Archive for the ‘Social shopping’ Category
What does Facebook’s new like button mean?
A few days ago Facebook announced their latest platform direction, the “Open Graph”. If you remember at some point Facebook tried “Beacon” which handled privacy miserably and failed. 2 years ago Facebook Connect was announced and was supposedly a big success but is now renamed “login” and is part of the new Open Graph and social widgets initiative.
The major change that Facebook is introducing is the “like” functionality which allows users to interact with the site and to see friends’ activity without connecting to Facebook if they are currently logged-in to Facebook. This is similar to “share this” in many ways. While this is probably going to increase engagement on the site, it is important to understand that as an e-commerce site you don’t establish relations with the user and don’t get access to the his/her data in this “like” model. Only when user connect or log- in to Facebook on your site, you get access to their data. So while the Open Graph could make e-commerce sites more social and engaging (see www.levi.com for example) it is recommended to drive users to login using Facebook on your site so that you can establish direct relationship with the user.
Last year we introduced our social widgets. Here is an example for our social wishlist widget:
We used Facebook connect and therefore participating sites had direct relationships with the users.
This is how it looks when I “liked” a product on levi.com
In this case only Facebook knows that I like the product but Levi.com does not, as I have not logged-in.
We are quite happy to see Facebook actively leading this revolution. As a personalization vendor we recognized the synergies between social networks and personalization early on, and leveraged infomration from Facebook in a unique way that is optimized for e-commerce sites. The new developments from Facebook will allow us to continue and innovate and make shopping more personal and social.
Facebook connect vs. share
With all the buzz around social shopping, web 2.0 and widgets people often ask us what is the difference between Facebook connect and a “share this” button you see on many product pages of online retail sites.
Facebook connect pop up
The main difference is that users who click on a Facebook connect button become your registered users. That’s right, by simply logging into their Facebook account on your eCommerce site they created an account with you. Depending on the user’s privcay policy you may access valuable information including birthday, interests which you can use to personalize and enhance the user’s shopping experience.
When visitors on your website uses the share button they do not become registered users on your site and and you have no records of them.
When implementing a Facebook connect application you can also start communicating with users via email. You need to ask the user for special permissions right after they connect. This will enable you to email them without asking them for their email address. Your emails will be routed by Facebook to the email address they had registered with Facebook.