After I wrote the post on Shopping Social Networks Daniel at Emergence Media pointed me to an article that he had written about the SF Tech Session on social bookmarking at Emergence Media

At the SF Tech Session Kaboodle CEO Manish Chandra spoke about how Kaboodle which is a social search engine where people (mostly women) can share home décor products, bridal items and all the way to clothing ensembles.
Here are some of Daniel’s notes from CEO Manish Chandra talk on Kaboodle:

• 70% of information stored is centered around shopping
• Demographic: 20-40 year old women
• Women use it as a social shopping tool, share shopping list
• Able to collect, share shopping items in groups listings or collages
• Collecting and Sharing Shopping Items (Bridal-related, home decor etc)
• Collage to create ensembles from the list

Besides the demographic information what I found interesting was how a retailer can use Kaboodle to engage and interact with their target audience.

A retailer could create a profile on Kaboodle, listing featured products on groups for “Hiking Gear”, “Beach Outfits” etc, with open comments by connected Friends. Simultaneously products listed in the retailers “Hiking Gear” group are also listed on the Kaboodle Search Engine, giving another channel to reach out to the shopping audience.

While this type of “Sponsored Profile”, similar to MySpace corporate profiles, are not available yet, this is an obvious move to make as Kaboodle looks to expand their monetization beyond PPC-based ads.

While shopping is at the heart of everything that Kaboodle does, I think that the new group functionality could really make a difference in 2007. Kaboodle just rolled out a new service where members can form groups around topics of interest in Kaboodle. In a group, you can share relevant Kaboodle pages with the group, contribute items to a “group collection,” and communicate in a group discussion forum. As you can imagine, the potential uses are many. For example some of the ideas on the Kaboodle blog are:

• a couple planning a destination wedding might form a wedding group to share hotel and activity options and access the couple’s registry
• a history class might form an academic group to share resources or articles online

These are great examples because Kaboodle’s demographic are 20-40 year old women which fits in perfectly with the wedding idea. I like the history example because it means that Kaboodle is targeting the facebook audience of college students which will allow them to target more than just retailer advertisers to their site.

Kaboodle seems to have a good strategy going into 2007 and is someone that social marketers should keep an eye on.

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