Users are playing, not watching sports – Fifa.com, NBA.com and ESPN.com all saw declines as regular visitors turned off their computers and headed outside to play.
Users are, however, watching blockbusters – Fandango.com, moviefone.com, rottentomatoes.com and netflix.com all saw traffic increases.
Users are being social – Cooking sites like allrecipes.com and cooks.com saw increases, as did dating sites zoosk.com and match.com, while twitter.com and hi5.com saw declines
So i guess we’re all having meals at home and then going out to watch The Expendables with a blind date.
E-commerce was at first a personal activity, where each user performed economically rational decisions regarding products and services. With wishlists, customer reviews and ratings, recommendations and referrals and shopping communities it evolved into what is now usually called Social Commerce.
The past few months have brought some new consumer patterns, that further confirmed the importance of the social graph for e-tailers as confirmed by recent studies by comScore and Performics/ROI Research , with consumers connecting with brand channels (40%), recommending products and services (32%) and finding out about new deals on social networks (37%).
Another study by Sage Pay, revealed that while on average 7% of visitors to an online store make a purchase, when directed from social media network, the percentage of visitors who will go to the transaction section goes up to 71%. Social proof is even more important for e-commerce, as Simon Black, managing director at Sage Pay, says: “The modern shopper often looks for reassurance from a positive review, a special offer to make it more affordable, inexpensive delivery options and a quick, easy and secure way to pay.”
Adding the social dimension to e-commerce website was once difficult, but with the release of social plugins by Facebook (Like buttons, Recommendations, Activity Feed) e-tailers have now instant access to a network of more than 400 million people, used with succes by global brands like Levis or TripAdvisor. It has also expanded the reach of social services and platforms like LivingSocial, SocialAmp or Fluid Fan Shop . And you’re not limited to Facebook: with Cheap Tweet, the best deals right are delivered to your Twitter timeline, with the site picking the best ones ranked by users’ votes and re-tweets. Altough this latest service risks becoming obsolete with the announcement by Twitter of @earlybird.
Entertainment, by definition, is one of the more promising areas where to apply this social dimension of shopping. Take for instance the Facebook app Tickets Together created by Disney that lets users buy tickets fo Toy Story 3, not only for themselves, but also inviting their friends.
Not only does this app makes it easy to choose where to watch the movie (local listing) but it lets you engage with the ones you’d probably will watch the movie with, and invite them right on Facebook, by integrating with ticket-buying services like Fandango.com
Exciting as it is, these are only tools and technologies. What’s really interesting are the new behaviors brought by the social web and connected consumers.
Group Buying
Making purchases together is one of the biggest web trends in 2010. It’s easy tounderstand why: when users reach for their friends to activate a deal (usually a minimum number of buyers is required), a viral loop is created. New models of authentication to social networks (Facebook Connect, Friend Connect, OAuth) have only made it easier and faster. From limited time offers, to price anchoring (show how much it would cost on a normal purchase), it’s one of the most effective ways to generate word-of-mouth.
These deals are available on social web services like Groupon, This Next, Tippr, LivingSocial, TownHog, Homerun , Milo or even as integrated applications such as ‘Special Deal’ group-buy app by preferred Facebook partner Wildfire.
Groupon
Groupon is the biggest player, with a simple proposal: advertise a special business offer, only valid if a certain amount of users purchase it immediately.
Launched in November 2008, it has sold over 7 million online coupons in 70 cities and is now expanding worldwide (UK, DE, ES, PT). Paying attention to small details is their main strenghts: from putting a phone number on every coupon to 2 way ratings (customers rating merchants and vice-versa) it created a vibrant community. Even unsusbcribing from their newsletter is funny.
From June 2009 to January 2010, the number of monthly visitors went from 26,000 to over 2.1 million, increasingly engaged with an average of 2.5 visits per month for each user. And what’s really amazing is that these visits are not coming from unexpected sources. Last January, Facebook represented 44% of all referrals, Twitter 8% and search only around 3%.
And growth is not only in visits but also as a platform, helping third-party developers and affiliate members get the word out about its daily specials. Groupon’s API has become available both as Division API (about cities) and Deals API (about daily deals for specific locations), further explored by integrating with Groupon’s geolocation service.
Another example on how groups and communities will become increasingly important in shopping is Woot.
The basic idea behind Woot is to offer only one discounted product each day, a “One Day, One Deal” policy until the stock is sold out, with no announcement of what’s the next offering. Innovative events and product specials like “Woot-Off”, “Bag Of Crap” or “2-for-Tuesday” coupled with bold marketing have built one vibrant community where it’s members actually have fun shopping.
Woot shows their different business culture, on their Amazon’s acquisition wicked celebration rap
Recently acquired by Amazon, much of the coverage focused on how Amazon captured the opportunity of real-time shopping, but the real value might be on the social side, venturing into new business models where communities represent a bigger role than the usual 20th century e-commerce.
Recently speaking at TEDx Sydney, Rachel explains that “collaborative brands make it easy for communities to act on behalf of their brands”, where we are no longer defined as consumers by our personal possessions, but also by what we are part of, what we share and the groups we belong to.
New trends like swaptrading (Such as Swaptree.com, sort of online dating service for all of your unwanted media), reveals new models of commerce, where trust mechanics and collaborative behaviors are principal. This groundswell of collaborative consumption, is further accelerated by the rise of mobile communication.
Rachel Botsman defines 4 big drivers of the shift to collaborative consumption:
1. A renewed belief in the importance of community
2. A torrent of peer-to-peer social networks and real time technologies
3. Pressing unresolved environmental concerns
4. A global recession that has fundamentally shocked consumer behaviors
People are starting to share resources without sacrificing their lifestyles or personal freedom, supported by 3 clear systems:
1. Redistribution markets (stretch the lifecycle of a a product, reducing waist)
2. Collaborative lifestyles (sharing of resources like money, skills and time) – coworking, couchsurfing or even landshare (http://www.landshare.net/) will become mainstream
3. Product Service Systems, where one pays for the benefit of a product without needing to own the product outright. Examples include rental services like Netflix or Zipcar .
You can get an overview of this new model of consumption on the promo video below:
After the financial crisis, consumers are adopting new behaviors that will impact e-commerce for the years to come. Group buying and collaborative consumption are the latest of these behaviors that brands will need to pay attention to and embrace the value of social capital and not only the monetary side of commerce.
If you know more examples or want to discuss how communities are impacting e-commerce, please drop a note in the comments.
And guess what, it doesn’t run on iPad but on a Android based tablet, an ICD Ultra.
The prototype was presented last week at TED and also at Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, being built on cross-platform runtime Adobe AIR. Altough iPad isn’t really a full web experience by not supporting the Flash Player, the Adobe CS5 packager does allow to turn this experience into a iPad app. You can find out more about the future of digital publishing at Adobe’s blog.
If it is not texting and looking and TV, it’s computer and listen to my iPod (…) If i know i’m gonna miss a show i record it.
I have facebook on my cellphone. I could research a word, do anything on my phone.
— Diamond, 14
The Kaiser Family Foundation released today a report on Generation M(2), a research on media habits of 8-18 year olds, with a sample of more than 2,000 young people across the US. Impressive how this 100% connected generation is using mobile as the main gateway to digital content. Not to mention the multitasking habits. But you knew that already, right?
Key findings of the report include:
Over the past five years, Young people have increased the daily consumption of media from 6:21 to 7:38
An explosion in mobile and online media has fueled
the increase in media use among young people.
Youth who spend more time with media report lower grades and lower levels of personal contentment.
For a short overview of what kids have to say, follow the video below:
Yesterday, the quintessential online ad resource BannerBlog featured two ads for Smart. Both pulled dynamic data — weather and maps — to build a display ad unit. I could be wrong, but the data source was probably some sort of API. For those not so versed in acronyms, Wikipedia to the rescue:
An application programming interface (API) is an interface that a software program implements in order to allow other software to interact with it; much in the same way that software might implement a user interface in order to allow humans to interact with it.
Flickr Mosaic: Crayonbox, constructed with Flickr API. Released under a CCommons license by krazydad
Like digital bridges, API’s request standartized information from public (and sometimes private) web services. From USA Spending to Fedex tracking, from Flickr to Google Maps, the interest for APIs has been traditionally confined to B2B/ERP and the Social Web. But lately the concept is extending beyond these areas: with developers creating exciting and unexpected uses with the new data available, and with consumer brands and the ad industry starting to let go of their closed silos, in essence “letting one thousand flowers bloom“. A good consumer brand example of this trend is the UK grocery chain Tesco, who announced a new API at TechForTesco and invited developers to tinker with its data, search for nutrition facts or send ‘ideas’ to the customer’s ‘ideas inbox’.
Web development frameworks have long been using these large building blocks to enable rapid development by a larger interested audience. They not only ignite the engine of innovation, sometimes stalled by internal corporate politics, but also allow brands to have a comfortable degree of control. With new data sets available, we could start thinking of new kinds of mashups, such as business data built directly into communication solutions, CRM programs feeding custom content or display ads with real-time data, as mentioned in the beginning.
Before a brand dips into this space, it’s challenge is to question which data set respects legal and privacy issues, while at the same time being interesting enough for developers and consumers to act upon. What they shouldn’t be asking is if an API is useful (it’s useful when the data is right).
If you’d like to know more about what’s being done with such web services, I highly recommend checking out the website Programmable Web. It’s a useful resource with over 1500 APIs that have been used in thousands of mashups.
Not Fab from fabulous, but rather Fab from making and using fabbers, machines that can make almost anything, by printing three dimensional objects.
From commercial to the more open-source hardware and software solutions at Fab@home, these machines will enable people to download and print objects, experimenting with shared projects and try out new materials. Fabber owners improve these models and share physical objects with other fabbers, with the same enthusiasm as the pioneers of open source movement.
The wave of innovation brought by Web 2.0 technologies, with a sustainable co-creation by thousands of users, is now expanding to the physical world. The signs are there: from hacker (in the creative sense) communities like Make, Instructables or the more neo-Craftsy website Etsy.com, people are getting more comfortable with the idea of building something with their own hands. It’s about feeling empowered, the hands-on experience of building something, appealing not only to our darwinian survival skills but also have a bit of science fiction premonition (remember Luke Skywalker building C3PO as a young kid?). Yes, because even young kids are starting to love the tinkering, as shown on this TED Talk by Gever Tulley.
If all this seems futuristic to you, just try to imagine how IKEA will look in a decade: instead of boxed items, dozens of 3d printers are available at the cashier. You just take the blueprints and super fast hardware will print that out. Or even better: for smaller items, you just download the schematic at IKEA Fab Store and print them at home.
Yes, it seems far fetched. But so did Augmented Reality a decade ago. I just hope the media won’t hype Fab as much as they did with AR. Universal manufacturing is something that could change society in unexpected ways, the same way Internet did, by redefining industries and democratizing innovation. It comes nonetheless with a new set of dilemmas, such as the degree of experimentation or control of outputs.
As for companies, they’d better start thinking how their old models of patents stand up to this new paradigm, with a product’s life cycle being dramatically redefined. And, who knows, maybe even involve the consumers in true User Generated Products.
The TrendWatch is the collective postings of some of the FullSIX Group’s designers, strategists, and consultants on new media and marketing trends. It is meant to be an impromptu think-tank, and is a way for us to share theories and beliefs about how we think communication and connectivity is evolving.
We work for The FullSIX Group; a leading full service marketing agency with digital DNA. From our 15 international offices with over 600 employees, we constantly embrace and encourage innovation to make integrated marketing and communication campaigns that are more accountable and efficient for our clients.
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