Social Transaction Sharing Sites
These sites, apps, widgets, and what-nots fall into the social shopping category that is rapidly growing, gaining investors, market adoption, and changing the way consumers make decisions about what they buy, where and more. Essentially, with the swipe or a card or a simple mention, you can share with your network (or the world) what you just bought with your piece of plastic. After sharing it with the swipe of a card, you can talk about it, rate it, discuss the overall buying experience with anyone. You can share price so you can let people know whether or not they got ripped off or not. Essentially, these tools are amazing for consumers. For business and marketers, however, it depends on if you use them or ignore them...
Who to watch: Keep your eye on Swipely & Blippy. On May 11, 2010 Swipely received $7.5 in Series A funding. Swipely will compete hand in hand with Blippy, another social credit card transaction site, but the difference is user intent as implied by TechCrunch. While Blippy focuses more on digits, Swipely focuses on the transactions and products themselves. The consumer intent with Swipely is more to explore what their networks are buying to gain suggestions on where to buy. Blippy on the other hand appears to be more of a price gauge so consumers can make sure they are not paying too much when their neighbor paid half that price. Basically, the sites link to your credit/debit cards so that you can choose to share as much or as little about your purchases as you want with your social networks. Swipely's focus is to add value to the transactions themselves by allowing networks and friends to share information about your purchases that is useful. Swipely will not show how much your spending but rather what you are getting.
What's it to US?
This trend makes word of mouth marketing less about what people are saying and more about what people are doing.
By making it quicker than ever to share with your friends what you just bought, for how much and where, these tools are essentially taking the talking out of word of mouth marketing and making it more about doing. The age old saying, "actions speak louder than words" is finally very true. Indeed, talk is cheap. This gives marketers something to think about especially if their former concerns where what people are saying on Yelp, review forums, discussion forums, While there are a number of potential business models that can and will probably pop up because of this trend, most of these social transaction sites are only accessible by invitation code. The thing to keep in mind for marketers and consumers alike is that social transaction sharing can be integrated throughout the consumer decision making process. While obviously, this will first impact the more socially savvy at first and then move throughout the adoption curve, the point to keep in mind as marketers and consumers is that this information will be available and it will impact decisions and ultimately, sales. Marketers can integrate a social transaction sharing strategy throughout their campaign to leverage this new trend. Meanwhile, consumers can benefit.
The true test of a good campaign for brands will be integration across consumer touch points along the decision making process. Are you using social technologies to become aware, generate interest, understanding, shape attitudes, affect purchases, and ultimately impact repeat purchases?
It has often been preached that social media technologies need to be incorporated thoughout the marketing mix and campaigns need to approach new technologies likewise.
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