Utah Open Source Planet

The floor (click to enlarge)

I attended a few sessions on personas. I didn't get it all, but I did have some thoughts that I tried to record. Here are some questions to ask:

• Who is the shopper? Examples include
  • First time buyer
  • Repeat customer with specific frequency
  • Loyalty program member
• What task is the shopper trying to accomplish? Examples include
  • Replenish - buy a product they've bought before
  • Accessorize - buy products related to what they've bought before
  • Research - find information on specific product
  • Browse - just killing time
  • Leave - didn't intend to get here)
  You should have a good list of all the reasons someone might end up at your site.
• What do you know about the shopper? You can find information in a lot of ways
  • Session data - referer, connection speed, IP address, etc.
  • Checkout data - name, address, etc.
  • Survey data - ask the customer!
  • Ratings and reviews by this shopper
  • Email responses
  • Past purchases
  • Clickstream - where has the visitor been on this visit and past visits
  • Analytics data - What percentage of your visitors are repeat visitors? That's one way to measure if you're giving customers relevant products and services. How long do visitors stay?

Using a persona depends on defining tactics for how to engage the customer for various combinations of the above. For each combination try to understand (analytics) how they behave on the site. When something goes wrong (like shopper not getting what they're after), how and where can you intervene?

Personalization should be used to overcome the paradox of choice in ecommerce where longtail economics give more product selection than any offline store can provide. Some simple things:

• Change the homepage for repeat customers vs. new shoppers
• Change the homepage for product search engine browsers
• Add a loyalty box for loyalty program members
• Add a "best sellers" box
• Reorder product search results according to a merchandising strategy
• Add a "click-to-chat" button up when shopper puts a high ticket item in their shopping cart

Here's an example merchandising strategy for product search results:

• Give the newest styles higher priority for shoppers in 'fashion shopper' category
• Give the on-sale merchandise higher priority for shoppers in the 'bargain shopper' category.
• Give in stock priority over back order
• Finally order by price

54% of shoppers notice recommendations and 72% of those find them helpful.

Recommendation engines (customers who bought this item, liked these items...) are a good way of automating some personalization tasks. New recommendation engines personalize the recommendation (customers like me who bought this item, liked these items...). Real time, based on shopper behavior at the moment, not static models.

Speakers seemed to blow off privacy concerns even in the face of direct questioning about it using logic that went something like "we're going to shove products at you on our site it might as well be more relevant."

Tags: ecommerce social+networking

David Friedman of Avenue A | Razorfish is talking about Web 2.0 technogies and ecommerce. The title was "Web 2.0: A reality check" and I was kind of expecting a cautionary tale, but it was more a tale that went something like "if you're not doing this, then you're dead."

The Web has always been a great place for surgical shopping. When you know what you want, you can go get it and the experience is largely good. Web 2.0 technologies give us the opportunity to put more of the fun of a traditional shopping experience into the Web.

• Support multi-dimensional product comparisons. This is becoming expected by customers. Ratings and reviews fall into this category, but go beyond ratings and also make it easy to compare products on your site.
• Build places that make it easy for customers to play and share. How do customers explore your product, engage with it, and share that experience with others.
• Engage in the conversation. Your customer is interested in getting to know you in a different way. They want you to stop just talking to them and begin a conversation.
• Give users and influences the ability to take your content and use it i other places. Customers don't really want to go see you. They don't wake in the morning and think: I can hardly wait to go to an online retail store. So let others bring your store to them.

Tags: ecommerce web social+networking

Some ideas from the social networking and retail panel:

• Engage communities that share our passions, partner with leaders in the this space
• Use caution or mistrust will erode the audience
• Switching barriers are low
• Enable fans to act as advocates
• Social network will become a primary channel for targeted marketing.

Tags: ecommerce social+networking

I got an invitation from John McCain to be his friend on LinkedIn:

So far 103 people are John McCain's friends on LinkedIn. I accepted, naturally, based on our close association in the US Navy--not withstanding the fact that he started at the US Naval Academy the year I was born and was just finishing his service when I was an E-5 attached to a recruiting command in Seattle attending school in the Nuclear Propulsion Program.

I've pondered this invitation for the last few days wondering first if it was associated with the campaign at all and then what staffer took it in their head that LinkedIn was a good way to reach potential voters. Many of McCain's links on LinkedIn have the Navy in their backgrounds, but not all.

I'm looking forward to being able to tap into McCain's ties in the Senate to link to others and reach out to his network. :-) Not sure I see the strategy here.

Tags: social+networking politics

I love Steve Gillmor's writing and how he puts things together. Witness this on Twitter.

Tags: twitter blogging social+networking

If you've been curious about privacy concerns over Facebook Beacon, this demo shows how it works and why some are concerned. I think Moveon.org is totally the wrong organization to take this on, but whatever.

If you're a Firefox user (one more good reason to switch), these instructions show how to use the BlockSite plugin to kill Beacon. This will still allow you to use the rest of Facebook.

Tags: facebook social+networking privacy

What's hot for Christmas 2007? Barbie key signings.

Tags: identity social+networking

Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business School (click to enlarge)

I'm listening to Andrew McAfee's keynote at Defrag. He's talking about how social software can be used inside the enterprise. One of the key tasks facing proponents of social software is to articulate the value.

Any worker has relationships of various strengths with co-workers. They might have strong ties to a core group who they work with all the time and weaker ties to others. There are still others who have the potential to provide value through relationship whom the worker doesn't know yet.

The prototypical tool for strongly tied teams is the wiki. He stresses that too many teams are still emailing things around to each other when tools like wikis would be a better way to manage team interaction. Less disruptive and easier to manage. At the strongly tied core, the use of social software leads to artifact creation. That is, what emerges is a document that represents the team's work product.

Organizations spend a lot of time strengthening strong ties--making them even stronger. Nothing wrong with that. But the people to whom you're strongly tied are not likely to be the source o non-redundant information. You usually know what they know.

Andrew believes that sociologist Mark Granovetter's theory of the strength of weak ties provides an important theory for understanding social software and weakly tied teams.

Social networking software, like Facebook provide a way for people to keep up with what weakly tied networks are up to, what they're thinking. What's more, they're starting to have tools for exploiting that weak network. Social networking software brings in non-redundant information and gives you bridges to other groups. Novel information is the emergent artifact for this group.

Potential colleagues have been traditionally brought into contact with each other through what some research calls "brokers." These are the people who know everyone. Andrew sees the blogosphere as the prototypical tool for brining people together inside the organization. If people are doing what Jon Udell calls "narrating your work," then others in the company can discover that activity and form ties.

Andrew says that most managers don't see the value of blogs, thinking of them as marginally time-wasting. Turn it around and think of it as workers broadcasting to others what they're doing. The benefits are innovation, serendipity, and bridging. Teams emerge from this activity.

The final group is those co-workers with whom we have nothing in common and have nothing to say to each other. This group actually has value to each other. Using prediction markets, the knowledge of a large group of people can be used to create answers create collective intelligence. The emergent artifact is "an answer" to a question about something of value to the company.

He mentions the Hollywood Stock Exchange as a remarkably predictive tool for determining the earning potential of a Hollywood movie. Companies don't use prediction markets enough to harness their employees' knowledge to create answers for the company.

Here's a table that summarizes Andrew's talk:

The concept of ties provides a foundation for conceptualizing value and selecting the right technology. The result is not that these technologies will make all ties equal. There will still be strong, weak, potential, and non-existent ties in an organization. These technologies can be differentiators that increase rather than decrease the differences. The tools allow these differences to be exploited and value to be created from them.

Tags: social+networking defrag

I'm in Denver at Defrag. Eric Nolan, Brad Feld, and Phil Becker have organized it to discuss "the internet-based tools that transform loads of information into layers of knowledge, and accelerate the "aha" moment. Defrag is about the space that lives in between knowledge management, "social" networking, collaboration and business intelligence."

I missed Dave Weinberger's keynote. I didn't want to--he's an engaging speaker and this performance must have been great: I walked in as someone commented that she never expected to come to a tech confernce and cry in the first sessions. But to make it I would have had to fly out yesterday and as much as I love Dave, I love being with my family on Sunday evenings more. Sorry Dave.

Flying out this morning did allow me to see the Moon-Venus conjunction that Doc showed on his blog this morning. Very clear skies and a beautiful morning.

The good news is that IT Conversations will get the audio, so while I didn't hear it live, I'll hear it none-the-less. If you're not here, look for the audio in a few months. I'm sure it's going to be very interesting based on the speakers and topics.

Defrag has all the marks of an engaging, early-stage conference: a smaller-sized crowd that makes for more intimate, honest conversation, not too many vendors to drive the agenda, and lots of familiar faces who I know are interesting to listen to.

Tags: itconversations conferences travel events social+networking information+overload defrag

I don't water ski. Never been. But let me take a minute to tell you why it's a stupid thing to do and all the reasons why you should waste your time doing it--just based on things I've heard. Stupid? Doesn't keep people from doing the same thing about Twitter.

Tags: twitter social+networking journalism