Social Retailing

With customer reviews being the next big thing in online retailing, I was not surprised to read  that Jeff Bozos and Amazon (which pioneered the user-generated customer review) has launched something called video reviews. Now Amazon users can use video to share their opinions and demonstrate the use of products on the site. Customer-generated video reviews are located within the customer reviews section of items in the Amazon.com catalog.

“We are dedicated to offering our customers an information-rich shopping experience so they can know which products are right for them,” says Colin Bodell, vice president, Amazon.com. “The chance to see product demonstrations as submitted by fellow customers is just the latest benefit to shopping on Amazon”.  Read more... (220 words, estimated 53 secs reading time)

We have written a lot about how customer reviews have and will increase sales. So I was interested to read in Internet Retailer about a new shopping study from The E-Tailing Group titled “Social Shopping Study 2007” which showed that the growth in online customer reviews has led to a new breed of shopper called the “Social Researcher”. This social researcher is someone who puts significant emphasis on peer feedback in product reviews when making online and offline purchasing decisions.  Read more... (602 words, estimated 2:24 mins reading time)

According to Advertising Age  Facebook is expected to unveil a new social retailing feature today (November 6th). The feature will allow Facebook members to share with people in their network what they bought, where they bought and also information on the product like a discount or coupon. What a Google killer this could be. A recent emarketer study showed that 37% of people in the U.S. use a search engine to find where to buy a product online. Now all they have to do is ask their friend on Facebook!  Read more... (346 words, estimated 1:23 mins reading time)

A new study from comScore shows that heavy users of social networking sites favor leisure-related retail sites. Heavy users of social networking sites are significantly more likely than average to visit leisure-oriented retail site categories, such as music, jewelry/luxury goods/accessories and consumer electronics than the average Internet user.

According to data from Internet Retailer, heavy social networkers accounted for 28.5% of visitors to music sites and 26.5% of visitors to jewelry/luxury goods/accessories sites. In addition, they represented nearly one-quarter of visitors to apparel sites (24.8%), tickets sites (24.5%), consumer electronics sites (23.9%), sports/outdoor sites (23.8%), computer software sites (23.7%), book sites (23.6%), movie sites (23.4%) and computer hardware sites (22.7%).  Read more... (324 words, estimated 1:18 mins reading time)

Following up on yesterdays post about how Customer Reviews Becoming More Important, it appears that consumer product reviews are  also credible, at least according to a Deloitte Consumer Product Group-sponsored study.

“Some online retailers are reporting higher sales conversion rates as a result of allowing customers to post product reviews on their Web sites,” said Jeffrey Grau, senior analyst at eMarketer.

 Read more... (381 words, 3 images, estimated 1:31 mins reading time)

Emarketer had some interesting data recently about how online shoppers in the US are turning to user reviews more than expert reviews when researching products. In an Avenue A | Razorfish study, they found that over 50% of online shoppers doing research said they consulted user reviews most often.

“It’s clear that new Web technologies have put consumers in control,” said Garrick Schmitt, vice president of user experience at Avenue A | Razorfish.  Read more... (176 words, 3 images, estimated 42 secs reading time)

Yesterday I wrote about Target and how they were able to successfully launch a marketing campaign on Facebook. While the Target campaign was running, Wal-Mart also tested the social networking waters again with its own social marketing efforts. Unfortunately, the results were not a good as Target’s.

Target was successful on Facebook for a couple of reasons. One was that the ad agency spent time on Facebook and understood how Facebook users were interacting with each other. They changed their marketing message to fit the Facebook audience, and they turned down the volume of their marketing message.  Read more... (628 words, estimated 2:31 mins reading time)

Facebook is the hot story in social media circles, so I went looking for a company that has successfully used Facebook to market its products or services. Thanx to an Adweek article I was able to find a successful Facebook marketer (Target) and an unsuccessful Facebook marketer (Wal-Mart). I will cover the problems that Wal-Mart faced in their campaign tomorrow.

Target took its first steps in social networking by sponsoring a page on Facebook as part of its back to school campaign. The Target social media campaign was run by AKQA and they made some very smart decisions throughout the campaign  Read more... (657 words, estimated 2:38 mins reading time)