Recently, Econsultancy published a piece on ten great e-commerce product pages. Following our research into the social shopping explosion we wanted to find out exactly how ‘social’ some of these retailers are. All of which will be popular destinations for consumers this Christmas.

We’ve judged these ground-breaking online retailers on the following criteria:

• Do they provide on-site reviews (1 pt per method of review)
• Do they have links to off-site social media estates (1 pt per platform)
• Do they actively engage and interact with customers (1 pt per platform engaging on)
• Personalised site recommendations (4 pts)
• Innovative, quirky, value added social media offerings (1 pt per offering)
• Exclusive offers for members? (1 pt)
• Colourful and entertaining campaigns (1 pt per campaign)
• Blogs (1 pt)

We all know Amazon will be a big hit for consumers this Christmas and the customer review ratings and personalised recommendations on the site provide useful tools for purchasing decisions.  In terms of being truly ‘social’ though it’s the fashion retailer that takes  advantage of social media channels to gain fans, really involving and engaging with them.  Asos even allows fans to review items via its own YouTube videos and engage with each other via community pages.  We’ve seen a rise in popularity of collaborative online shopping through sites like Groupon, so is this the next big step for retailers in 2011?

It’s apparent from our research on social commerce, the articles and conversations we pick up on, that it’s an exciting time for retailers. Especially when it comes to social media.  Do you have any recommendations for great sites and product pages that are being smart with social media?  As ever, we’d like to hear your thoughts…

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Yesterday Apple launched their first social network, Ping. Less than 24 hours later this new platform has received extremely mixed reviews and users are already highlighting issues with the system. With numerous social networking sites already established, and platforms such as Facebook and Twitter dominating the arena, where does Ping fit in?

Embedded in the latest version of iTunes, Ping, as you might imagine, revolves around music. Ping is designed to aid the discovery of new music and facilitate conversations between music lovers. When you login you can see the activity of your friends, including information about music they’ve purchased and are listening to. Apple are also plugging the fact that users can follow celebrities, much as they can with Twitter and Facebook, allowing celebs another opportunity to connect with their fans and endorse artists/albums. Fans can then purchase the music their idol loves by clicking the handy link taking them to the Apple store. Genius.

It is worth mentioning that privacy restrictions on this site allow users to choose whether their updates can be seen by all users or only by users they have allowed to follow them.

So what does this mean for social media? Well, with an already established fan base there is a strong likelihood that Apple’s Ping could push similar platforms, such as Last.fm and Spotify, off the radar. This also doesn’t bode well for MySpace, the site has already been dwarfed by Facebook and is now clinging to its status as a platform for new artists to showcase work. It could be that Ping becomes the new, more convenient, networking site for music related conversations…

However, so far reviews have not been great. Users have pointed out flaws such as the fact that Ping only displays music people have purchased in the iTunes Store, not their entire collection, resulting in a skewed view of a user’s music tastes. Further, users are limited to listing only three genres of music that they are interested in, and the music suggestions that Ping generates based on these three genres are extremely generic and mainstream, not the niche, up-and-coming bands that music fans may be looking for!

So, will it or won’t it take off? Right now it’s anybody’s guess. With mixed, predominantly negative, reviews, Ping hasn’t got off to a great start. But let’s not forget this is an Apple product, they have a huge, dedicated, fan base that has to have any product Apple releases.

All that’s left now is to sit back and watch how this unfolds… Ping has arrived. For now.

To be continued…

Related articles by Zemanta

• Ping: First Look at the iTunes Social Network (nytimes.com)

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With Facebook having just announced it recently hit the half billion user mark and with Twitter declaring this week that it received its 20 billionth tweet, it’s hard to comprehend that there may be another phenomenon biting at the heels of the giants of social media. Over recent years we have seen other contenders try, and fail, to reach the top spot – even Google can’t seem to be able to do it despite their continued attempts.

So when I heard the recent hype around microblogging site Tumblr, I wanted to check it out and see what all the fuss is about.

Founded by David Karp in 2007, Tumblr was created as a way for the average person to easily manage a blog without the complications inherent in a search engine-friendly application like WordPress. Think of your grandmother being able to start a blog and that gives you an idea.

To date Tumblr has about 6.6 million users and apparently 25,000 new people are signing up every day. Tumblr is clearly different to MySpace or Facebook – while the idea is the same (to connect to people with similar interests or background) the venue is far different. Described as the space “in between Twitter and Facebook” the site allows users to upload images, video, audio and quotes to their pages by emphasising the types of graphic content which can’t be reproduced on rival formats. Users can then follow others whose posts become visible in a live “stream”, these snippets can then be “liked” by clicking on a heart or “reblogged” to the users own followers. What sets this aside from its competitors is that the volume of followers is not given, in an attempt to boost the “community” feel of the site, which values commentary above simple links to outside sites.

My verdict?…well, our American friends across the pond are beginning to embrace it with open arms, with Newsweek and Rolling Stone both signing up to engage their readers in conversation. Will the UK be next to jump on the bandwagon? Tumblr’s figures are certainly impressive and there seems to be a growing momentum behind the website and despite the fact, in many ways, Tumblr does offer what Facebook and Twitter do, it does this in a very unique way. I’m watching this space!

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Just for fun I thought I’d use Google Trends to compare the leading social networks in terms of how much traffic they’re getting from UK web users. This first chart shows that Bebo and MySpace both declined at a fairly similar rate over the past 12 months, while Twitter has been steadily climbing.

What’s interesting is that all of these sites seem to have levelled out over the past couple of months at approximately the same volume of visitors – between 110k and 150k unique visitors per day. Obviously there are some clear long term trends here, so it will be worth revisiting this graph in a few months time to see how things have changed.

Now let’s see what happens when we open the door and let the big hairy Facebook gorilla into the room…

That puts things into perspective a little, doesn’t it? But when we look at the trend, it seems Facebook has been stuck on a plateau of around 2 million unique daily visitors for the past 12 months. If anything, the trend seems to be drifting ever so slightly downwards.

There are a couple of caveats to this. First, this data is based on Google’s own estimate of website traffic, rather than the sites’ own analytics – although I’d argue that if you were going to trust any third-party estimate of traffic volume, Google’s would be the most accurate.

Secondly, these are visitor numbers, not user numbers. Facebook’s UK user numbers have increased over the same period (although they seem to have levelled out recently too) which could indicate that users are visiting the site less.

Another issue with these stats is that they are likely to miss a large chunk of regular Twitter users who do not use the site through their browser, but through third party tools like TweetDeck. Some analysis puts the number of users who access the service via such tools at 68%, so that’s a potentially huge volume of Twitter users who aren’t accounted for in this graph.

This would put Twitter far higher up the chart than Bebo and MySpace, but still nowhere close to Facebook.  Despite a clear upward trend, Twitter still has a long way to go before it can compete with Facebook in terms of audience size.

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Positive and negative comments in groups on social network sites, such as Facebook, Flickr and MySpace reveal Disney, Nintendo and Google are the most popular brands. This comes from our latest research, Brands in Social Media.

Social networking groups are proving very popular in the UK. They are a very public demonstration of the connections between people and brands. Popular groups can quickly swell in numbers and influence large numbers of consumers online.

Understanding the sentiment of brand conversations is crucial. Frequency and popularity in the conversation is meaningless without a clear picture of whether the discussion is positive or negative.

We assessed groups set-up on three of the most popular social network sites: Flickr, Facebook and MySpace. We compared groups against the Interbrand Top 100 Global Brands. Groups that mention the top 100 brands were examined and brand sentiment (positive, negative or neutral in tone) recorded.

Automotive brands had the most loyal fan-based groups, Microsoft the most negative groups and Google hardly any negative comments at all! In fact, most Google groups were either advocating the search engine or explaining ways of using the technology.

The full report will be on our website on Thursday – for those that want the detail.

Technorati Tags: Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, Disney, Nintendo, Google, Brands in Social Media, Social networking, Microsoft

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