Recipe for Social Commerce

As a continuation to my previous post on Social Commerce, this one follows the implementation of a Social Commerce project I led as a technical director for almost 1.5 years. The project was for a very well known instrument manufacturer that set on a mission to create a very unique site offering engaging eLearning content, entertainment videos, Social Networking and eCommerce.

Site Features

With a laundry list of features, and a highly customized online eLearning system, we set out to deliver the following core site features/functions.

> User and group-level blogging and forums
> Live Chat sessions
> Streaming HD eLearning and entertainment video content (live and pre-recorded)
> Streaming audio content (live and pre-recorded)
> YouTube-like video sharing
> Flickr-like photo sharing
> News articles
> Wikipedia-like library of articles
> eCommerce Store
> End-to-end site search
> Single sign-on user accounts

Technology

To deliver the site, a combination of platforms and technical solutions were used.

> Community Server
- User for all social networking features and functionality
> AspDotNetStorefront
- Used for all eCommerce features and functionality
> Custom eLearning System
- This was built on a customized eLearning database, layered with rich .NET and Flash user controls (e.g. video players, chat with instructor, note taking etc.)
> Custom Flash Video Player
- These were used throughout the site to stream video content at multiple angles, resolutions and chapters/sections
> LHTTPD
- Used to allow for “scrubbing” across a video at any position and start the stream at that position without having to wait for all of it to buffer.
> FFMPEG
- Used to convert multi-format video content to Flash format when users and content producers uploaded their video and audio files.
> Representational State Transfer (REST) Web Services
- The core API that wrapped Community Server and AspDotNetStorefront API was built on REST for improved response times, scalability, compatibility.
> CuteChat for Community Server
- Used to deliver the live chat sessions

Kinder Egg Capsule for Storing iPhone Headset

Hard to find, and a fond childhood memory for many, I picked up and munched down a Kinder Egg from my local store. I noticed that the yellow capsule containing the Kinder Surprise can be used as a storage device for various tiny objects… One of which happens to be my iPhone headset. Attached is an image…

Other uses include storing SIM cards, SD cards and other tiny knick-knacks that you may find yourself at a loss for storing in a safe place while on the road.

How to ATTACK a Project

Apologies to all (if any of you are out there ) for the extended silence on my blog… Work, amongst other things in my personal life, have taken a bit of a priority. Perhaps its time for a new post to freshen things up. So, here we go…

After spending some time considering some of the most important principles to enforce and variables to track on an IT project, I outlined a condensed list that unknowingly shuffled around spells out ATTACK – rather fitting perhaps, then again slightly humurous…

Below is a breakdown of each letter in the acronym and how you can apply them in your project.

Accountability

Accountability is essentially your key catalyst towards getting things done. Making project participants accountable for their deliverables fuses their career progress/security with their ability to deliver to what they commit to.

Traceability

What good is a project manager/director without an ability to trace historical events for auditing, planning and confirming the validity of planned tasks ahead. Saving every email, document and meeting minute you come across can help you leverage that historical knowledge and align your team in the directions that were originally planned.

Transparency

Project transparency to key project stakeholders is critical. Visibility on he current state of a project’s budget, time line, resources and planning is crucial for the team to align and also provide the necessary feedback/input to help direct each others decisions.

Accelerate

Moving at an accelerated pace goes hand-in-hand with being constantly paranoid about the condition of a project – paranoia, in a positive sense however. If you are paranoid about the progress of a specific task, it proactively forces you to accelerate your pace and move faster than you are typically acclimated to.

Commitment

Commitment is part of remaining motivated on a project. When motivation is low, your commitment can easily degrade and performance within a project can quickly deteriorate. To maintain commitment within the team, it is important to strengthen everyone’s motivation and “positive vibe” – this is part of knowing how to effectively manage and communicate top-down as a project manager/director.

KPIs

No project should move forward without tracking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Anything from the performance of project participants to, budget/resource metrics – all of it helps. This gives you the reporting you need as a project manager/director to quickly act on weak areas in your project and also provide reporting to project sponsors/management.

Building a Social Commerce Site – A First Hand Experience

This blog post will be part of a string of articles related to Social Commerce and my first-hand experience at designing and building one of the most compelling and unique Social Commerce sites for the music industry. As for the details on this site, you will get a chance to see it publicly within a month and experience the rich media, content and social commerce model it delivers. Stay tuned!

To first set some perspective and align your understanding of Social Commerce, below are details on what Social Commerce is and the current opportunity in the market for e-Commerce sites to pursue it.

“Social commerce is a subset of e-Commerce in which the active participation of customers and their personal relationships are at the forefront. The main element is the involvement of a customer in the marketing of products being sold e.g. recommendations and comments from customers.” and the eventual monetization of this process through the sale of a product – Wikipedia

Your typical e-Commerce site converts at 2%. Meaning, an average of 2 in 100 people purchase products when visiting an e-Commerce site. Sounds unrealistic doesn’t it? Well, it is mostly true – granted sites like Amazon, Eastbay and NewEgg do much better.

Social Commerce models will help break this barrier by engaging buyers with entertainment and rich community content to keep them online longer, therefore increasing the conversion rate. The longer a user is on your site being entertained by video/photo/testimonial reviews of products, the more likely they will eventually buy something.

Taking this a step further, let’s take a look at the evolutionary steps of online commerce. Brick-and-mortar stores in the early/mid 1990’s started pursuing an online presence with e-Commerce sites and online catalogs. This led to the massive growth of online commerce during the Internet bubble with sites like Amazon for example, offering a wide variety of products for sale online.

The whole concept of shopping from your home or office was a breakthrough – not needing to go to the store and hassle with lines, low inventory etc. became a thing of the past.

The past 2-3 years have been shifting online commerce into a new evolutionary phase. This phase is driven by the fact that online commerce is unable to get anywhere close to the 70% offline revenue generated by brick-and-mortar stores. But why is this?! Well, simply because 2% of online shoppers actually buy something when visiting an average e-Commerce site, and also because e-Commerce sites are not “sticky” – meaning they are not engaging.

The current state of e-Commerce sites are that they act as online catalogs with some features of user participation (e.g. reviews, ratings and comments). Clearly not enough to keep buyers entertained. Alternatively, if you walk into the Apple store, for example, you are entertained and engaged – this keeps the customer in the store experiencing the product physically and sharing experiences with others. This enhances the emotionally-driven shopping cycle that attributes to 70% of offline revenue being generated by “product discovery”.

Product discovery is driven by advice from friends, feeling and trying a product out, learning from others what their experiences are etc. Social community sites that generate this content (e.g. Engaget, DP Reviews etc.) generate the online content necessary to bridge that “product discovery” experience. The future of social commerce is about blending content that these sites generate with an e-Commerce model – keep the buyer engaged, and provide that instant buy-now capability.

Now for some interesting numbers…

In an IDC estimate, social networks only made about $400 million in revenues in 2006, but could make as much as $1 billion in 2007. AC Nielsen also noted that nearly 40% of Americans say they participate in online communities, with sites around hobbies, shared personal interests, and health-related issues among the most popular. All these numbers point to signs of an emerging online market space.

Well, all this ideas and numbers are great and fantastic, but how can we get it done?

The answer lies in technologies/solutions that are already available, and were in fact used on the soon to be launched site.

There are several advanced e-Commerce platforms that offer the out-of-box functionality needed to put a store online almost instantly. Products like AspDotNetStorefront for small to mid, and soon large, sized businesses, MediaChase ECF for mid to large size businesses, and Microsoft Commerce Server for large to enterprise businesses.

Taking these platforms and blending/merging them with Community Server, allows you to leverage the community aspects/features into the e-Commerce model. Product reviews, videos, photos, forums, live chat and much more will help add that “stickiness” to an e-Commerce site and break the 2% barrier that many e-Commerce businesses are striving to breach.

From a technical aspect, these types of blended products will provide single sign-on and unified accounts, seamless community-to-commerce and commerce-to-community purchasing and publication processes, integrated administrative interfaces and highly customized and extended applications running on a unified SOA model.

In conclusion, there is a great market opportunity picking up steam, and solutions out there that can be leveraged to provide for a social commerce platform.

In my next post, I will present the project/site I worked on and discuss the technical solutions used to deliver it.

Saving Money with Technology

Below is a list of interesting tools you can use today to start saving money – especially during these tight times.

Firefox Tools

RetailMeNot automatically pops in to let you know when a site you’re at has freebies and discounts available, while PriceDrop adds buttons to Amazon.com’s item pages to help you get notifications when prices go down. If you’re more prone to random browsing for killer discounts, the Woot Watcher helps you get the jump on those ridiculous deals on random items at Woot!. Make it hard for yourself to pay full price, and bank the savings however you choose.

Personal Finance and Money Saving Tools

> Mint
> Yodlee
> Wesabe
> PearBudget
> MyGallons
> BillShrink
> SaleGasm
> Lastly, the Golden Money List

iPhone Applications

And for those of us graced with the iPhone…

> AccuFuel
> FuelGauge
> Gas Hog
> CarStat
> Where