"Pluck Potentials" is our blog series designed to inspire innovation and lead users to new and creative implementations of the Pluck Community Platform. With our Mobile SDKs, over 400 social components and companion Facebook apps, the possibilities for customized community elements are endless.
 
Many of you have seen our Community Results Blueprint for Conversion. It offers a guide to designing and building communities that mix Pluck social applications, platform features, best practices and selected 3^rd party technologies to encourage consumer community participation and ultimately improve online and offline conversion rates.  In addition to that it profiles the phenomenal results from some of our latest customers, Redbox and Healthspan.

This installment of Pluck Potentials takes a deeper dive into the Conversion Blueprint to explore how Pluck applications and features can be deployed to meet the express needs of the online retail sector. Let’s take a closer, more descriptive look and you’ll see what we mean.

Trusted, Rich Media Product Reviews

There is really only one thing a prospective buyer is looking for when perusing your ratings and reviews:  Value.  They want a high degree of confidence that they’re getting the best product, service or experience given what they have to spend.   Oftentimes reviews can reach such a volume as to overwhelm those with purchase intent by presenting a flood of rating and review data with such high variance that it actually serves to obfuscate the conclusion the consumer wished to attain:  “Is this the product I want or not?”  Point-solution “Reviews-only” vendors have responded to the deluge by creating badging and purchase verification features that provide some clarity and distinction, and we think that’s a great start, but there is a holistic approach to social commerce that is mostly overlooked.  Pluck community features allow customers to create and develop identities, levels of expertise and establish relationships within your site and third-party social networking sites.  This is essential to facilitate the deployment of powerful tools that can only be unlocked by gathering psychographic and relation-based information and harnessing it to create effective conversion applications that truly address the customer’s underlying motivations.  But you must own the data to achieve this! 

In the subjective world of ratings and reviews whose opinion do they value most?  When selecting a movie for family night at Redbox.com, what is weighted more:  100 ratings from folks they don’t know or 1 from a good friend?  Quality and service are two very important aspects of a successful customer experience, but there are powerful psychographic components to consider as well.  There is perhaps nothing more influential in the decision making process than a sense of comfort one has when investing in a known value.  Whether the measure is as tangible as durability or as nebulous as the “cool factor”, we all depend on friends, family and experts to provide the element of trust.  With Pluck Reviews customers are empowered to filter and sort by this most decisive factor.  By interlacing user-submitted “experiential” media such as video product overviews, customers can share with each other feature specific feedback integrated directly at the point of intent.

Social-Centric Recommendations

Up to now, recommendations have been product-centric.  You could show the customer other products based upon what they’re viewing, what others purchased who also viewed and so forth.  With our IBM Websphere™ for Ecommerce integration, we add the dimension of trust by surfacing recommendations based upon product+social-centric algorithms.  “This person you know bought this hat after looking at this shirt.  One of our badge-holding “Gadget Geek” community members bought this receiver after looking at this one.”  Just like Reviews, the element of trust in the opinions of people they know or have been identified by the community as trustworthy sources is the prime influencer;   becoming increasingly important the more sophisticated or significant the purchase.

Federated Search Integration

Endeca is the industry leader in site search indexing and presentation. Through our integration with their Guided Navigation™ you can add social attributes to your search index engine criteria, creating social dimensions and categories to your customers’ result sets.  For example, a customer searches for “LCD TV”.  Instantly the attributes of LCD TV’s are delineated on the page offering them a range of dimensions to further filter their search based upon their interest:  Price range, size, brand, power usage, rating, etc… You see where this is going:  The social dimension.   “Recommended by…”, “Viewed by”, “Purchased by…” adding the most powerful aspect of confidence to the navigation preference.

Activity Syndication and Micro-Affiliation

Did you know that Pluck customers experience an average of three unique views (3 UVs) per syndication of their content?  Any number of incentives can be implemented to drive participation:  5% of your purchase, free-shipping, entries into your weekly drawing for letting their network know that they bought the latest shoe from your storefront.   Create “micro-affiliates” with each purchase, introducing the possibility of follow-on rewards, badges and recognition when their syndications drive traffic and further conversions.  The effect is further compounded when the original buyer makes their return visit back to your site to cash in their earnings or discount, making another purchase and developing a cyclical process of buy-syndicate-earn-buy.

Behavior Rewards

Increase participation in your social initiatives by incentivizing your customers with leaderboards, contests and special savings discounts based on their badges earned, status rank or even user tier.  Pluck rewards and badging service layers let you credit any community member action you like:  Purchases, valued contributions, syndications, etc…letting them accumulate credit and recognition over the history of your extended relationship.  Identify your mavens, thought leaders and key influencers and target them specifically for future campaigns.  Promote your best and most influential customers to levels of privilege that secure a strong bond of affinity and ensure evangelistic advocacy for your brand that lasts a lifetime.  How great would it be to have an exclusive shopping event just for your “silver-and-up” community members the day before a sale for the general public? 

We’re leaving off as much as we’re including here, so read about our Conversion Blueprint, and then connect with us to learn more about how Demand Media customers are implementing Pluck’s unique community strategies to their storefronts to increase sales by effectively socializing their customer’s purchase experience.