Shop.org Blog

This fast paced session opened with Mitch Joel, President, Twist Image, giving us an extreme example of social shopping; the story of how Neal Schon from the 80’s super group Journey found a replacement for lead singer Steve Perry on YouTube; a 23 year old from the Philippines who had posted videos of his cover band!

This spoke to a major theme of the session – many online retailers are selling much of the same product, so how do you differentiate? (and it increasingly isn’t about best price and free shipping). Also, you need to get your content out there (videos on YouTube, photos on flickr, etc…), don’t restrict it to your site because potential customers are searching for information everywhere!

We are also experiencing a shift online. Looking for content has just surpassed communication as the number one activity on the Internet. People want to connect to others who have the same interests and who want the same stuff (think ‘digital Tupperware party’). Social content lets people fall in with ‘similar others’, and social networkers (facebook) are evolving into social researchers (like digg, but for products). 

Mitch was also adamant to stop thinking about the Long Tail and instead get on the Long Road of content, voice, conversations and ratings. You need a strategy for how your products can rise to the top. At the end of the day, Social Shopping comes down to making it easier for the customer to buy. The average online conversion rate remains at 2%, and social shopping is the only way to crank it up. 

Next up was Carrie Johnson, VP and Research Director at Forrester. If you’ve seen Carrie present before, you know she’s very analytical and covers a lot of data; fast!

There’s a lot of hype around social shopping right now, and many new sites are popping up like kaboodle, meebo, shopwiki, stumbleupon, etc… Don’t get distracted; the trend is more important than the technology. 

What the social shopping trend really means 

• It defines a social structure in which technology puts power in communities, not institutions 
• Social media increases the purchase options available to buyers 
• Networks expose unpopular, hard-to-find products and services (often free!) 
• These same networks create new suppliers of products and services 
• In the mean time, it erodes advertising effectiveness of traditional brands 

Social media will expose more products (than mass media does now) resulting in increased niche sales. 

What do you do about it? 

• Maybe nothing! Create a strategy based on your customers, now what you want 
• Start with figuring out what kind of social shopping profile your customers have then create an objective 

This requires a difficult deep dive on your customers (current or desired) and their participation levels in social media: 

• Who are they? 
• How engaged are they? 
• What is the frequency of their participation in social media? 

Lastly, as we move forward with this emerging media, some of the earlier experiments are beginning to drop off. Second Life, a former poster child has not held up to the hype and is no longer seen as offering any long-term value. 

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