Change the Timing, Change the Game: TurnTo, Curebit

Change the Rules (Photo by Satish Krishnamurthy, cc-by license, http://www.flickr.com/photos/unlistedsightings/3252766510/, rotated and cropped)

Some of the most interesting innovations in eCommerce are based on simple changes to the context of the customer-store interaction. Private Event Retail, for example, turned on its head the idea that your goal is to be as accessible as possible to as many people as possible, and changed “limited inventory” from a weakness into a strength.

In this post I discuss two other examples of changing the game by changing the rules in eCommerce: TurnTo and CureBit. Both attempt to drive consumer behavior more effectively by changing the basic timing of events: one in product reviews and recommendations, the other in deal sharing.

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Want Buzz? Be Interesting (and don’t put up barriers to conversation)

A few weeks ago, at the AlwaysOn Media conference in New York, there was a panel titled “Can Brands Get Away with ‘Buzz Marketing’ in the Blogosphere” – it was moderated by Jeff Jarvis (BuzzMachine), and included Rick Murray (Womma, me2revolution, Edelman), Gordon Gould (ThisNext), Barry Reicherter (Porter Novelli), and David Weinberger (Joho the Blog).

I was intrigued by an article in Information Week (“Blogger Smackdown at AlwaysOn“) which concluded:

The debate quickly escalated from a discussion of whether buzz marketing was feasible to whether marketing through blogs even made sense. Online blog marketing firm PayPerPost was savaged by both Jarvis and Weinberger, with PayPerPost’s CEO present in the room trying unsuccessfully to defend himself.

The video from the session is online at the AlwaysOn Media site, though they don’t provide any simple way to link to or bookmark a specific session. Instead, go to this webcast archive page, scroll down to where the session title is, and click on the icon in the video archive column. (Actually, there are lots of good sessions available – including the keynote on “Surviving the Media Disruption” – but beware, the volume varies wildly).

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Blogs, Wikis, and BI (oh my)

Good article from the CIO of Eastern Mountain Sports, Jeffrey Neville, about how they are leveraging what he calls “Web 2.0″ applications to improve collaboration and decision making in a retail environment: Adventures in X-Treme Web 2.0

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This isn’t what I meant by social software

There’s an Internet Explorer plug-in from the folks at Weezu. It’s an interesting idea – trying to bring “social” activity to what is otherwise typically a solitary activity – using the web. I think it’s ultimately unsuccessful, for a few reasons I discuss below, but it will be interesting to see what other approaches might arise to the same scenario.

Basically, you install the plug-in in your copy of IE, and sign in to the Weezu servers. Then, while you browse the web, Weezu “watches” what urls you are visiting, and informs you when other Weezu users are looking at the same pages.

In other words, you can see which other Weezu users (those who also installed the plug-in and created a Weezu account) are viewing the same page you are.

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Quality online is a lot like quality offline

The Fall 2006 issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review includes an article titled “How Do Customers Judge Quality in an E-tailer?” (online full-text PDF is free to subscribers, otherwise $6.50).

When I read that the focus of the article was to answer the question “What are the specific aspects of an online transaction that customers value and use to distinguish one site from another?,” and that the authors had done a survey and some analysis I was intrigued.

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