This week was my first time attending the largely popular AD:Tech conference. This year the conference had over ten-thousand attendees. While there was a ton going on at the conference, I’ll try to stick to mainly E-Commerce related topics for this post.
Two sessions really grabbed my attention. The first was titled Social Commerce: Mashing up the Web. The session boasted to be pertaining to the coming of sites after MySpace, YouTube, etc. From the description: Extending the “core elements of online social networks into more direct commercial models”. Sounded very interesting to me, but the headline title had given me a totally different first impression. My first piece of advice to the conference organizers is to be careful with the “new-age lingo” you use. Web 2.0 lingo is not strictly defined and often has vague or multiple meanings. Buzzwords are great to grab attention, but should be used carefully.
Getting to the point… You notice the titled included “mashup”. I realize this is not a developers’ conference, but when I think of mashup I think of web service integration (see mashupcamp.com or ProgrammableWeb for more information). I could tell by the list of speakers that they most likely wouldn’t mention anything about web services / APIs.
Finally… The session turned out to be very informational (but unrelated to mashups). Each panelist basically gave a marketing overview on how to reach a specific target audience and allow them to engage. Nath Freitas of Cruxy made some of the most interesting points, one of which was noted on the ADTech Blog yesterday:
“Most social sites lean heavily on the audience to build the content and evangelize. To do this, he emphasizes exposing consumers to a deeper amount of content to encourage additional engagement.”
The topic of engagement is a very important one for “social commerce”. You should not push too much content OR too much commerce in the face of your target audience. Providing a platform for the correct mixture of focused content and relevant commerce is key.
The second session was title Next Generation Strategies for E-Commerce. This was probably the most useful session I listened in on. The sessions started with some statisics compliments of JupiterResearch. Here is what I noted:
- Forecast for online shopping (2006) = $95 Billion
- Forecast for online shopping (2010) = $144 Billion
- Holiday sales (2006) are predicted to increase 18% = $32 Billion
- 50% of all transactions are influenced by online commerce
Heather Dougherty of Nielsen/NetRaings was asked what key trend stuck out in her mind. She was quick to mention the ability for users to socially “tag” shopping or product pages. She hit the nail on the head, but was at a lose for words on a term for this new phenomenon. Basically, “wishlists on steroids” she said. Some examples she mentioned were Kaboodle, Stylehive and Delicious. Let me try to put a term to that, “social bookmarking”. The trend with sites like Kaboodle, Wists and some others seem to be more of “social product lists” where users share lists of products with friends, family or the entire Internet userbase. It extends upon the old-fashioned (web 1.0 if you will) “wishlist”. I’m surprised nothing like this was brought up during the social commerce session.
Another striking fact was that having a Verisign logo on their homepage increased Audible.com purchased by 98%. That is a crazy increase, but don’t go running to add a Verisign logo to your site just yet. It is all relevant to your target audience and the product you are selling. So just focus on the moral of the presentation: Trial and error testing is critical. Let me put it this way, if you don’t try it and track comparable conversions, you won’t know what your users are most interested in.
[tags]social shopping, social commerce, adtech, ad:tech, kaboodle, stylehive, e-commerce, myspace, social bookmarking, advertising[/tags]
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