We’re getting ready to launch the new Crowdstorm product (V3) tonight and Sobek is currently tweaking the google adwords code while I’m browsing iStockPhoto looking for better images of numbers in circles! Strange what you do late at night…

I liked the image above as it reminds me of the networking effect of people sharing product recommendations with each other.. Right, time for another cup of tea and onwards and upwards..

New research out from eMarketer again, argues that shoppers are increasingly trusting each other when it comes to finding credible information advice about products or companies:

The fact is that knowledgeable and trusted peers provide valuable advice and insight to people trying to find the right products to buy and gain the advice and information they need. In fact, JupiterResearch reckons that online social network users were three time more likely to trust their peers’ opinions over advertising when making purchase decisions:

 So, what does this really mean… Well, I think that people are actually getting more savvy in how they find and absorb information and that people are now looking to credible expert sources and trusted peers compared to just lists and lists of anonymous or not-related reviews. Ultimately no-one wants to be fooled by advertising or biased reviews, and having trusted sources from experts, opinion leaders, peers, and friends – can really help people feel more confident in their product research.

Social Graph + Research + Shopping -> 2008 is the year..
 

There has been a lot of talk about the social graph and the best practice for extending, enhancing, and sharing it. Something which we’re following very closely here at Crowdstorm due to the role this graph can play in improving the product research process. Let’s say you are looking for a new 27″ LCD screen for your bedroom and have no idea where to start – a few recommendations or comments from friends and colleagues you trust will help point you in the right direction, especially if they are actually knowledgeable in that space.

Now to get to this kind of implementation, there needs to be that motivation and incentive to use “the crowd” in this way, but firstly you have to provide an easy way to bring in existing social graph connections without having to force people down the “add this person” route over and over again. So, this has led us to heavily research the space of importing connections from other applications and sites into the Crowdstorm registration process:

In an Mark Zuckerberg interview about data portability on facebook on ReadWriteWeb, he stated that “data portability is an important direction in which the web is moving and that fundamental openess between sites is inevitable, yet Facebook must be strict about privacy controls”. The argument is that other applications should not be allowed to share user data as the user loses control over it, which is actually a load of codswallop.

The fact is that you should give people free choice and enough good information to help them make it – which would include whether or not to to give your data access to a piece of software or application and allow what it can do with it. Zuckerberg knows this but is actually stalling while they try and figure out how a feature like this would stop a competitor replicating their site and making it better, porting all that data across.

In my view, the user controls the data, not the site. The process should go along the lines of:

1. Import the social graph data from any chosen site or service
2. Add value to it by enhancing the data within (such as adding trust between people or contextual shopping knowledge)
3. Utilise that data as part of the service to improve the consumer offering
4. Allow that enhanced social data set to be exported again to any other source

This process continually improves the social graph data set through collaboration and sharing. So, back to steps (1) and (4) here, what are good examples of sites that allow exporting of social graph data?

	Twitter	You can bring back a list of people you follow and those that follow you, and while you can’t invite them into the new network – you can get it to find existing people on it and connect with them.
	Flickr	As per Twitter, you can find existing Flickr contacts on the new network and agree to connect, but can’t invite directly via email.
	Gmail	You can authorise access to the gmail contact list and then manually select which of those contacts to invite into the new network directly or connect to people already in it.
	Yahoo Mail	As per gMail / googlemail.
	Facebook	As far as we can tell, you can import most bits of user data from their API except email addresses which means you could at least match up people on the Crowdstorm network who are also connected on Facebook, but not invite them directly.
	OpenSocial	Google’s api specification allows the importing of people relationships and emails depending on what is allowed by the site that implemented the protocol e.g. Bebo
	hCard	A microformat that can be imported into the network and link to other relevant hCards.
	CSV / VCF	Text based file formats for manually uploading lists of contacts and email addresses – only for tech savvy users.

We’re still looking into the Hotmail and AOL mail side of things as it’s not entirely clear what data services they have available for contact importing. So what have we missed? Anything important?

I’ll follow up with another post on our implementation of this and other good examples from around the web – just as soon as we’ve figured it out ourselves!

Technorati Tags: ecommerce, enhancing, graph, crowd, social

We’re really pleased to be nominated for the social shopping category in the Open Web Awards run by Mashable. It’s great to be noticed and we’ve got some tough competition, and as of the last count, we’re about 25% behind the leader! So – every vote counts right now and we’d really appreciate it if you could quickly vote for us with just a single button click on their site, via the button below:

I know it’s a PR thing but it’s important for us and we would get to go to San Francisco to the awards ceremony. In fact, if you get us the most votes through your company – I’ll get the whole Crowdstorm team to wear your company t-shirts to the event – how’s that?

Carrying on with the social + shopping trend, a report has recently come out from the e-tailing group in association with PowerReviews, on this new breed of social researcher.

Key findings were that 70% of users see customer reviews and ratings on products as being very important to choosing a product, 41% liked customer supplied photos, and 22% being customer supplied video:

82% of social researches found reading reviews better than researching a product in-store with a (ahem!) knowledgeable sales associate, and 75% found it helpful to narrow product selection based on feedback from people like them with similar interests.

This last bit is particularly interesting as it’s the first real bit of research touching on the “getting reviews from people you trust / similar to you” in the research / shopping sphere. After all – whose review would you trust more:

1. a person called “anonymous”
2. user “bob” who wrote a decent review but you don’t know them or if they have good knowledge about the product range
3. someone in your trusted network
4. someone in your trusted network who has knowledge about the product space and might actually own a similar product or the one you’re looking at

A good spot by Conor O’Neill on an article published in e-consultancy about whether online reviews should be policied or verified.
There’s a mention about Reevoo and their strategy on only taking “verified reviews” to encourage some sort of standard, although the article goes on to say:

“While this isn’t infallible, it does virtually guarantee a higher standard of feedback, since we at least know people have actually bought the product. But does that make these reviews 100% ‘accurate’?. By comparison, you can visit Amazon, log on, and leave a review on a product that you might not have necessarily bought. As such, you could argue that there are a higher proportion of phoney reviews on Amazon compared with Reevoo. But what does this really mean? Does it mean that consumers with no purchase history should be banned from submitting reviews? Seems harsh. Maybe they just buy their products offline.”

Very true – what if you bought the product months ago too from somewhere not affiliated with the company taking the verified reviews – surely you should be entitled to an opinion?

It goes on..

“What about journalists who don’t even buy products! They (do or don’t) play with journobait despatched by happy PR bunnies before forming an ‘expert’ view, and writing an expert review. A review which then appears in a magazine or newspaper. Are these reviews any more valid than one submitted on Amazon, by a user who didn’t buy the item through Amazon?”

Again – good point. How do you assess the quality of a user or an expert review – how do you pick between them. Fundamentally, and without always meaning to do a Crowdstorm plug, you’re clever enough to make your own decisions and most likely to believe users you already know or trust, have demonstrated knowledge for that product category in the community, and which review sites / magazines you like the best.

So we don’t need to enforce verified reviews to do this – we just need to let everyone publish reviews if they want to and give people the power and the tools to filter the wheat from the chaff.

According to adage, Facebook will add a social shopping component among other things to it’s service tomorrow (tuesday), or at least Zuckerburg will announce it.

What I’m curious to know is whether it is more along the lines of “your friend bob bought product x” and give you an ongoing stream of whenever your friends buy something (which could get very tedious to be honest and needs the retailers to buy in) or tapping into the recommendation aspect of things more with regards to product q&a.

I can’t imagine they would release anything that hasn’t had a lot of thought put into it – so we’re waiting with baited breath here to see what they’ve come up with. Does anyone have any insight?

So this week is a really important one for us as we open the doors for the UK site to everyone on Nov 1st – this thursday. So we’re ramping up our SEO work, tidying up lots of loose ends, importing our new feed partners (we have nearly 50 now), cleaning up the design, and 25+ other things.

We should start to see some PR coverage filtering in over the coming week as we announce the first stage of our product offering and how it helps consumers. Over the weekend, two mentions of note:

The FT covered a piece on The Web’s best Incarnations being here to stay. Now to be fair, they did actually cover off the old site when talking about niche products so they haven’t actually updated their research recently – but hey, I’m not complaining.

Mad.co.uk did a piece on Kelkoo UK founder launches new site and I really do like the quote they used at the end from me:

“The biggest challenge will be getting people out of the mindset that they have to type a product into Google and then filter the information themselves.”

As the mad.co.uk site is locked down to subscribers (!), I’ve included an image of the post here – just click the link or the image below to read it.