White Paper - Leveraging Social Networks to Attract, Convert and Retain your customers online

Many exciting developments are happening in the world of online social networks. Not only are social networks like MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn exploding in popularity, companies like Google are beginning to provide a single-interface for companies/individuals to interact across multiple social-networking sites.

With their Open Social initiative, they expect to provide a single interface for multiple sites including MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Orkut, Plaxo, Hi5, Ning and several others. Such initiatives can help companies reach out to as many as 200M+ users in dozens of countries. In these early days, it is useful for companies to think about the various ways in which they can leverage this phenomenon.

There are the obvious, more traditional and undifferentiated ways like putting up ads on the sites so that people will see them and click-thru to your site. But beyond these simplistic answers, there are a lot of hidden jewels for those who think creatively about building on the social networks.

Deep Integration into the Social Network

An average social network member has anywhere from 30-40 people in his/her friends circle. The interesting questions to ask are as follows:

If this person comes and say writes a review on my website, how can I easily broadcast this review so that all his friends get to see it immediately?
Similarly if this person adds something to a wish list or purchases something on my website, how can I easily transmit this information to his friends circle?
Can I offer her promotions such that if 5 of her friends purchase on my website, based on her recommendations, I can give her “50% off on her next purchase”?
Now that I know much more about my customer – her age, her interests, her friends – can I upsell/cross-sell her better? Can I give her more relevant offers?
Can I conduct instantaneously conduct a poll or a market-research-survey with “boys between 13-20 years of age based in MA and are interested in such-such”?
Can I create a page on these sites so that people can see what our business is about? More importantly can I get rich marketing information in terms of what certain demographics think about our products, what kind of interests they have etc?
On a more advanced level: Can I actually create a presence – in the form of an application – that users can download and have a richer level of interaction

The good news is that you can do a lot of the above with some of the social networks like Facebook. And with Google’s Opensocial, you will be extending your effort to almost ALL of the social networks.

A Three Step Roadmap

We recommend that companies follow a 3-step plan to leveraging social networks:

Step 1: Create a simple presence -- a set of pages -- on the social network sites. Provide ability for social network users to interact heavily with the content (products, promotions, expected features, market research questions).

Let them review, provide feedback, share with their friends. In this phase, you will understand a lot about the dynamics within these social networks: how people get to know about you, how they interact with you, how they share your information with their friends etc.
Also many of these network sites provide you with detailed analytics about the kind of people who are interacting with your content.

Step 2: Provide hooks within YOUR website so that visitors/prospects/customers can easily broadcast what they are doing on your website, back to their social network. By doing a little bit of development work on your website, you can contemplate a scenario that goes like this:

User comes to your site and reviews a product
Just before he saves the review, you ask him “Would you like to share this review with your friends on Facebook?”
He says “Yes” and immediately this review shows up on his Facebook profile and all his friends are alerted to the fact that he has just reviewed a product on your website.
Similar scenarios apply to various situations: Adding something to their wishlist, Adding to Cart, Purchasing something…

Step 3: Building advanced applications that plug right into the social network sites, and have no links whatsoever to your website. These applications take the form of little widgets that they add to their profile on the social network site, or they download to their desktop. These advanced applications are actually Mashups and get their content from your website via webservices and seamlessly show the “latest products”, “latest reviews”, “promotions”, “take quizzes”, etc to the users, while at the same time enabling them to share this information with their friends.

About Inkriti

Inkriti is a technology consulting company that delivers Web 2.0 Solutions for customer-centric E-business. Our solutions along with our global delivery methodology typically result in a 65% savings in IT costs, while reducing time-to-market and providing tremendous resource flexibility. Our customers include PCH, Redcats, Lillian Vernon, Time Life, Millennium Partners Sports Club, Toolking, Permission TV, Avitage and many others.

Inkriti is headquartered in Boston, MA and has a global technology center in India. For more information about Inkriti, please visit us on the web at http://www.inkriti.com or call (617) 233-7510.