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The new face of e-commerce: Selling you what you didn’t know you wanted

Molly McHugh
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facebook-shoppingFacebook has managed to change the way we think about most things, and even how we do some of them. The launch of the site’s new Open Graph tools has made this even more apparent for third-party applications, and fairly soon you’ll be able to “do” anything on Facebook. What this means, of course, is that you can publish your every activity to the social network via “action” apps: For instance, report that you “read” a book, or “cooked” a meal. The possibilities are endless.

We’ve already begun to witness our friends “listening” to music via the integration with outside music services, and reader apps from the Washington Post and Slate have popped up in the News Feed and Ticker as well. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, and as we’ve warned and been warned, major consumerism is at the heart of this new venture.

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This isn’t to say users are being played here — in fact, for those who highly value social interaction in their every online endeavor, consider this nothing but good news. And in the wake of the holiday shopping season, this could mean big things for e-commerce companies.

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Tapping social to sell

One of those very sites is Sneakpeeq, which recently launched its just-out-of-beta Facebook shopping application. The idea behind the flash-sales site’s Facebook integration is you can “peeq” at items (which is the app’s designated verb) which are then broadcast on your Timeline and via the News Feed. This offers your contacts a look into the styles you like, allowing them to interact with your activity, and obviously gives retailers partnering with Sneakpeeq a whole lot more eyes on their products.

sneakpeeq“When someone is ‘peeqing’ at your product, they are sharing it with their friends, so it’s representative for these businesses,” founder Henry Kim tells us. “It makes them put their best product forward.”

Sneakpeeq launched its fully-fledged integration with Facebook at f8, and while the “peeq” verb as been approved, it will be a little longer until we see it pop up in the News Feed. We contacted Facebook to find out when these shopping features would be fully implemented and did not hear back, but it would appear the launch is imminent. 

While an entirely Facebook-integrated holiday shopping season hasn’t quite reached us (Kim thinks this will happen next year), there’s no time like the present to start it. Somewhere along the line, the holiday shopping season morphed into this beast: one part chaos, one part challenge. Finding the best deals and most perfect gifts is something like a game, and this attitude lends itself perfectly to the shopping-app platform.

“The two pillars we use to make sales happen are using social tools that are valuable and using game mechanisms — badges for better rewards or lower prices, sharing, ‘peeqing’ at products, and a new feature coming where if you love a product (which is different than liking it) it gets pinned to your profile wall and your friends can see what you like, sort of like a gift suggestion,” says Kim.

Sortprice CEO Doron Simovitch says the power of the majority will influence social shopping trends. “The entire idea of buying things on Facebook has been gaining traction with more people out there. I think that as users witness more and more of their friends buying things through shopping applications, you’ll see more of them following suit,” he says. “That could very well lead to buying gifts via such application becoming the next ‘big’ thing on Facebook.”

Game mechanics and shopping seem to go hand in hand. Think about it: the hunt for discounts, the crazed chaos of Black Friday and other prized sale days, the mental countdown that begins on Thanksgiving or before birthdays. Whether this kind of consumerism appalls you or not, it’s very real, and it’s only natural that it would translate seamlessly to the social Web. In fact, a recent survey from Performics revealed that 25 percent of respondents said they wait to get feedback via social networks before they make purchases.

Does that mean brick-and-mortar or more traditional online retailers are in trouble? Not necessarily. “You may see manufacturers choosing to develop their own applications and social shopping resources that essentially cut out the middle man — in this case the retailers themselves — to deal directly with consumers,” Simovitch explains.

Shopping has undergone the transformation from physical to online, and we’ve seen legacy e-commerce brands like Amazon and eBay (which Simovitch says are under “no immediate threat” from social shopping apps) launch successful holiday shopping campaigns. Now we’re in the midst of another shift, one that isn’t specific to online shopping, but is definitely affecting it: The transition from search to discovery.

The digital inspiration platform

pinterestA big part of Web 2.0 was about the structural and consumer-related changes to search. Search became more interactive, more connected, more focused on the end user. Now the next step in its evolution is discovery. Applications that take your input and help you unearth things you didn’t even know existed are all the rage. Clipboard, Pinterest, Wantworthy, Snip.it, and Weheartit are part of an increasingly popular idea: the digital inspiration platform. They aren’t about helping you find what you’re looking for, they’re about helping you find what you didn’t know you were looking for.

On the surface, it might appear that this is just another design-heavy blogging style, like Tumblr or Posterous, but it’s much more. It reveals where our minds are as consumers — and this is exactly the behavior socially-integrated shopping apps are tapping into.

We use these sites and Facebook applications to share with our friends, but the effects are far-reaching. “In turn, brands and merchants will then be able to better target potential customers,” Simovitch explains.

The consequence is a developed reliance on aggregation. Real, organic, personal discoveries could become rarer and rarer. (The first hint of this? There are apps to recommend apps based on your collection of apps.) But that’s another argument entirely, and one that manufacturers aren’t (and shouldn’t be) concerned with.

Kim says one of the things Sneakpeeq’s buyers have revealed is that purchases are serendipity-driven. “They come to our site and they don’t know what they’re going to find,” he points out about users. “But they know because of our curation the stuff they find will be very good.”

“People are curious and they want to be shown things that they have an interest in. And today discovery is happening through social streams, like Facebook.” 

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Topics
Facebook wants a piece of Twitter’s “social TV” action, but what does that mean for you?
how facebook wants to control the horizontal and vertical of social tv second screen

Earlier this week Facebook announced two new tools designed to help media companies integrate Facebook activity and conversations into live broadcasts. The idea is that broadcasters could display real-time stats about how often keywords or topics are being mentioned on Facebook or even quickly select messages to be displayed or read on-air, essentially enabling broadcast programming to engage in interactive "conversations" with potentially millions of members of their audience who are also logged into Facebook.
In some ways, the new tools are Facebook's way of trying to catch up to Twitter, which to date has dominated the intersection of social media and traditional broadcasting. But, in other ways, Facebook is looking to redefine and expand how we consume and interact with traditional broadcast programming – and that could be crucial to mass media given how many people are now watching television with a tablet or smartphone in their hand.
Can Facebook bring something valuable to broadcast media, or has Twitter already locked down the "second screen"?
What's Facebook offering?
Facebook's latest play to real-time media companies has two parts: Public Feed and Keyword Insights.
The Public Feed is the ability to search everything everyone on Facebook shares in public for a specific word (like "Syria" or "Obama") and get back a continuous, near-real-time stream of every public post with that term, along with who said it and when. Because the posts are linked to particular Facebook users, it's simple for Public Feed customers to pull up any information Facebook considers "public" about any user – things like name, gender, profile images, and friend count, and (most likely) key demographic information like age and location.

Keyword Insights scans all Facebook content – even the private stuff! – to compile aggregate information about a specific term over a specific period of time in the last twelve days. However, Keyword Insights does not associate results with individual Facebook users or provide access to the posted content. So, a media company could determine how many people have entered the hashtag #samcro (often used by Sons of Anarchy fans) in the last 24 hours, but they won't get a the actual posts to know whether they're good, bad, indifferent, or just typos. But if Facebook doesn't give names with Keyword Insights, it does provide summaries based on age, gender, and location (down to cities), so media companies can know how many of those people mentioning Sons of Anarchy are (say) males between 18 and 24 and living in California – even if that hashtag only appeared in a private post to themselves.
Who can use Public Feed and Keyword Insights? Right now, it's just a few selected partners, including (but not limited to) CNN, the UK/Irish BSkyB satellite television service, Buzzfeed, Slate, and NBC's Today show, along with a handful of behind-the-scenes companies that offer social platforms and analysis. Facebook is working to add other partners; soon, you can expect any major media outlet or advertiser to have access to these capabilities, either directly from Facebook or through a third party.
How does this get Facebook on TV?
Folks familiar with some of Facebook's inner workings may have noticed that Public Feed and Keyword Insights are similar to parts of Facebook's Graph API, which (among other things) lets Facebook developers pull data like status updates and likes, search by keyword, and look at the social connections between results.
"The Graph API has been around for a while, but reliability has been a problem," noted Damon Cortesi, co-founder and CTO of social metrics firm SimplyMeasured. "Facebook iterates so quickly."
"I'd personally like to see social add value beyond ork! ork! ork! trained-seal contests to pump up mentions"
Conversely, Twitter has been much more accessible to analytics firms and media companies that want to integrate social data into their content.
"Twitter is one of the first networks we started pulling data from because it was so easy," noted Cortesi. "You tell it what keywords you want to track, and you receive data in real time."
To be fair, Twitter doesn't deliver real-time data directly to mainstream media: instead, it works with two companies (Datasift and GNIP), who in turn provide access to the "firehose" of real-time Twitter data. However, some of the reasons Twitter has been so successful at integrating with television and traditional media is both the narrow, short-message focus of the service (there's not much to do with Twitter other than tweet!) and the dependability of those real-time services. Programming like X Factor, Breaking Bad, and Discovery's Shark Week can rely on getting real-time data from Twitter to augment their programming. With Facebook, that proposition has been chancier: nobody wants to go on the air and say "Welp, we were going to take some questions from Facebook, but our systems don't seem to be working. Sorry."
How does this make better TV?
The real-time nature of social networking means social content is most relevant to live programming like news, sports, and some reality shows rather than (say) scripted dramas where time-shifting and DVRs tend to spread audiences over a longer period of time. Few people want to catch up on Showtime's Dexter and see a months-old (or years-old!) tweet scrolling across the bottom of the screen.
Speaking on background, representatives of both CNN and BSkyB indicated they're looking carefully at how to best integrate social content with their programming. BSkyB's initial focus seems to be on bringing viewer feedback and opinions into sports programming, while CNN is looking at approaches to daily news.
"We have to make good television," said one CNN representative who did not want to be identified. "A lot of social integration is based on voting. That works great for some formats, but not others. I'd personally like to see social add value beyond ork! ork! ork! trained-seal contests to pump up mentions or likes so the audience can get a treat. Ultimately, I think that's demeaning."

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Blab wants to know what the Internet will love before the Internet does
blab screen

What if one day, social analytics tools were so powerful they could predict what was going to happen next? Well a new algorithm-powered application called Blab wants to do exactly that by forecasting what is about to go viral.
The last year has seen a slew of social analytics startups hit the scene. Not only do these apps tell you who’s tweeting, retweeting, identify influences, and other rather two dimensional metrics, social media analytics 2.0 like Salorix and Demographics Pro throw machine learning, predictive analysis, and other goodies into an algorithm so they can dig far deeper into user likes, dislikes, habits, and other rather personal details.
And at the far, extreme end of the social analytic spectrum you might remember Raytheon’s RIOT, which uses predictive algorithms to predict your next move before you even make it. Blab doesn’t venture quite into that extreme, into the realm of "real-world" habits, but it is trying to know what the Web will do before the Web does - which can be an extremely valuable piece of information. 
Sourcing Blab’s data

From 50,000 social media and news outlets, Blab has a good idea about what news and viral events break. It pulls data from mainstream social media sources like Facebook, Tumblr, Delicious, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, and others courtesy of data providers like Gnip, which provides Blab access to Twitter’s Decahose and Tumblr’s Fullhose, Blab’s Chief Technology Officer David Snelling tells me. It also looks at “blog sources, both news related and social.” The list continues and probably won’t cease for some time since the team is continually adding more sources.
But this is just the groundwork.
The engine

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How American Express is doing e-commerce right
amexfoursquare

The power of social media remains unrealized. Even Facebook is learning by trial and error, experimenting with this new medium while we simultaneously consume it. And because the industry remains constantly in-flux, the missteps are various and many.
But a surprising contender is leveraging social platforms to its advantage. American Express has made a thorough and multi-faceted go at social this holiday season, using a handful of networks to fuel its focus on e-commerce.
Some brands are natural fits for social applications—generally, consumer product manufacturers like Target, Vitamin Water, Pepsi, and Old Spice easily fit the social media mold. While it might not fit in this category, American Express is getting ample help from the e-commerce surge this holiday shopping season. Formerly small startups like Groupon and Foursquare have been pioneering the evolution of how we buy things using social media, so it’s only natural that a company with the background and resources that Amex has would want a piece. Here are a few ways the company is cleverly exploiting social shopping trends.
The stamp card
The idea of a virtual stamp card isn’t novel. Everyone wants to be rewarded for their loyalty, a scheme various deal and location sites have capitalized on—and now, Amex. The company is partnering with Seamless, a New York-based startup that specializes in ordering takeout and delivery online. For every four orders of at least $15 you make using Seamless, Amex credits you $10. And this isn't the first time Amex has shown interest in digital commerce startups: the company will be heavily investing in this market. 
The fine print: The deal runs through October 31, 2012 and you can only get a max of $120 credited to your card. Eligible cards include Blue from American Express, Blue Cash, Blue Cash Everyday, Blue Cash Preferred, Blue Sky, or Blue Sky Preferred Card from American Express.
 
The grab bag
There’s something to be said for the element of surprise: as humans, we’re suckers for it. Enter Amex’s Gift Chain, a newly-launched program where members will get a surprise gift for spending $25 at participating online retailers. The catch, that you have no idea what you’re getting, is obvious. But possibilities include a year membership to ShopRunner, a $200 Amex e-gift card, or $100 in Nike gift cards. Or it could be the $5 Godiva gift card. Still, it’s an effective campaign since consumers are scouring online sales, and the extra incentive will likely end quite a few to the participating retailers’ sites.
The fine print: You have to sign up using an eligible Amex card (Macy's, Bloomingdale's, corporate, and prepaid Cards including American Express Gift Cards and SERVE Cards are not eligible), and you have to have been a member before November 27 of this year. You have to spend online using the card sometime between November 28 and December 21. Also, there’s a “while supplies last” clause attached.
 
Going local
Amex was a major sponsor of Small Business Saturday this year, the Saturday after Thanksgiving where consumers are encouraged to shop locally. Of course, the company attached its name to the day not only to get a little recognition for promoting small vendors. Amex teamed up with Foursquare (the two announced a partnership this past summer) to offer $25 for spending $25 or more at participating retailers. That isn’t where the integration ends, however: the company announced recently that card members can still sync their Amex to Foursquare for special offers and to get $10 back for spending $10.
The fine print: Again, the $10 for $10 is available at participating outlets. Prepaid cards and corporate cards are not eligible, either. 

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