Great panel sharing their experience "doing" social shopping. Here's thegroup at Rapleaf's Social Graph Symposium:
- Shawn Bercuson - Principal at Lightbank
- Joe Davis - CEO at CoreMetrics
- Jon Kubo - CIO at Wet Seal
Jon Kubo at Wetsealis sharing about their intent for thier iPhone app to drive people into the stores. They want folks to have an outfit-matching utility but more importantly, they want to have folks publish their shopping activity out across their social graph. They created an app where two people can essentailly "Webex"-style converge on a ecommerce page and see what each other is doing (e.g.circle a product).
I love that their Facebook pagedrives people to "Like" to unlock the experience (it only appears to do that). When I asked him about Facebook's new Open Graph initiative, he acknowledged that this model may be more of a threat. He is pretty far along with implementing social features for his site/apps/etc... and surrendering the primary "login" to Facebook may present a problem as big as the benefit. But his biggest problem is the realization that social activity on an ecommerce site diverts people away from buying.
Oh, and they are now getting more traffic from Facebook vs. Google
Grouponwas Lightbank's first B2C play. It grew from 400 in 2008 to 5m today. Shawn, a principal at Lightbank, really emphasizes connecting and activating your brand ambassadors. This is a guy trying to drive business results (to reap return on his investment). It's refreshing to hear a business person place such value on "influence planning" (our term today)
Joe is all about measurement. He has an approach to 'intelligent offers' which is a great sound bite - The right offers to the right person at the right time - or something along these lines.
Another sharp session.
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