Today, we launched a new solution called EverShare™ - the first all-in-one Frictionless Sharing and Curation Suite. It’s a mouthful, for sure. That’s because it represents the convergence of two very significant trends…
- Facebook’s Frictionless Sharing initiative, also referred to as Open Graph, and
- Social Curation, spearheaded by online sites like Pinterest and Fab.com
EverShare's "Gallery" Social Curation Feature
We already know that consumer-to-consumer sharing on ecommerce sites has proven to drive significant uplift in referral traffic, converting at much higher rates than other social media marketing efforts (e.g. 250-300 percent higher than Facebook Fan Page or Twitter programs for our social sharing applications). The more sharing the more uplift.
But not everyone who wants to share has time to initiate it. In other words, there’s “friction” in the system. And Facebook’s Frictionless Sharing initiative addresses this friction upfront by allowing shoppers to authorize certain on-site activities to be shared automatically on their Timelines and Tickers.
EverShare provides all the functionality needed to take advantage of this initiative, including clear user controls over sharing settings at all times, and a library of social sharing applications that effectively engage users to share that very first time.
(image to the left) EverShare's "ShareSwitch" User Controls
At the same time, the dramatic rise of socially-curated sites such as Pinterest and Fab.com has demonstrated the power of social curation to merchandise products and motivate user sharing in record numbers. We provide the social curation and merchandising functionality in EverShare to capture this momentum on your ecommerce site.
If you are attending Etail West in Palm Springs, February 27 - March 1, 2012, stop by our booth (#25) to get a demonstration. In addition to learning more about EverShare, you will get a just-completed 1088-person consumer research study - "Social Impact: How Consumers See It".
Posted by
Dan Kacher on Mon, Feb 13, 2012 @ 11:35 AM
Today, more and more retailers are integrating social features into their ecommerce sites to create a more personalized shopping experience and drive increased referral traffic and sales. A common question we hear from retailers considering Facebook Connect and Facebook Timeline applications is “what is the benefit of a ‘Facebook-Connected’ user?” And, specifically, “is there on-going value created by a Facebook-Connected user?”
To answer this, we launched a study to measure the click-through rates and share rates of shoppers who were presented with a range of social sharing applications on retailer websites. Our study found that returning Facebook-Connected users click on social applications and share content with their friends 9 times more often than non-Connected shoppers. We certainly expected a higher propensity for sharing for Connected users, but we were surprised by the magnitude of this difference.
Facebook-Connected users are 9x more likely to engage with social features and share with friends.
What does it mean to be a Facebook-Connected user?
When online shoppers “connect” to ecommerce sites using Facebook Connect, they grant retailers access to information about themselves, such as lists of their friends, likes, and interests. This information then allows retailers to offer social applications and more personalized shopping experiences. There are two paths to becoming a Facebook-Connected user. First, a shopper can login through a social login alternative, such as the “Login with Facebook” button. This method gives the shopper a convenient way to login to a retailer site and also converts them to a Facebook-Connected user. Second, a shopper can click on the call-to-action (CTA) for a social feature that requires information from the shopper’s Facebook account.
The two methods of becoming a Facebook-Connected user: 1) social login, 2) engaging with a Facebook-Connect-based feature.
The Study
To measure the benefit of Facebook-Connected users, we grouped users into two buckets based on Facebook login status: (1) users who are logged in with Facebook Connect and (2) users who are not. (As mentioned in a prior blog post, the login status is pulled directly from Facebook through an API called FB.getLoginStatus()). We then analyzed the rate at which individuals in these two groups (1) clicked on the main call-to-action, and then (2) shared content with their friends on Facebook.
The total data set is comprised of over 1.35 million CTA clicks on 42 different social sharing applications that occurred between October 2010 and January 2012.
Results
This study yielded two important learnings for us:
1) Facebook Connected users are 9 times more likely to engage with on-site social sharing features (i.e. click on a call-to-action button for a social sharing application).
2) Facebook Connected users are also 9 times more likely to complete the sharing process and send product/offer content to their friends on Facebook.
Conclusions
Based on our results, Facebook Connected users provide significant on-going value to retailers, as these users continue to engage and share at very high rates on return visits. Given this fact, the natural conclusion is that retailers should find engaging social experiences that motivate shoppers to connect, driving significantly higher LTV through on-going new customer referrals.
Beyond adding Like buttons and other social sharing features, you should consider adding a social login alternative to your site. Plus, consider adding the number “Facebook Connected Users” as a key performance indicator for your social strategy.
With those takeaways in mind, we’re going to get back to building engaging social features that will help you maximize these metrics!
Any retailer swimming in the social media waters the past few years has heard the word "engagement" a million times, and for good reason. Engagement is key in driving word-of-mouth endorsements. However, engagement and word-of-mouth are really a prelude to the ultimate goal of driving increased sales.
The problem with most social engagement strategies is they don't actually increase sales. In fact, Forrester's recent State of Retailing Online study (SORO) found that 62 percent of retailers' social marketing return on investment is still unclear. As retailers look beyond engagement to ROI from their social strategies in 2012, here are four mistakes to avoid:
1. Counting on Facebook fan pages to drive sales. Retailers have invested a lot of time and money into Facebook fan pages, trying to build a large fan base and engage them with weekly posts and promotions. This contradicts the true spirit of social — i.e., connecting with and empowering consumers. The socially empowered consumer now expects input and advice from peers, not from manufacturers or retailers. It should come as no surprise that traffic from Facebook fan pages isn't driving sales.
Recommendation: Capitalize on your existing ecommerce investments by engaging your website visitors with social features that cause consumer-to-consumer sharing. Word-of-mouth sharing will help drive traffic to your ecommerce site, where you're best equipped to convert it.
2. Relying on the 'Like' button to drive sharing. Early attempts to drive consumer-to-consumer sharing on ecommerce sites centered on the Facebook "Like" button. The click-through rate has been extremely low as there's no clear reason or benefit for consumers to like a product while shopping. What problem does that help them solve for them?
Recommendation: Provide engaging social experiences tailored to your target consumers that present compelling reasons for them to share with friends. Prioritize solutions that leverage user interaction data on your site as well as full social graph data about the user and their friends on Facebook. This will ensure you present the most relevant experiences at each step in the shopping process.
3. Waiting for a well formulated social roadmap to start. While the potential revenue that on-site social applications can generate is huge, waiting to create the ideal social roadmap may actually reduce your chance of success. It's hard to predict what will work best with your customers and your product categories. To make matters worse, while you're busy planning and building consensus across the company, your competitors can dive in and start getting real customer feedback to know what really works.
Recommendation: If you don't already have Facebook-trained engineers and product managers on staff, you may want to partner with a social commerce vendor regardless of your plan so you can get started quickly and get that feedback. You should pick a partner that allows you to easily test and improve upon different social experiences across your site (and yes, Sociable Labs does offer that capability). Because social commerce is still in its infancy, rapid experimentation and testing is key to generating the highest returns.
4. Looking for the social 'silver bullet.' Social technologies are evolving fast (as is consumer social behavior). Forrester's recent SORO study shows there's no proven solution in social marketing, though efforts to integrate social features on ecommerce sites have proven to work the best so far for growing sales.
Recommendation: Look for a social solution that provides a wide range of on-site social experiences explicitly aimed at increasing the metrics that matter most, namely referral traffic and site-wide conversions. Customize these experiences to your specific products and users. Solutions with built-in A/B testing capabilities ensure the greatest opportunity to know what works for your business and what doesn't, allowing you to optimize for the greatest user participation and overall lift in sales.
2011 was a big year for ecommerce and 2012 promises to be even bigger as social commerce continues to emerge as a key source of traffic and sales for online retailers. Here are the top five trends in social commerce that I predict will have the most impact in the coming year:
Going beyond the "like": To gain greater value from the Facebook social graph, e-commerce sites will begin to allow visitors to do more than just "like" a product. At the most recent f8 Developer Conference, Facebook announced its plans to enable more types of user actions to be shared, such as "read," "watched" and "listened." In 2012, e-commerce sites will begin to define their own social actions, allowing consumers to indicate what they've bought or reviewed, or even indicate what items they are shopping for. Given that 50% of visitors to e-commerce sites are logged into Facebook while shopping, these types of social features will prove to be popular with consumers in 2012.
Platforms open wide: One of the biggest inhibitors to integrating social into the e-commerce experience over the past two years has been the technical challenge. Vocal demand from retailers has driven most of the major e-commerce platform providers to adapt, making their platforms much easier to integrate with third party services. eBay's X.commerce announcement is the most visible example of this trend, but every major e-commerce platform has made social integration a big part of its roadmap in 2012.
More deals, every day: 2011 was the year of the local daily deal, led by Groupon and Living Social, amongst others. The daily deal phenomenon proved that consumers don't want to miss out on a phenomenal deal, even if they had little-to-no purchase intent for the item or service being offered. Online retailers were quick to realize that the Groupon model could be applied to their own websites, and I predict that this trend will only accelerate in 2012. The daily deal will become a mainstay of the e-commerce environment for years to come.
Celebrity-driven marketing: Our celebrity-driven culture extended into online retailing in a big way in 2011, and we'll be seeing plenty more in 2012. After several years of building Facebook fans and Twitter followers, social media-savvy celebrities became a key asset to the marketing strategies for many online brands. The success of ShoeDazzle, which rode Kim Kardashian's popularity, set an example for the industry. In 2012, we'll see more sites use celebrity muscle to push traffic to retail sites — like Fab.com, which got Demi Moore to tweet about some of its early sales, and BeachMint, which co-presents products from Kate Bosworth, the Olsen sisters and Jessica Simpson.
Shopping less but spending more: Shoppers with more cash than time will be courted by sites that offer personalized shopping services, digging up only the deals and the products that the shopper will jump on. Services like Shop It To Me act as virtual personal shoppers, saving their members the hassle of scouring sites for deals. Services that rent products, like Rent The Runway, will unlock new ways of consuming products. New forms of shopping with social twists will continue to spread in popularity fueled by strong word of mouth via social networks.
At first glance, the Facebook Permissions request can look like an intimidating hurdle for users of Facebook applications. The assumption often made about the Facebook Permissions request is that it asks for information users are not willing to share, that users are put off due to privacy concerns, and therefore that they opt-in at lower rates.
We wanted to find out for ourselves, and recently wrapped up an in-house study that indicates this assumption simply isn’t true. Our research found that users authorize Facebook Permissions at a much higher rate than people imagine – more than 50% of the time on average.
Methodology
Facebook Permission Screen on Backcountry.com
To evaluate the likelihood that a shopper on an ecommerce site will share their Facebook data, we measured the percentage of users who accepted the Facebook Permissions when prompted by a Facebook ‘request for permissions’ dialog (shown above). The data set comprised Facebook Permissions accept/decline rates for 1.2 million unique ecommerce site visitors who were served 42 different social applications from March to November 2011.
Results
For the 42 applications, we found that the Facebook Permissions authorization rate was 56% on average. The median rate was 58%, and the first and third quartiles were 50% and 66% respectively. Users authorized the use of their social data by clicking “allow” on the permissions request dialog.
These results provide compelling evidence that shoppers on ecommerce sites are willing to share their Facebook social data in exchange for utilizing engaging social features.
We found that higher opt-in rates for Facebook Permissions were generated when the social applications had any of the following characteristics:
- Great Value to the User. The more perceived value to the user of the social application, the higher the likelihood they were willing to share their Facebook data. An example is an application that gives the user an incentive when their Facebook friends participate. When the application needs to know who your friends are in order to credit you, you are more likely to opt-in.
- High Brand Trust. Higher user trust in a brand results in higher opt-in rates. Users with pre-existing relationships with an ecommerce brand opted-in at greater rates. Sites where traffic is largely being driven via SEO and SEM efforts tended to have lower opt-in rates.
- Lower Number of Permissions. The more permissions asked for in the request dialog, the lower the opt-in rate. The best practice in driving permission acceptance is to only serve permissions that are necessary to the application.
Conclusion
The great promise of personalization based on the social graph hinges on whether consumers are willing to share their personal social data with online retailers. We believe that while this technology is new, the adoption rates are already quite promising. Facebook Permissions authorization rates nearing 60% demonstrate that users are willing to share their information in exchange for a better user experience. It’s now up to us as designers, developers, and site owners to create the compelling social experiences that compel users to participate at even higher rates.
I am excited to announce the newest member of the Sociable Labs team, James Donelan. As our new VP of Engineering, James brings more than 15 years of technology and software engineering leadership experience to the company. He comes to Sociable Labs by way of Lithium Technologies, where he was the VP of Engineering, responsible for managing architecture and engineering for their enterprise platform which hosts more than 250 social communities with billions of transactions per month.
We are at an inflection point in the industry when online retailers and consumers can now reap really meaningful benefits from consumer-to-consumer social marketing. As a result, our company is growing rapidly to meet the need, especially in engineering. James is a great leader of fast growing development organizations, and has an outstanding track record leading successful enterprise-level social commerce projects. The fit couldn't be better, and we're looking forward to his leadership as we scale!
We just issued a press release announcing James' appointment, which can be viewed here.
This “Social Commerce Roundup” features the most insightful and evocative studies and thought leadership posts curated by Sociable Labs on the topic of social commerce.
Today’s roundup brings together four articles that provide new research and best practices to inform your social commerce strategies throughout the holiday months and into 2012. You’ll find comprehensive social media statistics in Advertising Age, best practices on social media engagement in ClickZ, fresh insight from Business2Community about the new ways customers are impacting marketing strategies and Sociable Labs’ most recent social design study (featured in TechCrunch) on Facebook login rates that could change the way retailers engage and convert customers.
50 Social Media Stats to Kick-start Your Day, Advertising Age—Effusive blogger Sarah Evans shares 50 compelling new social media statistics. The highlights? 43% of all online consumers are social media fans or followers, and 56% of consumers said they are more likely to recommend a brand to a friend after becoming a fan on Facebook.
11 Ways to Leverage the Power of Social Media for the 2011 Holiday Season, ClickZ—In addition to listing 11 ways retailers can fine tune their social media strategies to drive sales in the holiday months, this piece advises readers to socialize key touch points to take full advantage of social media. In true holiday spirit, this reporter explains that social media is the gift that “keeps on giving.”
Your Customer Is More Persuasive Than Your Copywriter, Business2Community—Although this article was published in October, it had our team talking throughout the month. The author argues that brands should be turning to their customers as their biggest catalysts for success: With a recent study stating that 62% of people trust reviews from their friends, family and colleagues most, the customer-in-the-driver-seat trend certainly isn’t going away anytime soon.
50% Of Ecommerce Site Visitors Are Logged In To Facebook, TechCrunch (featuring Sociable Labs’ recent social design study) — As retailers enter the holiday season, our team did a deep analysis of millions of online shopper visits that indicated that a critical mass of consumers are logged into Facebook while shopping online – big news for retailers in the intersection of social and shopping. For more details on our study, please check out our blog here.
Posted by
Dan Kacher on Tue, Nov 22, 2011 @ 09:08 AM
Every day at Sociable Labs, our team has the opportunity to discuss social strategy with leaders from some of the most exciting brands in ecommerce. Most executives we talk with are actively involved in social media. However, when we discuss on-site social applications and strategy with potential customers, one question comes up again and again:
“We know Facebook has a ton of users. And, we know many of our customers are on Facebook. But, what percent of our customers are likely to be interested in social features based on Facebook?”
Luckily, at Sociable Labs, we have a great “laboratory” for answering such questions at the intersection of ecommerce and social. In fact, we can go one better than answering what percent of customers may be interested. We can tell you what percent of your customers are actually logged in to Facebook while visiting your site. Utilizing our unique social analytics platform, we wanted to publicly answer this question and several related questions in order to help educate you on the Facebook state of your customers.
Methodology
Sociable Labs’ applications receive tens of millions of visits a month. To support these deployments and our customers’ broader on-site social strategies, we developed a sophisticated social analytics platform. For every visitor that interacts with Sociable Labs’ technology, this platform checks their Facebook login status (i.e. whether a user is logged into Facebook or not, while on our customers’ sites). We receive this information directly from Facebook through accessing a Facebook API, called FB.getLoginStatus().
“How much of our traffic can we expect to be logged in to Facebook while shopping on our site?”
Admittedly, this question is an important one for those seeking higher ROI and engagement through on-site social features based on Facebook. In addition to being a benchmark for interest in social sharing and features, this metric also reveals the number of users who can most easily engage with these features, due to their logged in status.
While we can’t share statistics from particular customers, we can share overall statistics across our customer deployments. On average in October, 50.8% of traffic was logged into Facebook while visiting our customers’ ecommerce sites. Across all customers, this rate ranged from approximately 40% to 60%.
So, the short answer to this question is that, depending on your target consumer, you can expect about half of your traffic to be logged in to Facebook while visiting your site. However, in the real world, short answers rarely adequately answer important questions, leading us to the typical follow-up questions.
“That’s great, but our most important days of the week are…”
Based on market segment and retailing strategy, companies may have different weekly highpoints in traffic and sales. Naturally, after hearing the answer to the first question above, potential clients often want to know if their users will be logged into Facebook during the busiest days of their week. Using our client pool as the sample, below is a table that demonstrates the answer to this question.
While there is a day-of-the-week effect, one could hardly call it significant. If yours is an ecommerce company, you can expect a large portion of your site’s traffic to be logged in to Facebook no matter the day of the week.
“Interesting! We do most of our business when people are at work or school. Are our customers logged in to Facebook then?”
Yes, absolutely. While users on our clients’ sites are logged in to Facebook slightly less during the workday and slightly more during the evening, the percentage of logged in users is still very high during the workday. For example, during the work week of October 17 to 21st, on average 51% of users on our e-commerce deployments were logged in to Facebook from 9AM to 7PM.
“Great, so… How much more likely is it that users will interact with a social feature if they are logged into Facebook?”
This topic deserves its own blog post. However, a recent sampling of a few social application deployments revealed that click-through rates were at least 1.9x higher for those logged in to Facebook.
Hopefully, the statistics above help clear up a few common questions that most ecommerce executives have about the Facebook state of their customers. When it comes to Facebook login status, just remember 50% all week long and odds are you’ll be pretty close.
[btw... TechCrunch just covered this study - read more about it here.]
Remarking to a roomful of retailers that the state of ecommerce has changed in the last five years is like announcing that Jimi Hendrix was a “pretty decent guitar player” at a Woodstock reunion: it’s an understatement that just might get you escorted out of the building. As more and more consumers fall into lockstep with the Internet, retailers are racing to keep up with the rapidly evolving needs and demands of increasingly empowered shoppers. Buyers today have more options, more knowledge, and more control over their purchasing decisions than ever before. Retailers with their eye on the ball are taking a good look around them and realizing that what worked in traditional commerce ten years ago just doesn’t work in today’s virtual marketplace. Fortunately, companies like ours are helping level the playing field by sparking innovation within the industry. Just like their customers, retailers now have a greater array of tools, technologies and data at their service than ever before.
With such a wealth of information on the web available to us about the new rules of the game, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. This is our humble attempt to narrow down the literally dozens of great resources that we turn to on a regular basis to a short list of 10. We believe these online resources are the best of the best when it comes to arming us with the latest news, practical advice and insight that is so critical to our success, as well as the success of our customers.
Without further ado, here’s Sociable Lab’s list of favorite resources, in two buckets: (1) resources for ecommerce and marketing practitioners, and (2) resources for social commerce specialists and developers. (both listed in alphabetical order)
For Ecommerce and Marketing Practitioners
1. AdAge CMO Strategy and Digital columns
The leading global source of news, intelligence and conversation for marketing and media communities, Advertising Age also has a fantastic CMO Strategy section which offers viewpoints from industry leading CMO’s and pundits. The Digital section of the site is also an excellent one-stop-shop for the latest digital marketing news.
2. AllthingsD – eCommerce
With Tricia Duryee offering razor sharp insights on the state of commerce (and all things social, digital, and media for that matter) AllthingsD is a great place to monitor collective industry disruptions.
3. Fast Company
As a startup, it’s always inspiring to us to learn about what the most innovative business leaders are doing to shake things up in their respective industries. Fast Company is chock full of astute articles about leadership, marketing, and one of their writers, Lydia Dishman, is particularly fascinating for us to follow as she covers innovation, entrepreneurship and retail.
4. Forbes Social Markets
Tomio Geron pens this perceptive column for Forbes.com that focuses on all things social, and helps us stay in the know on the latest and greatest companies and innovations impacting social media.
5. Social Commerce Today
Social Commerce Today takes a deep dive into the applications and strategies being implemented on social commerce by the early adopters. Edited by digital ethnographer Paul Marsden, this site covers the range of tools designed to help people connect where they buy and buy where they connect. From simple share with/forward to a friend buttons to real time social shopping social solutions, Social Commerce Today covers all that is related to “the creation of places where people can collaborate online, get advice from trusted individuals, find goods and services and then purchase them” (Steve Rubel’s plain English definition of social commerce).
For Social Commerce Specialists and Developers
6. All Facebook
David Cohen and other writers at All Facebook are a great resource on Facebook-related news. They focus more on writing for the developer audience.
7. Bokardo, by Joshua Porter
Joshua Porter is an interface designer, author of the best-selling Designing for the Social Web, and the man behind Bokardo, one of our favorite blogs. Porter may be an interface designer by trade, but he’s a writer at heart and his blog is an artful mix of interface and industry viewpoints that appeals to our technical and non-technical teams alike.
8. Facebook + Commerce
It’s only fitting that one of the best how-to-guides for Facebook commerce partners is hosted by Facebook itself. Visitors to the official Facebook page can learn about the best practices and tools available to help increase registration, conversions and cart size. The page’s mission? To help commerce partners use Facebook to create social and personalized experiences.
9. Inside Facebook
A site devoted to, you guessed it, Facebook, Inside Facebook provides daily news and analysis for developers, marketers and investors on Facebook-related business. A must read for all of us here at Sociable Labs. The founder Justin Smith wrote the Facebook Marketing Bible, the most widely referenced book on Facebook marketing today. His team of writers including Josh Constine is incredibly well versed in Facebook marketing strategies, and we consider them to be a great resource.
10. Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab
Forbes selected Dr.BJ Fogg, the man behind the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab as one of “Ten New Gurus You Should Know” and we couldn’t agree more. As a pioneer in the field of captology, the study of computers as persuasive technologies, Dr. Fogg and his team provide incredible insights from the intersections of applied science and behavior. The SPTL also regularly focuses on the psychology of Facebook, making the site a must read for our Sociable Lab innovators. Follow BJ on Twitter @bjfogg.
And there you have it: 10 of the most informative ecommerce and social commerce news sites and blogs that we read on a regular basis. What did we miss? Any recommendations of sites to add?
There are a few times in your professional life you believe you’ve witnessed the future… through a pivotal presentation or a critical book that changed your outlook. For me those books were “The World is Flat” by Thomas Friedman and “The Facebook Era” by Clara Shih. Last week at the Forrester Consumer Forum, that presentation for me was The Disruptor’s Handbook: How To Reinvent Your Products Before Someone Else Does by Dr. James McQuivey, where I experienced a new level of insight, inspiration and inevitability about the future of commerce. You can get a sense for the tenets of his predictions from his blog post – Meet the Digital Disruptors.
The two key elements of McQuivey’s vision that left an indelible impression on my mind are Empowered Consumers and Digital Disruptors.
1. At the center of McQuivey’s vision is Empowered Consumers – today’s consumers who are connected to a wide network of friends and who access the opinions their friends and like-minded consumers before they make a purchase. McQuivey suggests that this empowerment of the individual consumer and the power of the connected human network effectively obsoletes all previous sources of competitive advantage.
2. Digital Disruptors are driving the shift from people merely “adopting” a new technology to actually “internalizing” it. Moving from “doing old things in new ways” (adopting technology) to “inventing new things to do” (internalizing technology). McQuivey suggests that disruptors are both technologies, platforms employing them, consumers who use them and consumers who turn into competitors by internalizing them and inventing new products or companies. Barriers to entry are falling everywhere, and disruptors are fully empowered, right along with consumers.
Since witnessing McQuivey’s keynote I have reflected back on recent examples that substantiate the existence of the empowered consumer and the “social revolution”.
- The “Occupy” movement of empowered, disenfranchised citizens fed up with financial institutions and markets
- Bank of America’s reversal of the $5 monthly debit card charge
- Netflix’ dramatic loss of customers from their recent price hike
There is no CMO (or Chief Product Officer) who has escaped the social revolution in commerce. Many CMOs are seeking to “engage” their customers and “activate” their advocates, but are utilizing old-school B2C techniques with new world communities (e.g. running contests and messaging to fans on Facebook pages), which inherently miss the fundamental need of the Empowered Consumer – to hear “the truth” directly from their peers. And in the process, sales generated from these efforts have been disappointing, with very low conversion rates on traffic from these social media marketing efforts.
Consumer empowerment, together with disruptive competition, create an urgency for brands and retailers to “disrupt themselves” before they get disrupted by others, a key tenet of McQuivey’s prediction. Here’s what he says you need to do. Soon.
- Harness the power of digital disruptors: Invent the new applications enabled by disruptive technologies, such as new hardware platforms like the 40 million iPads worldwide, or social networking platforms like Facebook Connect and the new Google Plus API.
- Develop new products or experiences “adjacent” to you: Develop the most wanted capabilities or experiences that you are well positioned to deliver immediately.
- Create total product experiences: Dig deep into the consumer’s core needs and deliver the full set of benefits the consumer is seeking, be they products, services or new ways to shop.
- Get ready to measure early and often.
- Partner to enable fast action.
- Then Act!
Net-net – Act – Measure – Improve. And keep iterating! Be willing to accept early failures – as long as you have an iterative process in place and a top-down mandate to experiment and innovate. This is the new formula for how commerce can scale with the realities of today’s increasingly social consumer and web.
Dr. McQuivey offers a starting point for you – a Digital Readiness Test – forr.com/digitalreadiness. Go!
(And if you’re interested using a “test-and-learn” approach to harnessing social on your ecommerce site, I invite you to learn about our ROI-Guided Social Design solution.)