  Too bad it is wrong.  When you drive your car you degrade my experience of driving my car.  No cars on my road = good.  Many cars= bad.    If you’ve been asleep for the past 5 or so years (arguably the ISP’s have) than you may not have noticed the web went all social.  People, (i.e. users bound for the ISP slow lane), create cool content, share, mashup and generally make the whole thing a vibrant community instead of a video billboard.    My web experience is enhanced the more people that use it! Not like a highway at all, is it? 

 Aha, says my ISP - “but what about P2P?”.   And there is the really shocking part of the stats.  Turns out, at least according to Arbor, that only 20% of the total traffic is P2P (arguably a portion of which is people creating content collaboratively).  The rest is you and me creating sharing and generally making the web a richer experience. 

We see this all the time in the user communities we look at for clients -  it tends to be the 10 or 20% of the community that heavily engage that makes the whole community vibrant and alive. Yep, they use some bandwidth to do it. I think that’s a small price to pay for creativity.   I guess what it comes down to is - do you want  YouTube?  Or do you want Clown Co Hulu? 

This report by Shel Israel for Global Neighbourhoods TV gives a quick overview of how  SeaWorld San Antonio used social media channels to launch the “Journey to Atlantis” last Summer. You can also find more details about the initiative here.

Congrats SeaWorld San Antonio on a successful launch and an outstanding social influence program! The google search for”Journey to Atlantis” alone shows the popularity of user-generated content surrounding the campaign.

I had the pleasure of attending Jeff Pulver’s  Social Media Breakfast in San Francisco.  It was a great group of social media folk.  The mix of deep thought and greasy hash browns courtesy of Sear’s Fine Food is a tough combo to beat.  There was a lot of discussion about the nature of “community” and the changing ways in which we interact with community.  We are immersed in user/consumer communities for our clients so this is something we think a lot about.  There are a couple of interesting companies I’ll cover in my next posts.

Another prevalent discussion was around how companies can interact with social media.    Not so much the toolbox itself, but the importance of the mindset around it.    Engaging with social media means just that – “engaging”.  Tough concept for a lot of companies because it involves doing a lot of micro activities well.  The antithesis of doing one macro campaign (Super bowl ad anyone?) with a big impact.

Jeff gave everyone a Personal Social Networking Toolkit. It contains a profile (name and tagline), tag cloud and a “wall”.  In the form of Avery labels, post-its and a bic pen.  It worked.  Really well.

 If you want to see more here is Jeff’s video on how to use it – great idea for any networking event:

Today iMedia Connection featured an article “Get in on the Social Shopping Craze” by Denise Zimmerman. It was interesting to read as it explores some of the same concepts we’ve been talking about with our clients and on the RelevantMind blog.This article provides a good commentary on  the social shopping landscape, but it sites Forrester as having the opinion that social shopping lacks staying power because low traffic numbers will impede its growth and market value. I could be taking this statement out of context. And I have yet to read this research, so I’m wondering how the research giant is defining social shopping as it relates to this claim. I rarely disagree with Forrester, so I imagine they aren’t including social shopping sites like Polyvore into this category as we’ve seen in our research that those sites are catching up to retail sites in terms of traffic volume. I’ll dig a little deeper and let you know what I find out. 

The news this week made it really easy to bring the discussion back to my social shopping series with all of the talk about Amazon’s social shopping deal with Facebook. Amazon is now offering two new applications to Facebook users – Amazon Giver and Amazon Grapevine.

Amazon Giver helps you buy gifts for friends off of their Amazon.com Wish Lists or from gift recommendations based on their Facebook profile interests and favorites.

Amazon Grapevine helps you get the word out to your friends about what you are doing on Amazon.com. Let your friends know when you add items to your public Wish List, write reviews, or tag products on Amazon.

I’ve downloaded both apps and I’m excited to test them out from a user-experience stand point, though I’m sure they’re pretty tight since Amazon rarely misses the mark. What I’m most interested in is the recommendations feature. Apparently the system uses its recommendation engine to allow users to view product recommendations generated by Amazon based upon what the other person has listed as their likes and interests on their own Facebook profile.

This is huge and depending on the integration, the Facebook application may solve my number one issue on Amazon.com - relevancy. Naturally, the recommendations on Amazon.com come from items I’ve browsed and purchased – which includes items for me AND friends and family.  Recommending I pre-order the new National Album - relevant. Recommending I buy a collection of children’s books - not so relevant. However, if properly implemented, the recommendations from Facebook should be relevant my interests and, therefore, relevant to my purchase intent.

Let’s test it out. Find me on Facebook and buy me something based on the recommendations! I’ll let you know if I like it.

I’d like to say I’m behind on my social shopping posts because I’ve been hob nobbing and absorbing all things social media at SXSW. Sadly I was unable to make it.

Every year SXSW has been one of the highlights on my event calendar. Even when it wasn’t 100% relevant to my job at the time, I would do whatever it took to get there. Ironically, this year it is 150% relevant to my job and, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make it work.

But I kept tabs on the presentations through tweets, webcasts, blogs, and **gasp** actual conversations with folks who were there. I’m honestly shocked that despite all of the fantastic topics covered, people are mostly buzzed up about the keynote hosted by Sarah Lacy.

For those of you that haven’t heard (read: aren’t social media nuts), here is the reader’s digest version of the situation. Per the direction of SXSW, the keynote was intended to be a casual conversation between Lacy and Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

The crowd wasn’t one bit pleased. Feeling robbed of their access to Zuckerberg through the typical Q&A style, they became restless (booing, shouting out complaints) to the point that Lacy, facing ridicule and humiliation, had to change the interview style to the Q&A approach.

First question:

“Other than rough interviews, what are some of the biggest challenges Facebook faces?”
“Has this been a rough interview?” Lacy interjected – light-heartedly interjecting.
“I wasn’t asking you, I was asking Mark,” the attendee. Responded.

I understand Zuckerberg is an icon among an audience of tech geeks. And the crowd was expecting to learn more about the secrets of Facebook. And I may be the only person who actually enjoyed the casual conversation between the two versus Zuckerberg’s canned responses to the audience’s questions.

But each time I read/hear/talk about it, I grow increasingly more irritated with this gentleman and the audience in general. Have we really grown so accustomed to having our voices heard that we insist on stomping our feet until we get our way?

This is our reality.

Some people are just plain spoiled, but most of us have been spoiled by social media. Just like Willy Wonka’s Veruca Salt – we want what we want AND we want it NOW! We want to voice our opinions and have our questions answered. And if we don’t have a platform for doing so, we will make our own!

Just like the desires of the audience forced Lacy to react and shift, the desires of consumers are forcing companies to create platforms for consumer interaction, get engaged in the conversations, or, at the very least, listen to the uproar of the crowds.

Let’s just hope they get it together before their vocal consumers start getting demanding and become as rude as the SXSW keynote attendees.

In my last post, I ran through the basics of Polyvore’s site from a user’s perspective. Today I’m going to give my two cents on why retailers should be paying more attention to Polyvore and the social shopping trend in general.

First, who doesn’t love viral free referrals?

As I outlined last week, when I publish a set I can manually share it with my friends in many ways. But once the set is published, I’m also sharing it with my virtual “friends” - the other 135,000+ registered users – who can access to it through search or stumble across it through the many ways of exploring the site. They can see what I’ve put together and where (read: free referrals) the items came from. They can also use any of the items I’ve clipped in building their own sets which is when the connecting with strangers starts happening.

For example, I don’t know MIZZ*TIFFANY in real life – but we are best friends forever on the site because we have similar taste. Not only do I use a lot of the items she’s clipped (and vice versa) when building my own sets, but she’s introduced me to three retailers I’d never even heard of before. Thank you, MIZZ*TIFFANY for showing me three new online stores! Those retailers should be thanking her too, as I’d never have found them (and then made a purchase) on page 20 in Google search results. It makes me wonder. Do these retailers even know about Polyvore or, if so, are they using their analytics tool to track traffic coming from it?

My guess is probably not. But if I were a retailer – especially of fashion – I’d build a campaign in my analytics tool that aggregates site visits coming from any of the polyvore URLs. In doing so, they should be able to identify the influencers who are advocating for their brand. And if there is a significant amount of traffic coming from the Polyvore, they may want to run a promotion on the site.

Check out this recent promotion from American Eagle (ended last week) calling for Polyvore users to create their own sets using AE clothing. Brilliant – they’ve found a great way to engage with their target audience in a manner that isn’t disruptive and actually contributes to their social shopping experience.

And that is the key to any successful social shopping initiative. Finding the communities where your target audiences are connecting and implement a strategy that inserts you into the conversation to further their purpose, as well as promote your product.

Secondly, I firmly believe that it’s a new era for online commerce and behaviors are changing. 

Polyvore has a large, yet targeted audience of users who have come together to essentially create fashionable photo stories. And the audience is growing tremendously month over month. Check out this graph comparing the traffic rank of Polyvore to Abercrombie, The Gap, and J. Crew. Not too bad for a site that’s not even a year old.

Not only is the traffic stacking quickly, but the average user spends 8 minutes on the site per session. And if I had to guess that number will only increase as greater interactivity is offered leaving less time spent on a retail site. In fact, as more people learn about (and use) social shopping sites like Polyvore, I’m guessing (er - hoping) that retailers start to take these new behaviors into consideration when making user experience and design decisions on their own sites. Retailers need to view the shopping experience outside of their closed-loop online experience because I firmly believe that more and more “shopping” is going to occur within sites like Polyvore, with the retail stores serving as merchandise repositories and transaction outlets. I’m not recommending that retailers start editing their online stores based on the latest and greatest Internet applications, but they do need to understand how these other sites work relative to their own sites.

For example, most retail sites currently offer zoom and/or color change features on their images - which over time has increased conversion and become a best practice in retailing. However, these images are most often served through a flash plug-in, which doesn’t allow the clipper to grab the image. So the images look fantastic and are perfectly merchandised on the retailer’s site, but consumers can’t clip them, meaning they can’t share them within other social shopping environments. And when consumers are spending more time on social shopping sites versus retail sites - they’ll be sharing (read: promoting) the products that are easy to share - which aren’t the ones served up in flash.

This is only one example of how I think the growth of social shopping sites will change the game for retailers. It will change how they communicate promotions, how they design customer acquisition campaigns, and how they evolve their own user experiences on their sites. It will be interesting to see which retailers change their strategies based on these quickly emerging trends. The only thing of which I’m certain is it won’t be the ones who view social media as a new fad and start paying attention after it’s too late.

We return from our brief recession conversation to remind you of the social shopping series we started a few weeks back. After a brief period learning more about the behavior that drives social shopping this fall, we spent about a month evaluating social shopping on retail sites, as well as the various communities where consumers come together during the shopping process. Again, the goal was to better understand user interactions and the impact these interactions have in the buying process. There were a few winners among the many average sites we evaluated and I’m going to dedicate my next few posts to highlighting some of the best-in-class examples of social shopping, starting with my favorite of the mix – Polyvore.

Polyvore is an easy-to-use social shopping application that enables browsers to create visual sets, outfits, collages, etc. from items they find online and share them with whomever they want. In my opinion, this is the closest consumers have to a virtual dressing room. You can’t try them on exactly, but you can check in with your friends to see if that belt really goes with these shoes – before you make the purchase.

How do consumers interact with the application and others on the site? Using the Polyvore clipper tool you add to your toolbar, you can “clip” or grab images from other sites, adding them to your “inventory” for later use in creating a set. Once you’ve “clipped” the images you need, you can bring it altogether through the application in a set – like this one here.

Once I’ve published a set, Polyvore makes it easy to share. I can send friends a link or even an ecard. I can embed it on my blog. And, of course, I’ve downloaded the Facebook widget, so the new sets are automatically added to my news feed and my profile page - further promoting my set (and the Polyvore site) to my Facebook community.

Polyvore wins! It’s an easy-to-use, easy-to-share example of social shopping. It was the first example about which I was truly excited to share with my retail client. Her response - “that’s a neat little tool, but I don’t see how we could use it” - was not so exciting. On a base level she’s right, this is a neat little tool for consumers. But if you look at the big picture, it can become a powerful promotion engine for retailers, who should start to pay as much attention to sites like this as they do to their own online stores.

Why should they be paying attention? More on that tomorrow…

Sarah used the dreaded “R” word (Recession for those that missed the last post) and it brings up for me the importance of companies really connecting with their customers. 

When times are good the rising tide floats all boats.  When times are tough things like really understanding your customers, learning from the dialogue and adding meaningful value responsive to customer needs becomes the difference between merely surviving and thriving.

The RelevantMind team has spent the last year talking about the value of consumer conversations in user communities while focusing our efforts on developing products that connect both consumers and businesses to these valuable conversations.

Through the consumer research sites we launched last fall - cyclists, golf enthusiasts, and aspiring chefs can access a curated collection of relevant conversations about the products and services they are looking for within our road bikes, golf, and cooking verticals.

While working to improve the relevancy of these consumer sites, we recognized that the data we were gathering was a valuable business intelligence resource. So we spent the rest of 2007 and early 2008 building off the underlying technology we use to power the consumer sites to launch our new suite of market intelligence tools.

As Sarah referenced in her last post - The Forrester article recommends that during a recession, advertisers focus their ad dollars on cost-effective programs with clear measurable results that engage these customers during the product purchase funnel. And our suite of tools does just that.

We empower companies with the knowledge they need to better engage with consumers during the product research process and identify and connect with influential users who impact consumer opinions during this process.

We provide quantifiable metrics allowing them to measure the impact of their existing word of mouth and overall marketing efforts and the qualitative data they need to understand the opinions of their customers, advocates, naysayers, loyalists, and competitors.

Finally, our flexible pricing structure provides a cost-effective way for advertisers to build stronger social media marketing strategies that will give them the larger share of wallet from consumers during any economic condition.