Nate Elliott is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, where he helps interactive marketers around the world develop the strategies and tactics that make them successful, and then helps them measure the results. You can follow him on Twitter at @nate_elliott.

Last year, American consumers posted more than a billion opinions about products and services online, according to data collected by my company. With peer influence playing such a prominent role in consumers’ purchase decisions, it’s no surprise many interactive marketers are tapping into that influence via viral marketing programs and influencer outreach.

However, the vast majority of marketers ignore the staggering volume of social data all this influence creates. And those who do study social data typically use it for the wrong reason: to measure the brand impact of their marketing campaigns.

Social Data Is Often Based On Small Sample Sizes

With so many opinions posted online, you might assume it would be easy to find a reliable sample of data to analyze for brand impact. But even popular consumer brands often find it difficult to collect usable social data.

For instance, I recently reviewed a listening report for a global sporting goods brand — one that sponsors leading teams and athletes around the world and has strong brand awareness. I was surprised to see that the brand was mentioned in social media only a few hundred times each week in the U.S., and less than 100 times each week in other key markets around the world.

To make matters worse, the low quality of many social sentiment analysis tools reduces sample sizes further. When listening tools can’t decide whether comments are positive or negative, they’re usually labeled as having “no sentiment.” Three-quarters of the mentions for this brand were tagged as such, leaving less than two-dozen weekly usable posts in some markets.

If you asked your market insights team or your survey provider to analyze 25 consumer survey responses, they’d tell you it’s impossible to find statistical significance in such a small sample. The same standards must be applied to social data as well.

Social Creators Aren’t Necessarily Representative of Your Audience

Although most online users today engage with social media, that doesn’t mean the consumers who post social content offer a representative sample. In fact, 20-year-olds are twice as likely as 40-year-olds to be what my company calls “conversationalists” — people who post status updates on Facebook or Twitter. And they’re three times as likely to be what we call “creators” — people who post blogs or videos online.

If you’re marketing a product targeted primarily to younger consumers, you might find that the people posting in social media look something like your audience. But for many marketers, that’s simply not the case.

Social Data Usually Measures Extremes

Ever notice that most online reviews are either very positive or very negative? It’s not your imagination. Our data shows that most social influence posts are extreme in nature – and it happens for two reasons.

First, consumers are simply more motivated to post opinions online if those opinions are strong. If I don’t have a strong opinion, I probably won’t take the time. That’s why nearly three-quarters of customer ratings on Amazon’s ten best-selling books are either 1′s or 5′s, and why very few reviews fall in between those extremes.

Second, so many posts about products and services are driven by individual experiences that they’re bound to be polarized in nature. If I waited in line at the bank for 20 minutes, I may fill the time telling Twitter that I hate my bank. Conversely if I get a free upgrade on my flight, I might post about how much I love my airline. Perhaps these are useful customer service data points (and they definitely influence other consumers), but they’re not a reliable gauge of overall sentiment towards your brand or campaign.

Valuable Ways for Marketers To Use Social Data

So if you shouldn’t use social data to measure brand impact, what is it good for?

Lots of things. Whether you or your company works directly with social media or not, you should be using social data right now to:

• Develop your messaging. If you want to create messages that resonate with your audience, you need to know what it cares about. For instance, companies are using private listening communities to craft their marketing messages. And increasingly, companies are using data from public social media as an additional marketing guide.
• Source your creative. We know that consumers trust what they hear from other consumers more than any other source of information. So why not use listening platforms to identify positive social content that can be included in campaign creative? I’ve even seen UK bank First Direct use social sentiment data in an outdoor advertising campaign.
• Improve your media plan. You probably already have a few staples in your online media plan — the sites and networks that consistently perform for you. But social data can help you find new sites to add to your buy. For instance, when Microsoft found that people were talking about its computers in forums dedicated to fishing and cars, it quickly added those sites to its plan.
• Identify your key influencers. According to our studies, consumers in the U.S. create more than 500 billion peer-to-peer impressions about brands and products per year. Social data can help you identify (and then reach out to) the most vocal and influential of those consumers, either individually or by finding the forums in which your brand will have the most influence.
• React to your consumers. You can’t fuel a positive conversation about your products (or get involved in a negative one) unless you find those conversations first. Listening platforms can help you quickly find both the good and the bad so you’re in a position to react.

The key here is to successfully build social data into marketing programs – and not to use it, like most companies, as a tool to measure those programs.

Disclosure: Microsoft is a client of the author’s company.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Yakobchuk

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This is all good stuff to keep in mind for any business, as the world grows more mobile, and more connected.

“Nearly 9 out [of] 10 smartphone owners use their devices throughout the day for a variety of activities ranging from using search engines to find information, to watching videos,” says Selina Rennie of Google’s Agency Team. “They have become so entrenched in our lives that 43% of smartphone owners say that they would prefer to give up beer instead of internet access on their smartphone.”

“Unsurprisingly, using the smartphone is an incredibly popular time-killer with nearly 60% claiming to use their smartphones while waiting, for example, in a queue at a supermarket or for a bus,” adds Rennie. “Smartphone users are also becoming increasingly reliant on their devices for shopping assistance with 70% of smartphone consumers using their devices while shopping in-store.”

Here’s a look at where smartphones are being used:

It’s also worth noting what consumers are doing while they’re using their smartphones, whether that be while consuming other media or doing other things in general:

The study suggests that 82% notice ads on their smartphones, and half of them take action. “However, it is not only mobile ads prompting action,” notes Rennie. “Mobile search is often prompted by cross media exposure. Over two thirds of smartphone owners have carried out a search on their smartphone as a result of traditional media.”

A few other points of note (as determined by the study):

- Search is the most visited site from smartphones at 77% compared to 65% for social networking sites and 46% for retail sites.

- Mobile searchers want their information “quick and convenient”.

- The most common types of info users are looking for using search engines on smartphones are:

1. News (57%)
2. Dining/restaurant information (51%)
3. Navigational (51%)
4. Entertainment (49%)
5. Shopping (47%)

In case you’ve at all doubted the significance of mobile to local business, consider that 95% of smartphone users have looked for local information, according to the study. Out of the local information seekers, 77% have contacted a business by either calling or visiting, and 44% have purchased either online or at a physical store. Nearly all of them take action within a day.

The entire study can be found here (pdf).

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This is all good stuff to keep in mind for any business, as the world grows more mobile, and more connected.

“Nearly 9 out [of] 10 smartphone owners use their devices throughout the day for a variety of activities ranging from using search engines to find information, to watching videos,” says Selina Rennie of Google’s Agency Team. “They have become so entrenched in our lives that 43% of smartphone owners say that they would prefer to give up beer instead of internet access on their smartphone.”

“Unsurprisingly, using the smartphone is an incredibly popular time-killer with nearly 60% claiming to use their smartphones while waiting, for example, in a queue at a supermarket or for a bus,” adds Rennie. “Smartphone users are also becoming increasingly reliant on their devices for shopping assistance with 70% of smartphone consumers using their devices while shopping in-store.”

Here’s a look at where smartphones are being used:

It’s also worth noting what consumers are doing while they’re using their smartphones, whether that be while consuming other media or doing other things in general:

The study suggests that 82% notice ads on their smartphones, and half of them take action. “However, it is not only mobile ads prompting action,” notes Rennie. “Mobile search is often prompted by cross media exposure. Over two thirds of smartphone owners have carried out a search on their smartphone as a result of traditional media.”

A few other points of note (as determined by the study):

- Search is the most visited site from smartphones at 77% compared to 65% for social networking sites and 46% for retail sites.

- Mobile searchers want their information “quick and convenient”.

- The most common types of info users are looking for using search engines on smartphones are:

1. News (57%)
2. Dining/restaurant information (51%)
3. Navigational (51%)
4. Entertainment (49%)
5. Shopping (47%)

In case you’ve at all doubted the significance of mobile to local business, consider that 95% of smartphone users have looked for local information, according to the study. Out of the local information seekers, 77% have contacted a business by either calling or visiting, and 44% have purchased either online or at a physical store. Nearly all of them take action within a day.

The entire study can be found here (pdf).

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Modern design retailer Design Within Reach has launched a new online 3D modeling tool that enables shoppers to visually sample furniture and accessories in their homes and offices before making purchase decisions.

Shoppers are invited to upload blueprints of their interior spaces to the 3D Room Planner, which will be converted by a team of in-house designers into workable floorplans within a few hours. Users can then alter the colors, textures, patterns and dimensions of walls, floors, doors and windows to resemble their existing rooms in both 2D and 3D.

From there, shoppers can begin sampling hundreds of models of Design Within Reach furniture to reimagine their space. When they’re finished, a high-quality, 3D design is rendered within about two hours. Users can then share the design via email, Facebook and Twitter, or with the sales representatives at their local Design Within Reach studio. Items used in the rendering are automatically saved to a shopping list on Design Within Reach’s website.

Those who need a little more design help, or simply want to explore the tool can map out imaginary floorplans with the 3D Room Planner, or browse and edit rooms shared publicly by other users.

For now, the tool is available only on a designated section of Design Within Reach’s website. The company plans to outfit its new store in Stamford, Connecticut, with a “design bar” so that shoppers can explore the 3D Room Planner with sales associates, and continue to tinker with layouts when they return to their home computers. If successful, design bars will be integrated into other Design Within Reach retail locations, bridging the online and retail experience in a highly useful fashion.

The 3D Room Planner is powered by mydeco.com, which will continue to upgrade the product for Design Within Reach as well as for its own website. Soon, mydeco.com CEO Nicole Vanderbilt says, the tool will enable users to sample and adjust interior and exterior lighting.

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Modern design retailer Design Within Reach has launched a new online 3D modeling tool that enables shoppers to visually sample furniture and accessories in their homes and offices before making purchase decisions.

Shoppers are invited to upload blueprints of their interior spaces to the 3D Room Planner, which will be converted by a team of in-house designers into workable floorplans within a few hours. Users can then alter the colors, textures, patterns and dimensions of walls, floors, doors and windows to resemble their existing rooms in both 2D and 3D.

From there, shoppers can begin sampling hundreds of models of Design Within Reach furniture to reimagine their space. When they’re finished, a high-quality, 3D design is rendered within about two hours. Users can then share the design via email, Facebook and Twitter, or with the sales representatives at their local Design Within Reach studio. Items used in the rendering are automatically saved to a shopping list on Design Within Reach’s website.

Those who need a little more design help, or simply want to explore the tool can map out imaginary floorplans with the 3D Room Planner, or browse and edit rooms shared publicly by other users.

For now, the tool is available only on a designated section of Design Within Reach’s website. The company plans to outfit its new store in Stamford, Connecticut, with a “design bar” so that shoppers can explore the 3D Room Planner with sales associates, and continue to tinker with layouts when they return to their home computers. If successful, design bars will be integrated into other Design Within Reach retail locations, bridging the online and retail experience in a highly useful fashion.

The 3D Room Planner is powered by mydeco.com, which will continue to upgrade the product for Design Within Reach as well as for its own website. Soon, mydeco.com CEO Nicole Vanderbilt says, the tool will enable users to sample and adjust interior and exterior lighting.

More About: design, design within reach, home, interior design, mydeco.com

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Creativity has a lot to do with it, and it doesn’t take long in Austin during SXSW to realize that there’s enough creativity around to pack an entire city of paying creative thinkers. O’Brien herself  has experience as a self-employed artist for nearly ten years. She’s also an entrepreneur.

“One of the most powerful points of the social space is this qualified recommendation engine – you have friends that have tastses like yours, ” said O’Brien. This is probably the most important part of the discussion – one that retailers should carefully consider.

Google is paying special attention to this these days. Last year, the search engine launched its version of the recommendation engine with Hotpot, which Marissa Mayer spoke about yesterday. Google Place Pages and other reviews surfaced, will likely continue to build on the user’s social graph, and help users make purchase decisions (a massive reason why social search is so important going forward).

O’Brien also talked about the growing innovation in mobile that will complement the social recommendation concept through this with things like bar/qr code scanners, NFC technology, location-based services, etc.

Basically, regardless of whether you are shopping online or offline, your friends will be a big part of your shopping experience, even if they’re not physically with you.

None of this is breaking news, of course, but finding ways to integrate all of these elements together is going to be increasingly important for any retailer to thrive in modern times. It’s also one of the biggest driving forces among some of the Internet’s biggest players and new, interesting startups alike. The fact that so many players are chasing perfection of this concept can only mean good things for businesses – options and newfound interest from consumers.

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"The survey results clearly illustrate what many in the marketing world already suspect, that while marketers are experimenting with social media, they are also struggling with the practicality and ROI of these channels and driving the bulk of investment to the more ‘traditional’ digital channels," said Bob Egner, VP of Global Marketing at EPiServer. "The reality is that as marketers we’re still early in our understanding of how to best use social channels such as Facebook and Twitter and that clearly more work needs to be done to effectively connect social and mobile marketing to lead generation and revenue growth."

Most of these respondents apparently want to stick with what’s working, as 46% count email and company sites/blogs as the top priorities for future investments in digital marketing.

"In 2011, we expect to see more detailed analytics related to social behavior and sentiment that is closely coordinated and synchronized with the other online marketing metrics," said Egner. "In order to drive greater investment by marketers in the social channels, we also encourage digital agencies to take an integral role in bridging the gap between marketers and technologists to drive greater understanding of social media, and to paint a clearer roadmap to conversion and ROI."

The survey, which was conducted among CEOs, Vice Presidents, Directors, and Digital Marketing Managers of over 65 organizations of varying sizes at ad:tech, also found that over half (54%) indicated that their IT departments are involved frequently in technology purchase decisions.

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Blake Scholl and Jason Crawford are two Amazon alumni transferring their e-commerce background and social product discovery experience to mobile in the form of Barcode Hero, an iPhone application that is receiving a massive update today.

Barcode Hero is designed to be a community where people share product recommendations through barcode scans. The application [iTunes link], a product of Scholl and Crawford’s KimaLabs, originally launched in August. Today’s update better surfaces those recommendations to help app users make more informed purchase decisions while shopping.

In version 1.0, Barcode Hero users could scan barcodes on products, leave short product comments and give their review in the form of a thumbs up or thumbs down. The application was built to be incredibly social in nature, so users could find and follow friends, post products to their social networks and compete Foursquare-style to become the king or queen of each of the 50,000 product categories.

With version 2.0, the focus shifts from sharing to recommendations, so users can now scan products to see recommendations from friends. For instance, users can scan a bottle of wine to see reviews on that bottle, but also uncover the most highly recommended wines in the same category, according to the community. Of course, there’s also price comparison additives to ensure that users aren’t getting ripped off.

The updated app now supports browsing and search for products, photo uploads for additional points and the ability to discover if users’ address book contacts are using the app.

Scholl was reluctant to share specifics around application users or downloads, but he did disclose that users are very active — 30% leave thumbs-up product recommendations and 10% leave short product comments. Apple also plans to feature Barcode Hero in a list of featured holiday shopping apps beginning today, which should cause a spike in downloads and activity.

Barcode Hero resembles a slew of other applications including Stickybits and myShopanion. What makes it unique is its core purpose is to help people choose amongst products. The founders also don’t plan to add rewards in the immediate rewards, which prevents the app from infringing upon the store scanning and rewards zone that Checkpoints and Shopkick occupy.

Barcode Hero has raised $770,000 in seed funding from top notch backers including Ron Conway’s SV Angel and former MySpace CEO and Amazon alum Owen Van Natta. The company will likely raise an additional round next year.

Image courtesy of Flickr, littleREDelf

More About: barcode hero, barcode scanning, product discovery, product recommendations, social media, startup

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Do you let friends influence purchase decisions? Let us know.

"Numerous studies have shown that a friend’s recommendations have the most weight with shoppers, and the Amazon Facebook connection places the users friends right inside the buying cycle," notes HypeBot’s Bruce Houghton.

The Amazon/Facebook integration itself is huge, simply because Amazon is an e-commerce giant. You might say it’s THE e-commerce giant, but the implications of Facebook and social media in general on e-commerce will be broader than the enormous, but still limited network of Facebook users. Facebook may not always reign supreme in social media, but for now, it’s the poster child with its half a billion users and counting. Amazon’s integration will show the masses what is possible, and others will follow suit.

Recommendations can indeed be very powerful, but social media will continue to drive e-commerce for other reasons as well. "Social commerce is moving beyond just recommendations and reviews," says Jeff Bennett, CEO of Swaptree.com. "With the web now enabling social connections through Facebook, Twitter and other sites, a new movement of collaborative consumption is forming and is fostering personal connections in a way that has not previously occurred with traditional point and click transactions."

Facebook ironically (given all of the privacy concerns voiced throughout the media this year) may add a trust factor to e-commerce sites. "According to Facebook, three times more visitors will login to their Facebook account on an e-commerce site than would create an account/register. That’s significant," says SeeWhy Founder Charles Nicholls. "Visitors don’t like creating accounts everywhere. They forget how to login and don’t like sharing personal details unless they are willing to trust the site."

In the future, Facebook’s own role in all of this may increase dramatically through advertising. It’s already playing a huge role on Facebook’s site. The more users share, the better Facebook can target ads to them. Facebook’s ads already target you based on your activity, like what’s in your profile. The "open graph" which lets you "like" stuff all over the web will only continue to fuel this.

One day, while the company will not acknowledge this, they could send these highly targeted ads to you all over the web with an AdSense-like platform. Facebook, to the best of my knowledge, has not indicated that they intend to do this, but it seems like such an obvious move. If user’s are already logging into other sites using their Facebook accounts, bringing other Facebook information to them, why wouldn’t they consider doing this? Such a scenario would obviously compete with Google’s AdSense, and it’s no secret that the competition between these two companies is already heating up. Whether Facebook goes that route or not, the competition is there.

Google has a lot of data about you too. In fact, the Wall Street Journal just published an article looking at a document the company compiled in 2008, which mentions some interesting things about what Google could do with some of that data.

The increased competition between Google and Facebook will also likely drive online purchasing. Leena Rao at TechCrunch speculates that Google Checkout could get a huge injection of usage from several elements, such as Google’s newfound interest in social gaming (one of the major areas where the company appears to be going after Facebook). Another (while still theoretical at this point) concept she mentions would have Google letting businesses and customers engage in direct transactions from Place Pages, which Google has also been putting an increased amount of focus on lately.

It doesn’t seem incredibly far-fetched does it? And let’s not forget the Places API, which lets developers tap into Google’s Places data for their own apps. On top of all of that, Google is reportedly acquiring Jambool, which owns Social Gold, a social payment product. Social Gold lets developers put payments into their apps.

It seems like the competition between Facebook and Google might be a big win for e-commerce as a whole. Kim-Mai Cutler at VentureBeat thinks a deep Amazon/Facebook partnership could "help corner Google in the e-commerce market." The e-commerce angle to this whole battle might be one that is widely overlooked. We’re not talking just virtual goods here. We’re talking the sales of merchandise.

Some consumers will continue to express concerns about privacy with regards to how businesses tap into their Faceboook or other social data, but that discussion really won’t be much different than the basic discussion around Facebook’s Open Graph as a whole. Facebook doesn’t get your buying history. Sites don’t get your Facebook info. Facebook provides your Facebook info while you’re on other sites. That can add a lot of convenience to your shopping experience. That can help businesses drive sales.

Will consumers increasingly embrace social media’s integration with their online shopping experiences? Tell us what you think.

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Retailers and manufacturers using Bazaarvoice can use their product review content to drive more traffic from Google as well as provide brand exposure to shoppers.

Consumers will be able to access opinions from other customers as they research and complete purchases, adding more relevance to the process. Google says the program will feature full-length product reviews and user ratings from retailers and manufacturers to help with the shopping experience.

"In the past four years, there has been a tremendous change in consumer shopping behavior as people increasingly rely on information from their friends and peers to make purchase decisions," said Brett Hurt, founder and CEO of Bazaarvoice.

"Our clients’ innovative use of the voice of the customer has helped Bazaarvoice become one of the fastest growing technology companies today. Now, Google is affirming the power of social commerce with this partnership to integrate Bazaarvoice reviews content into Google.com – the heart of its business – as well as throughout product search and advertising vehicles. It is a big honor to be Google’s partner in this industry first, and this will be transformational for our retail clients and their suppliers."

On Google Product Search, Google will feature a brands logo beside reviews from the brands website with the goal of increasing both exposure and conversions.

Some of Bazaarvoice’s clients include Best Buy, Costco, Dell, Macy’s, Proctor & Gamble and QVC.
 

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Sam Decker is chief marketing officer of Bazaarvoice, the market and technology leader in hosted social commerce applications that drive sales. You can follow him on Twitter @SamDecker.

By now, most companies realize their customers are their most valuable advocates – and when their customers share their credible opinions via reviews, it increases sales of their products and services and deepens brand engagement. The majority of large brands now offer some type or ratings and review system on their sites, because consumers now expect to be able to read and contribute peer reviews before making purchase decisions – so much so that some 82% of consumers say they find reviews “extremely valuable or valuable,” according to a recent survey. If all you’re doing is offering rating or review functionality, you’re likely not getting the maximum benefit.

If you already have a ratings and reviews system in place – or if you haven’t yet taken the plunge – there are several steps you can take to improve the effectiveness of your consumer reviews programs.

Why Ratings and Reviews?

Done correctly, ratings and reviews deliver a significant increase in sales; one third of retailers reported an 11-20% overall increase in conversions as a result of adding reviews to their sites, while consumers are willing to pay up to 99% more for a 5-star rated product than for a 4-star rated product.

But engaging in a conversation with your customers isn’t just a way to generate sales; having reviews on your site also boosts SEO traffic and page views, increases average order value, lowers returns, reduces customer service calls, and results in more satisfied customers overall. What’s more, companies can analyze ratings and review trends to improve overall marketing strategies, improve customer service, and fine-tune merchandising.

1. Integrate Reviews with Your Login System

Ask people to register or log in to post a review. While some companies see this as a barrier to generating a critical mass of reviews, we’ve found that requiring registration does not have a significant impact on the number of reviews created (though it does tend to improve the overall quality of reviews), and the value of linking reviews to a customer profile is enormous. When you know who is writing reviews, what they are saying, what products they’ve reviewed, what products they’ve purchased, etc, you can use this information to segment messages to that person and to see overall trends that will lead to better marketing decisions. What’s more, when you require registration to write reviews, you can see who is writing the most reviews and reward frequent reviewers with badges, discounts, and other incentives.

2. Mine Your Data

You can tell a lot about your business by reading and analyzing reviews. In fact, review content can positively impact every function of a business if you collect data in the right way. Analyze the content of reviews, ratings and opinion trends, and the number of reviews for certain products, then compare this data to web analytics, CRM, and purchase data to get a complete picture of how your merchandising mix and overall marketing programs are performing. Make sure multiple teams – technology, product design, marketing, sales, management – have access to this data, so they can use it to improve their business results.

3. Integrate Ratings and Review Content into Marketing

Don’t just leave ratings and reviews on your website, put them to use in all of your marketing materials. You can include top-rated products and snippets from positive reviews in search ads, e-mail campaigns, circulars and catalogues, and on in-store banners. Integrate with Facebook and Twitter, allowing reviewers to automatically share their reviews to these and other social networking platforms, virally spreading your brand’s review content across the web. One of our customers, Office Depot, included top-rated products in its paid search campaigns and saw a 156% increase in ROI on that campaign vs. its traditional paid search ads.

4. Motivate the Community

Research has shown that even one review on a website will instantly drive up conversion on that product. But, of course, the more reviews your site has, the bigger the impact. To encourage people to post ratings and reviews, offer sweepstakes and prizes to reviewers, give badges to top reviews or list their names on a leader board, and promote participation in the review program on all of your marketing materials. You can also implement Ask & Answer type services, where people ask each other for purchase advice, or invite people to discuss their personal stories with your brand, products and services. The more content your customers create about your brand, the more your sales will increase.

5. Remember to Moderate

You want to encourage people to be open and honest in their reviews – a good mix of positive and negative reviews is credible and authentic – but you don’t want to leave rants and irrelevant reviews up on your site. Make sure you work with a reviews provider that offers full moderation (using humans to scan reviews, not just fallible natural language technologies), or task people in-house to moderate reviews.

If someone writes a flamingly negative review, perhaps due to a customer service mishap or a defective product, you don’t have to leave that review on your site – but make sure to reach out to that person offering customer support, as well as with a mitigating gesture like a discount.

6. Don’t Forget About Ratings

While it’s the review content that really counts – some 80% of people value the narrative review content more than the star-rating in making purchase decisions – ratings are still crucial. We’ve found that products with star ratings receive on average a 120% higher click-through than those that don’t have ratings, which means ratings are the “eye candy” that pull people in to seek more information on a product.

7. Push the Participation Chain

You need to keep people engaged with your brand over the long term, so encourage participation in your reviews platform by promoting the program through social channels like Facebook and Twitter. Think in terms of building a “participation chain” that cultivates user involvement, where each action builds upon the one before through sharing. By lengthening and deepening customers’ participation on your brand site, participation chains improve brand opinion, increase sales, and make customers more likely to recommend a brand to their friends.

By seeing ratings and reviews for what they really are – an integral part of your entire business strategy, and not just a widget on your site – you’ll be well on your way to attaining maximum value from consumer-generated content.

More business resources from Mashable:

- Mashable’s Social Media Guide for Small Businesses
- 4 Ways Social Media is Changing Business
- HOW TO: Use Twitter Hashtags for Business
- 5 Advanced Social Media Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses
- 6 Must-Follow Steps for Selling in Any Economy
- 5 Easy Social Media Wins for Your Small Business

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Barghest

Tags: engagement, List, Lists, ratings, reviews, tips

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If you’re a business or UX professional trying to decide how to focus your efforts to have the most impact, it’s helpful to know which types of brands have the greatest opportunity to improve their online UX. To answer that question, it helps to first expand our view beyond the online world to understand which types of brands are expected to offer rich experiences in general (whether online through their websites, or offline in their stores).

Four factors that bear on customer expectations

1. Customers don’t care about all brands equally. Even some brands that help them solve essential problems (e.g., heating their homes or feeding their families) are simply taken for granted. However, brands that serve a symbolic role in customers’ lives—the brands that help people express their identity, tastes, and interests—garner greater interest. Customers tend to implicitly expect richer experiences when shopping brands that help them express some aspect of their identities. The identity-related qualities of a brand are intangible and are, in a way, invisible features of the brand’s products. It takes a rich experience to bring those qualities to life and make them resonate with customers.
2. Some brands present customers with high-involvement, high-risk purchase decisions (e.g., buying a car). Customers typically want to analyze a wealth of information to help make the right decision. As their need for information increases, their need to have that information presented in a richer, more readily intelligible way also increases.
3. Certain brands, by their very nature, offer customers high levels of human interaction and product interaction prior to purchase (e.g., when buying a computer). The greater the level of interaction, the greater the potential and expectation for a richer experience.
4. Some brands are able to envelop their buyers. When you go through the door of a retail store, for instance, you’re walking into the physical incarnation of the brand—it’s all around you. Customers implicitly expect richer experiences from brands that feature enveloping environments.

Verticals where rich offline shopping experiences are the most prevalent

Some industries or verticals are more likely than others to contain brands that:

1. Garner high interest due to their identity-building qualities
2. Are high involvement
3. Have high levels of human interaction and product interaction
4. Feature enveloping environments

The strongest examples that come to mind are:

• Automotive (e.g., shopping for a new car at a dealership)
• Retail (e.g., shopping for clothes at an apparel store)
• Education (e.g., visiting schools as part of choosing a college)
• Real Estate (e.g., shopping for a home and walking through the models)

Within each of these verticals, brands have spent decades creating rich offline experiences. They’ve done such a good job that we have to come to implicitly expect rich experiences when shopping these verticals. Think about shopping for a new car, for example. It’s a self-expressive, high-involvement purchase made in an engaging showroom with lots of personal assistance and a hands-on test drive. All of this adds to a rich offline experience.

The offline–online gap

If you’re wondering where you should focus your efforts to have the most impact, look for brands with online experiences that don’t yet match the richness of the offline experience they’ve spent decades honing. When a company has a significant gap between its offline and online experiences, customer expectations are not met, brand differentiation is diminished, and business is lost.

When your experience of a company’s website falls short of the offline experience you’ve come to expect, you lose your motivation to complete the purchase online. If there’s a retail outlet nearby, you may abandon the website with the plan of visiting the store to feel comfortable making the purchase. You wouldn’t be alone; MIT’s Technology Review (citing Jupiter Research) reports that for every $1 consumers spend online, they spend $6 dollars offline as a result of research they conducted on the Internet. But what about those times you don’t get around to visiting the store, or it’s simply too far away? Those become lost sales. Even if you do make the trip, it still feels like a preventable inconvenience, and like the brand has let you down. And what about those times you do put up with the website experience and make the purchase online? You may be left with an uneasy feeling, wondering if you made the right decision, and with a less favorable impression of the brand.

The greatest gaps

Drawing on my own observations, I estimated the size of the online–offline experience gaps in 13 key verticals.

The greatest gaps I identified are in retail, education, and healthcare. Within these verticals, companies have a huge opportunity to improve UX, especially relative to competitors in their verticals. Closing the online–offline gap improves customer satisfaction, enhances brand differentiation, and prevents lost sales.

It’s important to note that not all brands within “big gap” verticals are expected to offer a rich experience. brands that emphasize low price are a key exception. In these cases people expect to forgo the rich experience in exchange for low prices.

But as you’ll see in the next section, “big gap” brands are failing to offer online experiences that are differentiated from the experiences offered by low-price brands.

Mystery Shopping

Retail

I recently went shopping for a jacket in both the offline and the online world, first at Patagonia and Walmart stores, and then at patagonia.com and walmart.com. Patagonia is one of my favorite brands; by focusing on Patagonia I don’t mean to pick on them, but instead to show that even the strongest brands have opportunities to improve their online UX.

The shopping experience at the Patagonia store was noticeably richer than Patagonia‘s online experience. The store experience provided a livelier ambiance and greater opportunities to interact with the product and with helpful employees. I found the Patagonia employees to be enthusiastic about the brand and capable of answering tough questions like, “which of these jackets provides more warmth and more breathability?” Although patagonia.com provides a richer experience than most outdoor apparel websites I’ve visited, the online experience didn’t give me as much confidence to make a purchase as the offline experience did. Online, I struggled to choose between four different jackets and worried I’d make the wrong choice.

Patagonia and Walmart are two brands at opposite ends of the low-price/premium-quality spectrum. In the offline world, it’d be impossible to confuse the two—the videos make that abundantly clear. But as the screencasts show, my experiences shopping for jackets at patagonia.com and then walmart.com weren’t nearly as different from each other as one might expect. If I had wandered around the sites a little more, I would have encountered interesting things on Patagonia‘s site such as the award-winning Tin Shed (a virtual shed full of interactive props and stories). But I was on the sites to shop for a jacket, not to wander around and check out peripheral Flash microsites.

During a separate patagonia.com shopping experience (this time shopping for a shirt), a chat box popped up and “Taylor” asked if she could help me. I had wanted personal assistance when I was shopping online for a jacket, but hadn’t gotten it. This personal assistance, though a bit intrusive, would have certainly helped shrink the offline–online gap, differentiated the experience from the walmart.com experience, and guided me toward the right purchase decision. But perhaps there’s even a better, less intrusive solution: adding a “Have a question? Chat live” button adjacent to product information. On occasion, I’ve seen a “Chat Live” button in the patagonia.com search area, but it’s not always there and it’s not in a place where you see it if you’re looking at information about a jacket.

Patagonia.com could also be improved by increasing the use of video to augment product photos. After documenting my jacket shopping experience I took a deeper look at the site and found that 17 percent of their men’s jacket listings included video depictions of the jacket. I hadn’t stumbled on any of these during my initial shopping experience. If more jackets had accompanying videos, I would have been more likely to see a video. Well-produced videos enhance the richness and differentiation of the shopping experience, help close the offline–online gap, and guide customers toward making the right purchase decision.

Education

The selection of a college or university is one of the biggest decisions a person can make in life. In the offline world, you can stroll the campus, audit a class, have lunch with current students, tour the facilities, check out the social scene, and so on. But in my investigations I found that the online experiences in the education vertical generally don’t match the offline experiences. Sure, you can watch a video or a virtual tour, but you’re just watching from behind the glass, not actively participating and interacting. In the education vertical, as in the retail vertical, the gap between offline and online experiences compromises brand differentiation.

Let’s say I want to get my MBA at a school that’s convenient to where I live and work. I know I’ll be spending a lot of time on campus, so I want to make sure it’s an inspiring place that’s conducive to learning and working with classmates. Based on their proximity to where I live and work, the schools I chose to investigate were the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU) and the Northglenn Center of Colorado Christian University (CCU). As you’ll note in the screencasts, the schools’ websites made it hard to get a feel for each campus and to get help making this high-involvement/high-risk decision. And what information I did find wasn’t presented in a rich way.

The online experience left me feeling that I’d have to make an in-person visit to experience each campus. So I visited both schools.

As it turned out, my offline experience with each campus made the decision an easy one. At one school—the much more expensive one—I felt immersed in the experience as an engaged participant, rather than merely as an observer. It was indeed a rich experience—much more so than online—and it differentiated the school from its low-price counterpart.

Healthcare

To check out the offline experience in the healthcare vertical, my wife and I shopped for the hospital where we’ll have our next baby. We toured the family birth center at Foothills Hospital in Boulder, and got to meet the doctor. We found the facility to be more like a resort than a hospital—there was a jetted tub in the birthing room, a DVD player and queen bed in the recovery room, and a beautiful lobby, cafe, and waiting room.

Had we checked out the hospital online instead, our experience would have been far different. We are making an emotionally significant, high-involvement decision, but the hospital’s website fails to welcome us with a rich experience. The entry point into the website is cold and off-putting, in contrast to the hospital’s warm and inviting lobby. After a bit of searching we found a simple “Welcome Tour” slide show, but it offered none of the richness of the offline tour.

Just as we saw within the retail and education verticals, the offline–online experience gap in healthcare means that brands are missing opportunities for differentiation. An actual visit to Foothills Hospital sets it apart from other hospitals, but a visit to their website does not. In fact, I found a richer online experience with a lower-priced hospital serving an area that’s pretty much the opposite of happy-go-lucky Boulder: South Central L.A., including Compton and Watts.

Closing the Gap

The online experience doesn’t need to exactly mirror the offline experience; they play complementary roles rather than act as alternatives to one another. But when it comes to satisfying customers, differentiating your brand, and winning business, the richness of the experiences should be on par with each other. It’s about creating the same richness online as customers have come to expect from those brands through years of offline experiences.

A good example of a rich online experience that complements and is nearly on par with its offline counterpart is the Volvo Virtual Test Drive of City Safety. The online test drive allows the “driver” to experience the brand’s automatic braking technology in a way that would be terrifying offline.

Juan Sanchez, a UX Magazine contributing editor, explained the importance of complementary experiences this way: “I think a lot of companies fall short by siloing their online and offline experiences, or by making them feel too much alike rather than having them work as companions. There are things that online or mobile experiences can do that an offline experience can’t, and vice versa. Industries should take into account the ‘experience ecosystem.’ They need to consider all the interaction touch points to make the online, offline, mobile, and other experiences seamless. If I do something online and then go into a physical store, there ought to be some overlap in the experiences to make the transition state a smooth and inviting one.”

What do you think?

As you reflect on brands that are behind or ahead in closing the offline-online gap, please share your thoughts with us through comments. You can also record your comparisons as we’ve done in this article, and include a link to them in your response. Whoever provides the best laggard example (big gap) and leader example (no gap) will receive a gift certificate to either Patagonia or Walmart.

Go to Source

As time goes on, it may become helpful or perhaps even necessary to use these tools for actual e-commerce. The common thinking behind social media marketing is that you don’t want to be too sales-pitchy in your conversations, and in some ways that is still very true. However, while social media is largely about conversations, it’s not only about conversations.

As time progresses, social media becomes a lot of things to a lot of people. We’ve reached the point where social networks are simply "where we hang out" online. People are not only having conversations. They’re sharing pictures. They’re playing games. They’re looking for information. They’re using social networks to help them make purchase decisions. Sometimes this is through conversation. Sometimes it’s as simple as being a fan of a brand’s Facebook page and receiving timely updates.

Has social media ever led you to an online purchase? Tell us about it.

Facebook has virtual currency, and is starting to open up possibilities for transactions for physical goods. Facebook Connect has just been made easier for webmasters to implement on their sites. That’s huge. As people spend much of their time on Facebook, they are pretty much relinquishing a certain amount of trust to the social network, whether they realize it or not (and whether they should be or not, but that’s another issue).

If your site is plugged into Facebook via Facebook Connect, and they can log in to your site to make purchases just by being logged into Facebook, they may not find themselves as concerned with security issues. Security concerns have long hindered the true potential of e-commerce, and as a result, plenty of trustworthy e-commerce sites have likely missed out on tons of sales, just because of the distrust of the method of purchasing in general.

Now I’m not saying that Facebook Connect is a sign of security. In fact, some might even suggest that it damages security, simply based on the fact that Facebook is often associated with security issues. I’m just saying, users are always signed in to Facebook anyway, and if they see your site is connected with Facebook, they may have no problems signing in with their Facebook info.

"Facebook Connect would allow you to go to a Website like Dell.com and authenticate yourself using your Facebook profile, allow your identity to be known and access your friends so you could spark up a chat," says Paul Dunay, Global Managing Dir. of Services, Social Marketing with Avaya in an interview with eMarketer. "So I could say, ‘Hey, Jeff, I’m looking at this new fancy laptop or this netbook. I heard you bought something. Would you recommend this to me?’

"So you could almost take your friends shopping with you. That is the potential with this example," he adds. "We’re in a period now where we’re all starting to get comfortable with Twitter and get comfortable with using Facebook and LinkedIn and a lot of these other tools, and now we’re about to expand." 

You want to stay relevant in real-time searches to stay current in people’s minds as well. It’s simple branding. That doesn’t mean you have to send out excessive tweets promoting your product. It is information that Twitterers often seek, and by simply discussing information, you’re brand is still visible, even if that information isn’t directly related to your brand. Read this for ways to optimize for real-time search.

Also be sure to watch this video where Sheila Dahlgren of Adobe gives some predictions for the e-commerce industry, which include behavioral targeting and personalization tactics.

What role do you think social media will play in e-commerce in the future? Share your thoughts.

Go to Source

Name: ShirtsMyWay.com

Quick Pitch: ShirtsMyWay.com is a new platform that lets shoppers design their own dress shirts in detail using an interactive shirt model.

Genius Idea: Whether you’re particular about your dress shirt details, or just looking for something different than what’s currently sold in stores, ShirtsMyWay stays true to their name and offers you dress shirts done your way. Since everything can be customized — design, fabric, details, and measurements — the company says that there are over 7 trillion different possible shirt combinations you can create in total.

When designing your shirt, you can use the interactive shirt model to customize fabrics for every element of the shirt, adjust the style of details like pockets, collars, and cuffs, and get nitpicky with buttons, buttonholes, shoulder loops, collar stays, and monograms. Of course, you can also opt for a long sleeve or short sleeve shirt, toggle between front and back views, and input your own body measurements for a shirt that’s made to order.

ShirtsMyWay dress shirts are available in 28 countries, start at $65, and go up price as you select higher priced fabrics. All additional customizations and standard shipping (15 working days) are included free of charge.

We’re a little disappointed that there’s no dress shirt options for women, but we imagine that many a woman will do the shirt customization and purchasing for her man. In fact, the only real downside to ShirtsMyWay is that they serve an audience who isn’t typically the head of household purchase decisions.

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BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

Tags: custom, dress shirts, shirtsmyway