shopping

A interesting post from Romain Boyer last week: Le futur du commerce social n’est pas sur facebook.

If I understand Romain’s views correctly:

• Facebook does not have the right functionality for online commerce
• Facebook does not wish to develop e-commerce functionality

Having sweated blood and tears for years devising, developing and installing e-merchandising functionalities on our clients’ sites which would enable them to stand out on the web, it’s true that I would have been rather annoyed to see everything appearing on Facebook with a standard shopping model shared by every trader on the planet.

Even if no one asks my opinion, certainly Facebook won’t, it’s right to assume that social commerce won’t happen just on Facebook.

But then, dear reader, where will social commerce take place if it’s not on Facebook? You’d really like to know … me too!

In his conclusion, Romain Boyer talks about “real concepts”. If it’s too soon to say exactly what these concepts will be, it is possible to identify certain possible directions they could take. I’m thinking out loud, so don’t hesitate to give me a slap, dear reader, if I talk rubbish!

Direction number 1: Less noise please

Consumers are fed up with the anonymity of pseudonyms which allow anyone to say anything any way they like, either because they have forgotten to think or because that brings them in money.

Tomorrow’s winning concept will publish the name of the contributor and thus encourage experience, reflection, correct spelling and politeness.

Direction number 2: Detachment, overview

When you let go of your mouse and look around you, you realise that there will be many of you involved in these future venues for social commerce.

Of course, if I’m only interested in my friends’ opinions, I can be satisfied with the gentle babbling on their facebook walls. The problem is that my friends don’t necessarily talk about the products I’m interested in buying and that the opinion of a few friends is not particularly significant if I want to get a really serious view

For example, yours truly, who has had to change the turbo on his brand new Renault twice, the first time at 17.000 kilometres, tends to repeat the mantra “Renault, everyday a different noise”, when you mention this make to him. The truth is that it’s perfectly possible that Renault have manufactured reliable cars since 2004. Or Peugeot (Power steering went at 35.000 kilometres).

If I want to get some really useful feedback, I need a system which can give me the overall opinion of all those who have contributed reviews. Moreover, I don’t want to be forced to wade through endless lists of reviews, I want to be able to restrict my search to all those, for example, who think that battery performance is poor. Or that the game is great for a two-year old kid (I was thinking of “red fish” on ipad)

The winning concept will allow you to combine all views in an intuitive, easily-readable format.

Direction number 3: a touch of intelligence

Very few systems allow you to use reviews and comments to search for products. So it’s all the more strange that consumers’ reviews are used for … finding products.

The future winning concept will allow reviews and comments to be used as fuel in a totally innovative search engine.

Direction number 4: Let’s cast out the traders from the temple

If you are going to go to the trouble of being innovative in new digital “social” spaces, and if these spaces are useful for improving consumption because they express opinions in a more democratic, more extensive, more coherent way, then why restrict these spaces to the world of commerce?

As far as I am concerned, a genuine “social commerce” concept, should also function in “social local affairs”, “social problem-solving for my business”, “social what attitude should I adopt if my 12 year-old daughter wants to go in for body piercing”.

If any of you are interested by these directions, please get in touch with me. We are currently working on concrete prototypes and are looking for partners (clients?) to use them in applications!!!

Stan Zeltner

badgeville icons

This morning I read this on my ipad:

“ Google’s Big Problem: It Ain’t What You Think

As the search giant ponders its future, it must recognize its “ user experience” problem, especially vs. rivals with more consumer-friendly offerings”

Google’s minimalist interface is starting to pose it a problem. So could fashion be moving (again) from Roman to Gothic?

I remember spending hours spent doing research for the pleasure … of finding exotic, unusual or amusing links which interested me. When the web was in its infancy, just finding relevant information was enough, the chance to be a part of it all brought surfers online. Yesterday, they were satisfied just to be there, today they want more fun Numerous sites enhance the user’s experience by adding a fun element:

• Trying on clothes : fitsme.com, myvirtualmodel.com
• Going shopping in 3D : shopping life, potoroze

Enhanced reality enables digital information to be displayed on a “street view” map.

For less frivolous activities, the completely new notion of “enhanced survey” allows you not only to answer questions but also to compare results and share them.

Another approach consists of transforming navigation into a game, it’s called gamification, and here’s its wikipedia definition :

“Gamification is the use of game play mechanics[1] for non-game applications (also known as “funware”)[2], particularly consumer-oriented web and mobile sites, in order to encourage people to adopt the applications”.

As far as social shopping is concerned, could a new concept not be devised in which products or services became pieces in a board game?

We could have fun inventing the rules of this new game in the context of a round in which, for example, you would have to evaluate food recipes according to the following criteria :

• dietary
• appearance
• taste
• cost
• ease of preparation

Let’s imagine:

A system for collecting reviews and comments

Classification from best to worst (tops/flops) of the different recipes

• Advanced options for collating the reviews to enable “widgets” to be created for each recipe
• The ability to see the opinions of people who are sceptical about just the dietary aspect, for example
• Search results for recipes meeting dietary and low-cost criteria
• An option for my 13 year old son to see “what other 13 year olds think about this recipe”, especially taste
• Everything linked to a gamification system like badgeville

In this way we would have an intelligent and amusing system which would be useful for the consumer, also for the brand themselves.

What do you think?

We plan to play around with this at the start of 2011. Anyone like to volunteer to play with us? I’m thinking of brands which would like to test the concept or bloggers who would be interested in creating reviews of subjects which interest them.

Stan

We took part in the Nuit des Technos organized by IKSO and Sophie Granier in Marseille on Thursday 14th October and displayed our www.lesvinsauverre.com presentation.

A fantastic setting (the docks), lots of fun presentations: 3D screens, with and without glasses, a virtual bar, an animated virtual carpet, digital name badges, payment by phone, and lots of others I must have missed!!!
Once again we were able to confirm how quickly visitors took to the lidoli review system, its fun approach with summary of overall voting patterns by colour and classification by criteria.

As far as our selection of wines was concerned, Le Tariquet is still in the lead and by a considerable margin.
We left at about 1 a.m., rather tired and with a stack of interesting business cards and maybe a few clients.
We’ll be back next year.

I risk talking rubbish in this post, because my knowledge of the hotel trade is limited. You have been warned, feel free to comment, I’m not afraid of learning.
The big vertical platforms have assumed great importance in the hotel and restaurant business. A storm of negative reviews can easily damage your turnover. It will then take time to restore your e-reputation to where it was before this crisis.
So I ask myself these rather naive questions:

• Why don’t hotels ask for a review when the guest is checking out, exactly at the moment when the guest is standing in front of them?
• Why don’t restaurants ask for feedback when they present the bill?
Today, with QRCODES, you can offer customers a fun way of giving their opinion from whichever smartphone they possess.

The advantages of this suggestion are pretty obvious:
• They’ll know much sooner if there is a problem and they can solve it much more quickly.
• They can improve their internet ranking (and why not on the big vertical American portals? – we can but dream!).
• A customer who has given his opinion once probably won’t return to give it again.

Moreover, it seems to me that you can put together a much more accurate review in this way, for example by inserting qrcodes on the menu in order to get some feedback on dishes which work and those which don’t.
So why don’t tourist offices and hotel and restaurant syndicates offer this kind of service to their members? (lidoli can help them do just that!)

Am I talking nonsense?

It was with great hopes and a certain amount of apprehension that I loaded up my Peugeot Tepee on Monday morning with stools, a bar, cases of wine and loads of other stuff.

It was to be the first time that we we’d present lidoli direct to “real” clients.

Lionel and Justin from flysurf.com gave me tremendous help in conceiving and developing a theme for our stand. Being not particularly well-placed (we were the last to reserve a space), we felt it absolutely vital that we come up with something which would attract people to our stand. We hit on the idea of setting up a demo e-commerce wine site,
Pierre Edouard, who has a well-known wine bar in Banon en Provence (France), selected and supplied us with 6 wines: 2 reds, 2 rosés, 2 whites.

The idea was to set up a friendly, welcoming space where you could discover lidoli whilst tasting some interesting wines.
Thanks to help from Kevin, Pascal and Thomas, who met us on Monday at Porte de Versailles, we were able to set up our stand in spite of all the stuff we’d forgotten or lost and the inevitable last-minute surprises.

From the very first day, Tuesday, we were aware of something happening: lots of interest, requests for explanations and details of cost.

Pascal, Kevin and Thomas worked like Trojans to present the product, which really reassured me and allowed me to stand back and work out what was really interesting most the visitors to our stand.
Even if the concept of a horizontal review interests lots of people (there are currently very few systems like this), I realised that the combination of the coloured image from « Regnier’s Abacus » and the lidoli multi-criteria review system is very powerful indeed.

We have, in fact, a system which, if you like, « draws » an image of the visitors’ perceptions of the products. As Confucius said, “A picture is worth a thousand words”.

Lidoli’s stand at e-commerce 2010
There was an unexpected confirmation of a very positive reaction to lidoli in an article on a blog by Fred Cavazza, as well as by an increasing number of qualified leads from visitors to our stand.

So I returned home on Friday, in the pouring rain, exhausted but encouraged by the notion that lidoli was going to find a market more rapidly than we had expected.

Thanks to Kevin, Justin, Moezz, Alain, Pascal, Thomas, Lionel, Pierre Edouard without whom I would not have been able to write this article.

If you wish to visit our fake e-winery, click here

We are setting up more and more meetings to present lidoli.

Reactions are generally positive.

lidoli is a system which is easy to understand and whose advantages are easy to demonstrate.
However, I’m frustrated at having to confine its use, for marketing reasons, to e-commerce.
The basic way in which lidoli (developed from Regnier’s Abacus) works is as follows:

A) Define the topic to be assessed (e.g. school dinners in the borough of …)

B) List the items which will allow performance/quality to be measured:
•    Hygiene (Hygiene is satisfactory)
•    Variety (Menus are varied)
•    Welcomel (The dinner ladies are friendly)
•    Food (It’s good)
•    Environment  (The dining hall is nicely decorated)
•    Opening hours(Meal times are convenient)

C) Ask people to give their opinions according to a scale of 5 colours, from dark green (I strongly agree) to dark red (I strongly disagree). Lidoli also allows the use of stars, but I prefer colours.

D) Exploit the information which has been gathered (construction and display of qualidgets, research according to criteria)

From a more technical point of view:

• You divide up the issue along semantic lines
• Web surfers evaluate each item using a clearly defined scale
• You then exploit the information by making it easier to read

We have dozens of ideas for useful and interesting applications for lidoli :

• Wine lovers (Make your own selections, choose more easily, discover new products)
• Investment clubs (Give an opinion, choose shares which will rise)
• Democratic participation )assess projects, give feedback on local amenities)
• Car lovers (The truth about urban myths, better informed buying)
• Travel (Where to go)
• Towns (The best areas in which to live) ….

The list of potential projects is limited only by the imagination and energy of those who wish to suggest  them !!!
If you want to set up a group of web users with a common interest, contact lidoli!!
We will equip you with the innovative tools you need to create original sites with huge potential.

Stan

I read with great interest Tim’s blog on wizme.org

The problem of fake reviews is a real one and the creation of a system which measures reliability is really necessary.

Should we at the same time throw the baby out with the bath water and exclude businesses from the system by removing operations on Facebook?

In a previous life I worked as a vote manager.

This strange job involved carting cases of voting keypads (very heavy), a laptop and a data projector to far off regions (a long way from home, anyway)..

In these gatherings I witnessed at first hand debates on a whole range of subjects such as local planning matters and important company decisions.

In these meetings I also became aware of the important role played by the facilitator.
Is an e-commerce trader a good facilitator?

One view is that he is too biased to take on this role and, if you follow this line of thinking to its conclusion, the review system should be sited outside his shop.

Another way of looking at it is to make the trader fully aware of the risk involved in manipulating feedback and give him the tools to enable him to establish a transparent review policy.

No technical solution exists for detecting false reviews. The operator must suggest them all himself.

The trader must be free to manage his e-reputation policy by choosing the options which suit him best.

Stan

The debate about fake reviews is growing.
It’s easy for a retailer or a manufacturer to pass himself off as an enthusiastic customer. Fake review firms offer to sell false reviews by the yard to businesses who can afford them.

Equally, if I have a business, it’s dead easy to filter out negative reviews when they are moderated. In this way I can swear, hand on heart, that I’ve never submitted a false review.

This practice is difficult to detect, and legal action is virtually impossible.
When we set up lidoli we were determined to remain independent from brands and distribution networks and maintain total transparency as far as consumers are concerned.

Nevertheless, we wish to make lidoli a brand which inspires confidence and we are exploring all possible avenues.
We are aware that quite often fake reviews are posted without the knowledge of the moderators (as in the case of hotels), sometimes even without the knowledge of the e-commerce trader.

Here are the guidelines we think are important:

• No advertising = guaranteed independence
• The ratio between positive and negative reviews on the site. Above 98%, and democracy has been replaced by a banana republic.
• The context of the vote is important. Confirmation of the voter’s email address makes his opinion more credible, evidence that he has bought/used the product in question is a significant guarantee.
• The use of the same review tool on a large number of sites gives credibility to the reviewers and to their opinions. It would be possible to produce a league table showing the reliability of reviewers on a wide range of sites. This argument backs the call for horizontal platforms which place reviewers at the heart of the system.

Finally, why not allow reviewers themselves to give their « opinions on the opinions » by adding two links:

• Credible review
• Rubbish review

and by counting points like the Facebook like button?

If you have any other (good) ideas, please feel free to comment.
I should add that I never add false comments to my blog. That’s easily verifiable, as there are no comments on the site yet.

Sniff

Stan

Do you really need to spend tens of thousands of euros, maybe even hundreds of thousands, to set up a system for feedback and reviews on your website?
That’s the question we asked ourselves when we set up lidoli, and the question to which we’ll give a precise answer, (well, I hope so anyway).
When social commerce was first launched, there were no solutions. They had to be developed, and some IT companies chose to specialize in the field of opinions and reviews.

The “opinions and reviews” module was a specific development and an IT project in its own right.

It’s still possible to adopt that approach today. The advantage? A result which is perfectly in tune with your needs. The disadvantage? It can be very, very expensive.

Then open source scripts appeared which enabled simple feedback and review gathering systems to be set up, often based on a number of stars.

The pro’s? Much less expensive.

The con’s? Often they had basic features which were difficult to adapt.
Today, large-scale industrial solutions are available.

You can set them up on your website within a matter of hours.

Before making your choice, it’s worth remembering that these solutions are often hosted by different servers and url which are not the same as those of your site. So you need to ask yourself the following questions:
•    Do the techniques used for including opinions and reviews on my site enable indexing by search engines? (overlook iframes, for example)

• Do these searches bring surfers back to my product listings (Great!) or take them elsewhere? (Ouch!)
• Does the system require external links which will downgrade my page ranking?
• Are opinions presented in a meaningful way which enables them to be grasped intuitively?
• Do the reviews really help my customers when they are seeking products and advice?
• Can reviews be moderated in a positive way?
• Can the solution offer dashboards which give an indication of the social activity on my site?
• Does the solution encourage web users to give their opinion?
• What happens on my site if my service provider’s servers, or the links to their servers, break down?

If I’ve overlooked any questions, I welcome your comments!

Stan

Mea culpa, I haven’t posted anything for over one month.

I could use the heat, the holidays or too much work as excuses …
So I’ll use all three!

Re-reading the lidoli site takes up a lot of time.

Our autistic software specialist culture sometimes makes dialogue with our communications consultant difficult, lots of well-meaning people give us their opinion. We listen to them, have our doubts, we correct and, most important of all … we move forward all the time.

We’ve completely re-designed the lidoli site, you can see it here.
We’ve just a new version of our voting system online at flysurf.com.
Much more informative and intuitive. You can see it here

We’re completing the interfaces with iphone and ipad.
If you’ve got an iphone or any android device you can test it here (after downloading the QRCode application from appstore):

And, of course, we’re getting ready for the e-commerce exhibition, which is rapidly approaching.

All your comments are very welcome. Happy holidays!
Stan