Less Than 1% Of Online Purchases Come From Social Channels

Thirty-nine percent of online retail transactions by new customers start with clicks from paid or organic search results and less than 1% come from social channels according to a new Forrester report.

In order to determine how and when shoppers touch various platforms when completing a transaction online, Forrester partnered with GSI Commerce to examine 77,000 consumer orders made over a period of 14 days in April 2012. Findings in the report include:

-- Multiple platforms influence many buyers. While 33% of transactions by new customers involve more than one trackable touchpoint, 48% of repeat customers visit multiple trackable touchpoints. The most popular platforms include organic search, paid search, and email.

-- Email and direct traffic matter for frequent customers. Thirty percent of transactions by repeat customers start with an email from the retailer, and an additional 30% type the retailer's URL directly into a browser.

-- Social tactics are not meaningful sales drivers. Forty-eight percent of consumers reported that social media posts are a great way to discover new products, brands, trends, or retailers, but less than 1% of transactions could be traced back to trackable social links.

More information on social  media and CRM can be found at www.CRMindustry.com

By 2014, 10-15% of Social Media Reviews to Be Fake, Paid for By Companies

Consumers' increased reliance on social media ratings and reviews will see enterprise spending on paid social media ratings and reviews increase, making up 10 to 15 percent of all reviews by 2014, according to Gartner, Inc. However, analysts predict that increased media attention on fake social media ratings and reviews will result in at least two Fortune 500 brands facing litigation from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over the next two years.

Organizations who opt to pay for fake reviews can, and have, faced both public condemnation as well as monetary fines. In 2009, the FTC determined that paying for positive reviews without disclosing that the reviewer had been compensated equates to deceptive advertising and would be prosecuted as such.

As the FTC begins to crack down on this practice of fake reviews/ratings, some reputation management companies are taking a different approach, not posting new, fake, favorable reviews, but identifying fake and defaming reviews and requesting the reviewers or host site remove them or face legal repercussions. Gartner analysts said they  expect a similar market of companies to emerge specializing in reputation defense versus reputation creation.

Gartner believes that although consumer trust in social media is currently low, consumer perception of tightened government regulation and increased media exposure of fake social media ratings and reviews will ultimately increase consumer trust in new and existing social media ratings and reviews.

More information on social media and CRM can be found at www.CRMindustry.com

Six Core Principles to Tap the Power of Social Media

Gartner has identified six core design principles that distinguish social media from other approaches to communication and collaboration, and form the foundation for its unique mass-collaboration value proposition. Business leaders should apply these principles to shift away from a "provide and pray" approach to a motivate and engage strategy.

Participation: Getting Communities to Work for You

Successful social media solutions tap into the power of mass collaboration through user participation. Many organizations miss the participation principle and look at social media as another channel for corporate communications rather than an opportunity for mass collaboration. Instead, Gartner recommends that business leadership set active participation as a priority design goal, with everything else revolving around getting the community to contribute valuable content. Providing seed content to promote community contributions, and motivating content contribution through social incentive mechanisms — such as social status and gamification — are recommended to drive participation.

Collective: People Must Swarm to the Effort

With social media, participants "collect" around a unifying cause. People go to the content to contribute their piece to the whole. However, the most challenging effort with social media is to gain community adoption, and speed is critical. Swarming is almost completely dependent on the organization’s purpose for mass collaboration. Gartner advises organizations to pursue a specific and well-defined purpose that is easily identifiable and meaningful to the target audience. It’s important to capitalize on physical world events, as well as online events, as part of a "tipping point plan" to rally people and catalyze a community.

Transparency: The Community Validates and Organizes Content

A social media solution also provides transparency, in that participants are privy to one another's participation. It is in this transparency that the community improves content, unifies information, self-governs, self-corrects, evolves, creates emergence and otherwise propels its own advancement.
Gartner recommends empowering the community with a robust capability to view, use and provide feedback on the contributions of others: with functionality such as thumbs up and thumbs down, tagging, voting, star ratings, and social commentary. Employing transparency with social status and gamification mechanisms, such as leader boards, virtual currencies and badges, also helps to create incentives and recognize valuable contributions.

Independence: Provides the "Mass" in Mass Collaboration

Independence delivers anytime, anyplace and any-member collaboration, which means any participant can contribute completely independent of any other. To aid independence, Gartner advises organizations to consider the potential scale of the social media solution, and examine the design for anything that may impede anytime, anyplace and any-member collaboration. They should also eliminate, or at least minimize, any workflow, controls, administration and moderating, or other gating mechanisms that can create bottlenecks and negatively impact scale.

Persistence: Contributions Must Endure for Scaled Value

Organizations should make it easy for participants to capture content using evolving technologies, such as contextual information capture, to help collect more interaction content. They should examine how much persistence is desired, how much of the contribution to capture, how to manage it and how long to maintain it, whilst identifying content that is critical to the purpose of the social media effort.

Emergence: Communities Self-Direct for Greater Productivity

The behaviors in mass collaboration cannot be modeled, designed, optimized or controlled like those in traditional systems. They emerge over time through the interactions of community members. Emergence is what allows collaborative communities to come up with new ways of working or new solutions to seemingly intractable problems.

An organization should observe social media behaviors, examine how productivity actually manifests itself through community interactions, then guide the community or make other organizational behavior adjustments to accommodate new ways of working.

More information on CRM and social media can be found at www.CRMindustry.com