The Value of Social Design for Online Retail – Part 2
by Ashley AuldFriday, March 20th, 2009
Social Design Principle 2: Encourage Authentic Conversations
Previously we identified how important it is to deliver unbiased information to consumers and cited the Amazon Effect as evidence. Authentic conversations promote products, get valuable customer feedback, and establish a presence and a voice for your brand. There are many methods, but the two most common are:
- Maintain a blog – Blogs are great for engaging in dialog with customers and initiating ways to discuss products, services, and future feature development.
- Use Authentic Advertising – Promote products in an unbiased, authentic way.
Start a Blog
How can a company initiate authentic conversations? First, start and maintain a blog. It’s easy, it’s cheap, and it’s familiar to customers as a way to interact and communicate with both the blog authors (the company) and other blog readers (the community)! Make your blog a window on your company and reach out to customers. Engage them, and ask them about both their good and bad experiences with your products and services.
“When you have authentic conversations with people, you learn enough to actually improve your product with them, freeing you from the need for the hard sell. No longer will you have to convince people your software is worth it, because by working with the very people you’re selling to, you’re guaranteeing a valuable product.” – Joshua Porter, Designing for the Social Web
Some retail web sites place their blog on the homepage of their store. Woot.com, an online retail web site features one discounted product per day on their homepage, and they present it in the context of a blog post. This product is then advertised via RSS and Twitter feeds, and the blog post attracts hundreds of customer comments and even more exposure every day. This daily blog guarantees a constant stream of fresh, new content and drives return visits.
”Blog post as advertisement” is a new form of advertising and is becoming more popular. Using social design a company can essentially advertise without advertising, which is referred to as authentic advertising.
Use Authentic Advertising
CC Skye’s website is an interesting example of a successful use of authentic advertising. They leverage celebrity endorsements without making it look like a celebrity endorsement. On their product detail pages, they identify the colors of their products with the celebrities who have been seen wearing them. This is reinforced with a photo that looks like it was taken by the paparazzi. The “guerilla style” photography works and makes the photo appear authentic. In this example, the image implies that Kim Kardashian was not paid to promote the product, and that she genuinely likes the product and the style.
Authenticity, if delivered in a meaningful way that is relevant to the products, has the potential to be more powerful than traditional advertising. A customer may be more inclined to buy a bracelet if their friend has one and raved about how cool it is, or even if they knew that an admired celebrity also likes it. Social influence can be a powerful tool to attract attention to products. The trick is to create designs and build web applications supporting both authenticity and delivering the experiences in ways relevant to the customers and the products for which they are shopping.
Committing to authenticity helps your business in several ways:
- Engaging in conversations via blog posts helps address the needs of customers quickly and efficiently.
- Exposing products via authentic advertising generates interest and associates products with admirable individuals and desirable outcomes.
- Encouraging people to provide constructive feedback about products and services benefits the company and makes customers happy.
People appreciate that their voices are heard and are even more impressed when the company acts on that feedback with future product enhancements or service initiatives. Providing customers a way to become invested in the products through authentic conversations will make them more likely continue to do business with the company and more likely to bring their friends along, too!
