So a few days ago it was announced that ShopLocal.com (our business to consumer – B2C – business unit) was going to enter into the Twitter craziness with a “deal & steal” focused approach to highlighting the best local offers contained within ShopLocal.com. Today I am pleased to announce that ShopLocal (the business to business – B2B – business unit) has also entered into leveraging Twitter as a way of further engaging our customer base. The team and I plan on sharing insights into what is happening around ShopLocal as well as the rest of the ever emerging digital advertising landscape, with a retail focus.
Don't miss out! Join the conversation around ShopLocal today on Twitter
The real holdup was some loser on Twitter was “name squatting” on the ShopLocal username for the last 2 years or so. After some back and forth with Twitter support, ShopLocal was able to make a trademark infringement claim and the nice Twitter support gang re-instated the rights of the username ShopLocal back to my team. From some quick research, it appears that it wasn’t until a few months ago that Twitter started to help out legitimate companies get back their business names. We are thrilled to have the name back and look forward to better utilizing it in the days to come.
Finally, followers of ShopLocal on Twitter have some new voices to look forward to. Welcome Brendan Flynn (runs project management & client services) as well as Brian Houchins (runs marketing) to the conversation. Both are avid Twitter users already and will be helping share writing duties across both the B2C and B2B Twitter accounts.
So in today’s WSJ there was a rather fitting article titled,
Look at This Article. It’s One of Our Most Popular
Top-Ten Lists Abound Online, but Following the Herd Can Make You Wonder About the Wisdom of Crowds
By CARL BIALIK
In it the author makes the point that when a site publishes a “most popular” list, that this type of presentation actually distorts the overall ranking, because the perception of popularity alters users’ behavior. For some entertaining examples, read the complete story. This in general makes sense. By showing lists or result sets ranked by popularity, the site is to some extent creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. The items at the top of the popular list will ONLY continue to become even more popular and thus remain at the top of the list by the very fact that they are first.
Companies need to be careful and take the necessary precautions when creating and using crowd sourced popularity so as to not create bias and affect consumer preferences
However, ShopLocal’s own Wisdom of Crowds methodology does not suffer from this problem. This is because the presentation of content within the SmartCircular sites is not affected by the Wisdom of Crowds ranking (e.g. it is not used currently for things like result set sorting order), that this ShopLocal generated popularity data (WoC) is an unbiased measurement of user preference.
Since one of the current near-term road map items for SmartCircular 4.1 sites is to begin consuming and using this popularity-based rankings in areas such as category, brand and keyword search result pages, the ShopLocal team will make sure to exclude any user responses to featured offers from the Wisdom of Crowds ranking so as to keep this problem highlighted in the WSJ article above from occurring.
Special thanks to our own Loch Rose for pointing this fun read out and doing the initial analysis.
Here is a nice short video demo of the native iPhone Weekly Ad app for those of you out there that are not part of the private beta trial. Just remember to enter the password of “success” (without the quotes) when prompted to be able to view the video. Enjoy.
Nice demo video that shows of some of the core features and functionality of this multi-platform ready mobile application.
If you are a Twitter user and interested in learning about the best of the best of the best in regards to local deals at the retailers you know and trust (stores like The Home Depot, Best Buy, Target, Kohl’s, etc), then following the new ShopLocal.com Twitter account is a must. Every day, the top in-store and online deals will be highlighted.
It's super easy to become a follower of ShopLocalcom on Twitter. Just head on over to http://twitter.com/shoplocalcom today and click the large "Follow" button (which is called out above with the red arrow)
Got product ratings and/or reviews on your retailer.com web site? Want to get additional mileage and reach to this really powerful content? Interested in better equipping potential web – to – store shoppers that are within your SmartCircular site with deeper product knowledge. If yes, there is now any easy integration available to connect on a product level this user generated content both within the item rollovers / mouseovers within the browse by circular page views as well as within the item detail views that SmartCircular provides.
This really is a match made in heaven. Since the lifespan of the content contained within the circulars is so short typically (1 week or less), there really is not much opportunity to allow users to create reviews or ratings within the SmartCircular environment. However since many of the items within the circular, when no on store special, are also sold within the retailer’s dot com site. This means that for those items that are sold on retailer.com that:
- Have ratings and/or review UGC available on retailer.com
- Are featured within one or more weekly ads
This subset of items can easily undergo a treatment similar to the one that was just release for Staples below within their SmartCircular site.
Within the item rollover,a limited amount of review and ratings information is displayed for applicable products.
Within the ShopLocal hosted item detail page, a more complete view of any available product ratings and/or reviews are displayed
(4.00 out of 5)
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