The Value of Social Design for Online Retail: Part 1
by Ashley AuldFriday, March 13th, 2009
Social Design Principle 1: Encourage Information Sharing
The average person is bombarded with 500-3000 advertisements per day. With so many ads surrounding us, it is not surprising that people to receive them with distrust and skepticism, “Of course an ad is only going to tell me what the company wants me to hear!
Traditional advertising, as done in the 1940s and 1950s, is more effective when there are only a limited number of brands from which to choose, but as Barry Schwartz wrote in The Paradox of Choice, this is far from the case today. The industrial age has resulted in hundreds of brands, and social applications are a highly successful technology we use to help us efficiently sift through all of this information to find what is valuable and meaningful.
Amazon.com smartly solved this little problem and became enormously successful by utilizing customer reviews more than a decade ago. Joshua Porter (Bokardo.com) has written some insightful blog articles and dedicated a section of his book ‘Designing for the Social Web’ on what he calls, “The Amazon Effect:”
“Customer reviews allow people to learn about a product from the experience of others without any potentially biased seller information. No wonder everyone wanted to shop at Amazon. They had information that no other site had: They had the truth.” – Joshua Porter, Designing for the Social Web
Online reviews provide customers with a source of information independent of the seller or manufacture. There is more credibility in reading a review from someone who was not paid to promote a product. But what if this person is nothing like me? How do I know if their review is one I can trust? Smart recommendation systems, such as the ‘Movies you’ll Love” tab on Netflix are designed as solutions to this problem. We’ll discuss the issue of how people identify with one another in the upcoming entry on social design principle #3, Appeal to the Unique Individual.
Sharing tools are an effective way to get meaningful feedback and allow customers to freely exchange information with friends about products they are interested in buying. Allow your products to be shared on networks such as Facebook or Digg. Making it possible for customers to involve their social networks in the shopping experience helps inform their purchasing decisions. For example, last summer I was agonizing over what shoes my bridesmaids should wear for my wedding. I went on Zappos.com and selected 4 or 5 pairs of silver open-toed shoes that I thought would look good with the dresses, and I saved them all to a wish list which I made public. I sent my bridesmaids the link via Facebook. We used Facebook to communicate in a threaded conversation about the shoes. My bridesmaids voted for two favorites, and I bought a pair of each. The only bridesmaid who lived near me tried the shoes on for fit and comfort. We kept the winning shoe and returned the other (with convenient free shipping.)
Reviews, sharing, public facing wish lists, and threaded conversations are social design tools and effective ways to help inform purchasing decisions when shopping online. However, implementing sharing tools requires the retailer to relinquish some control of the product information on the web site where it is sold. Retailers are often concerned that negative customer reviews may hurt sales. This is a possibility, but the benefits of social design outweigh the possible problems. In fact, a negative review could be seen as potentially beneficial, because it provides valuable insight on ways a company can improve their products and services for the future. Negative reviews may also increase credibility for customers; when reviews are all positive and glowing, customers may suspect that the retailer edits or filters submitted reviews, but neutral or negative reviews create a sense of balance and objectivity. A proactive company will contact customers who submit negative reviews, engage them in dialog, and ask them to provide additional and constructive feedback.
In the next entry we will further explore how retailers can open effective and productive dialog with their customers when we discuss the second social design principle: authentic conversations.
