The Official Fluid Blog

At Fluid we’ve delivered some interesting work in the past: Timberland’s Build Your Own Boot Studio (BYOB) was a breakthrough in product configuration, offering instant color change and the first rotation of a custom product. Reebok built upon this by allowing two axes of rotation as well as allowing shoppers to configure a product on a lifestyle photograph. The recent launch of the new Vans configurator, is one of the most exciting client launches during my time at Fluid.

The Vans work builds on many of our learnings of the past years:

• Designing a custom product is stressful. One of the biggest impediments to custom product sales has been the inability to get immediate validation on a design in real time. In the Vans configurator a shopper can send a link to a friend via instant messenger (or email). When the user clicks the link they’ll be brought into a collaborative shopping session where they can share design ideas and give feedback in real time. We believe this will not only increase sales but bring new shoppers to the Vans site.
• Product configuration is an iterative undertaking. We’re providing users a simple “Scratchpad” where they can save their designs in progress for easy reference without logging in. With the scratchpad users can save a design with a single click and return to a previous design just as quickly.
• All of this functionality is part of the Fluid Retail product suite, utilizing both Fluid Configure and Fluid Social. This means we’ll be able to deploy the technology faster and more cost effectively for future customers looking to create similar collaborative shopping experiences.

We couldn’t be more excited to share this client work with you…keep your eyes peeled for future deployments of Fluid Social collaborative shopping deployed in support of collaborative shopping for traditional, mainline products.

When we discuss Fluid Social, particularly for Facebook, we often get the question of whether a particular brand’s shoppers are actually on Facebook. That question is getting easier and easier to answer as there is overwhelming evidence that soon EVERYONE will be using Facebook regularly. A latest bit of research just showed up on CNN.com.

Social Design Principle #4 – Participate in Active Listening

Utilizing social design principles to improve a customers shopping experience has the potential to bring tremendous benefit to a company and its customers.  However, no matter what conversations take place, there are two key components essential to the fourth principle: active listening:

• Maintain your commitment to having conversations – companies must be dedicated to maintaining their social channels to keep content fresh and new.
• Admit your mistakes, and do something about them – part of having authentic conversations is being prepared to accept negative feedback and to do something about it.

Maintain your commitment to having conversations.
Social Design is only powerful when the content is new. Customers will not participate in a conversation if there are very few others or if the thread is old.  If there is little or no activity, then people are not likely to participate.  Therefore, companies must be prepared to maintain their blogs, video and photo galleries, Twitter broadcasts, Facebook groups, and whatever myriad of social technologies they choose to pursue.
More importantly, companies  need to mean every word they say.  If a company promises to modify a product or improve a service in response to an upset customer, they must do so. Engaging customers then failing to follow through and deliver on those promises damages the company’s brand, reputation, and credibility.

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Social Design Principle #3 – Appeal to the Unique Individual

Social Design can recommend products in a smarter, more relevant way that appeals to your customers’ unique individuality.  It is more powerful to present a customized list of items “We think YOU will like…” rather than simply presenting “Related Items.”

Previously we discussed the value of customer reviews as a source of unbiased product information, but in some cases they may be puzzling or less useful to customers. Reviews may have less value when shopping for certain types of products. Books, movies, clothes, and shoes are often reviewed based solely on personal preference. While one person may love a movie, another may hate it.  With this in mind, how do customers find or know what is relevant to them?  Making better connections between customers and products requires a better recommendation system to identify items that will appeal to the unique individual:

1. Personalize the Recommendation– Present recommendations in a context relevant to the individual, and they will be more likely to engage with your products.
2. Build Customer Reputation – Encourage participation by allowing customers to earn a reputation for themselves in the context of the rest of the community.
3. Give users a “Me” page –Give customers a unique space dedicated to content meaningful to their shopping habits. This can be a valuable tool and help inform purchasing decisions.

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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.

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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.

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At Fluid, we leverage new and innovative technologies to set our clients apart from their competitors.  Recently our clients have been asking about “social” features more often. “Social” is the latest buzz word flitting back and forth in the media, and it has caught the attention of both retailers and agencies . “Social” is a term that carries weight: The numbers we see on Facebook, Youtube, and Flickr are hard to ignore.  Retail companies are now looking for ways to make “social” features work for them, too.

A large part of the fun in shopping is being able to do it collaboratively.  Friends help inform our decisions about what we should buy. They give their opinions on fit, help pick out the perfect pair of shoes, and they are a part of what makes shopping fun.  Unfortunately, this desired social interaction has largely been lost as stores move online, and while the fun one has when shopping with friends cannot be wholly replaced, social design continues to introduce new ways to improve the collaborative nature of the online shopping experience.

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Last month, a friend asked if I could recommend any companies that specialize in 3D Computer Graphics. Unfortunately, I didn’t have an answer, but on a whim I updated my Facebook status message with the following:

“Mariano is looking for companies that specialize in 3D Computer Graphics.”

Literally, within a few seconds, I received many great suggestions for companies to explore via wall and email messages.  Not too surprisingly, Facebook was a great proxy to crowdsource and gather information. The recommendations felt more credible because they were from my friends and at the same time, using Facebook illustrated the power of accessing an extended network when looking for advice or new information.

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I will be presenting at the Web Experience Forum in Boston on October 14 and discussing the future of online customer experience in a session titled “Can I Get That in Pink and Eggplant?”  Here’s the blurb for the session:

“As more and more retail purchases occur on the Web, the ability to portray products as if they were in the buyers’ hands will become one of the key drivers of an excellent Web experience. Color change, product configuration, magnification, rotation, and personalization are already mainstream features expected by and familiar to consumers. What will online customers want next, and what do they not even realize we can offer? What is the next level of Web experience we need to attain to drive growth in Web transactions? This presentation will look at how emerging technologies and innovative design will transform the Web experience in the coming years.”

I don’t want to give everything away before the session (and I don’t think the folks at the Web Experience Forum would appreciate it), but here are some hints about what we see in the next two to five years:

• Video is the next JPEG,
• Sites will be smarter and more aware of who we are and what we like,
• Mass customization of products, whether or not we realize it,
• Sites will relinquish total control of the experience and become deconstructed,
• Mobile devices will be links and keys in much larger experiences,
• Social, social, social!

Check back the week of October 20 for start of six installments summarizing each of these future directions in online customer experience.

Many of the multi-channel merchants we work with have invested in beautiful photography that shows a range of products in highly branded settings. Many of these photos are shot primarily for print catalogs and, up to now, retailers haven’t been able to put these assets to affective use on the web.

In some cases, catalogers have uploaded versions of their print catalog to the web. While there are legitimate reasons to do this, Fluid’s customers have generally found results from these efforts disappointing. Conversion rates are low, as you would expect from directly translating a print layout to the web. Even with the fancy page flipping affect many of them add .

In other instances retailers have simply taken the existing photo assets and overlaid merchandising text in Photoshop. While this serves the purpose, this text frequently looks cluttered and may significantly lessen the brand impact of the photo. These photos were taken to create an emotional connection between the shopper and a brand or product. Reading text overlays certainly lessens the visual impact and can also distract from the emotional connection of envisioning yourself in the scene.
Other retailers have used these assets as the basis for a richer shopping experience, creating tooltips that appear on mouse over. This is a great use of interactive technology but up to now has been resource intensive to produce. The manual production required to update a banner has required a designer to create the visual and an engineer to wire up the custom Flash or AJAX technology. By the time the banner is integrated into the site it could be a week or more later.

The Fluid Retail team has recently released an enhancement to Fluid Experience that allows retailers to more efficiently use rich brand photography on their site. Using our authoring tools virtually any member of the production team can pull in existing photography, mask out and associate products and publish the assets to the site without need of any technical skills. The whole process can be completed in a matter of minutes.

I’ve embedded an example of the type of interactivity that is possible with Fluid Experience below. Note that shoppers are able to learn about all the products shown, without leaving the photography that has engaged them. Combined with a quick shop window and mini-cart, this type of interactivity encourages the purchase of multiple products.

It is also worth noting that this merchandising component is embedded using Fluid Social’s content syndication capabilities, that allow anyone to take your site content to iGoogle, blogs, MySpace or Facebook.

As I said earlier, the real magic behind the Fluid technology is the authoring tool that eliminates the need to have Flash developers or IT involved in publishing new assets to the site. If you are looking for better ways to engage shoppers with rich product photography you should contact us to learn more.