Amazon has always been a category leader in e-commerce for how helpful and personal its product recommendations have been.  Now they are taking this to the next level by pulling in Facebook's social graph to aid them in their current product recommendations. Though this project is still currently in beta, it is a glimpse for marketers into how Facebook can be utilized, not only to create a more personal web experience, but also to help users make purchase decisions.  

I've been a long-time user of the functionality within Amazon that allows me to keep and organize wish lists for others (and myself), so much so that I create my entire Christmas and birthday lists within Amazon so that I can remember gift whims I have for others and myself throughout the year. 

Now it's not all up to me and my order history to figure out what present to buy.  Amazon now allows users to connect their account with Faceook to utilize the data provided on friends' profiles.  The following screenshot shows that after I've connected the two, I can be alerted on upcoming birthdays and get a snapshot of the types of products that are currently popular among my friends.

Since it is my brother's birthday today (Happy Birthday Ryan!), I went over to see what types of products recommended for him. As you can see from the screenshot below, I have a nice list of gift suggestions based on his profile. 

Unfortunately, after asking him whether or not these suggestions are spot-on, he only sees a couple of items that strike his fancy, and even those are a little bit of a stretch.  This is likely because the only items he currently has "liked" on his profile are his evergreen favorites.  He is getting closer towards 30 (couldn't resist), so it has been a few years since he created his profile, back when adding likes and interests was more of a deliberate and well thought-out process.  Unfortunately, because he isn't actively "liking" new content across the web, I can't tell how his tastes have changed or what he likes now.

On the flip side, one of my colleagues' 13 year old sister has "liked" more than 1,000 pieces of content across the web - most of which is not product related, and most she will likely regret liking after a year or two of maturity. The screenshot below shows how someone in this demographic isn't carefully considering what they "like" and has no idea how this could affect them in the future.

As you can tell from these two examples, for Amazon and other e-commerce retailers to take this to the next level - the "Like" button will not only need to be adopted, but consumers will need to understand what utilizing the "Like" button may mean for them.  It also will require the e-commerce site to have some degree of intelligence to be able to translate the "Like" data correctly.  For instance, if I "Like" something other than a book, movie, or music - how will that translate into product suggestions?  If I were to "Like" something like LoL Cats, will it translate to a suggestion of cat calendars? Or if I were to "Like" content on People of Walmart, would that offer me a Walmart gift card?  The next obvious question is the timing of the "Like".  If I liked something 5 years ago will it still be relevant to Amazon?  Maybe, maybe not.

As you can imagine - there is still a lot to work out on behalf of both Facebook and e-commerce sites like Amazon.  However, the biggest takeaway for marketers at this point is that we are currently witnessing a stronger movement of e-commerce sites utilizing Facebook data to improve the product buying experience, rather than inserting the product purchase experience directly within Facebook. It also suggests that in the battle between Facebook and Google to be your default social profile, Facebook has yet another advantage.  Therefore, if you aren't considering the impact of Facebook on e-commerce - you will need to start considering.  As Amazon has proved to us before, relevant shopping is the best type of shopping.  

http://ignitesocialmedia.com/feed/

• identify with your customers about what they love OR hate before you actually start marketing especially for startups.
• dont worry about first impressions - keep iterating through development and failures.
• iterate quickly so you can establish an increase in user perception
• your process of product and marketing development should be circular not linear. testing and asking customer questions, with an end goal
• validate product with 5-10 customers before you spend a lot of money on marketing
• Metrics worth there weight:
  • visitors which stay 10+ seconds OR 2 + pages per visit
  • visitors who click
  • visitors who sign up to email

• if you cannot get users to hate or love your product then your marketing will be a waste of time or money.

Neil Patel:

• unique visitors are not really unique anymore b/c most users have multiple computers. unique visitors are not really a good metric anymore.
• cross check your stats b/c things can lie, data can often be inaccurate, so before you take action on something make sure you crosscheck the data
• some people need time before they buy so you need to analyze all your entry sources (look at first source user visited for conversion and heres how to do that in Google analytics: http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog/seo/first-touch-tracking-in-google-analytics/ )
• He likes retargetting a lot currently and uses retargeter.com (500 month to retarget)

How To Not Fail At SEO

• build out types of 'keyword searches' and group them together to answer specific questions to help you garner additional insights and potentially how to target them.
• 100 links on a page is not the defacto answer, although google says it is. it really depends.

• Dont analyze and benchmark SEO too early in the game. give your product/marketing items time to develop.
• Doesnt like sites who utilize footers with stuffed, innerlinked content

What kinds of companies can and should raise capital

This session wasnt the typical presentation, q and a therefore the comments were noted in no particular order from the following speakers: Mark Suster, Andy Liu, Paige Craig

•      If you are intending to sell it or take it public, then you should raise capital
•     VCs typically take 20-40% of the company
•     can build a ton of companies right now for under 250k$ vs, along time ago you couldnt.
•     if your desperate to take on VC money to pay folks then you will never get VC $$.
•     sell the passion, sell the team before you get the money from VCs

Social Media Marketing

• 2009 study say 79% have interacted with brands online, up 20% since 2008.
• If a brand can develop advocacy they will market for you.

• encourages the facebook share button over the facebook like button b/c it will show up in the news feed more often.
• give calls to actions for shares on actions that get repetitive by the user. give them a popup to ask them to share if the system notices they are doing a repetitive task, that way you dont piss off all the users.    

• new version gets rid of sub categories and upcoming sections. more focus on the recommendation or My news.
• power users are no long power users they are influencer's, all of your actions are visible by your fiends with a My News feed. Similar to facebook.
• new system allows for new influencers, ashton kutcher could create a power account over night because you will be able to import followers from twitter and other social networks.
• there will be an auto submit feature where publishers can have their content automatically included
• if you had a ban in the past you will not be baned anymore.

Building communities that people love

• Humanitarian motivation UGC is one of the number one ways to build community. UGC is wildly successfull when you can tap into the humanitarian side. An example would be wikipedia.
• foursquare and facecbook are examples of 'recognition UGC' b/c you are looking for recognition from your followers and friends.
• Roadblocks to interaction and sharing of content - 10% contribute, 90% consume lets say. One of the biggest roadblocks is getting that 90% to share and create content. Trolls and hate casting is one of the number one reasons people dont create, for fear of it. He likes to utilize Facebook connect to create more authenticity so users will be less likely to troll.

• if you want your community to work you need to focus on simplicity. The LOLbuilder is the solution to how people add captions to cat photos. It was dead simple and is now the #1 most used image editing software on the web.
• people love simple things, you can over engineer things.
• trust your users but not too much.
• focus on different types of users, not just your commenters, but also people who might not comment (which is a much larger percentage of

Marketing Strategy: Don’t forget search

•   august/september yahoo/bing organic will be integrated paid will be shortly after.
•   Bing/yahoo paid search platforms will use current Adcenter, not the Yahoo PPC tool, they will be scraping it for Adcenter.

• apple and twilight are two examples she notes who dont attack seo/sem - leaving money on the table. Companies both have HUGE budgets but are not even trying. Twilight specifically had a 30m budget but didnt buy 1 paid ad on Google or build any additional sites for SERP management.
• behavior should drive the marketing message.

Links matter: How to measure and attain them

Rand Fishkin

• save yourself a ton time by building a link aquisition plan before you ever target your first site to go after.

Dave Snyder

•  Link acquisition is boiled down to 2 main factors:
  • monetary response
  • emotional response
• 8 primary emotions: anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, anticipation, acceptance, and joy.
• when you develop content for links, work your way backwards and target the emotional response for optimal success 
• when your content illicits an emotional response it will garner links.

http://ignitesocialmedia.com/feed/