Making "social" work for online retailers doesn't have to mean handing over the keys to Facebook. But it does mean letting go of some control, says Sociable Labs founder Nisan Gabbay.
"Let’s move away from business-to-consumer marketing and go back to people-to-people."
Sociable Labs may be the secret weapon retailers have been waiting for when it comes to social media.
Sociable CEO Nisan Gabbay
The San Mateo, California, startup offers a suite of social applications that can be incorporated right on a retailer’s e-commerce site. The main thing Sociable does, founder Nisan Gabbay tells Fast Company, is to help retailers focus on maximizing sales through social media, not just buzz-building. This can happen more effectively, Gabbay says, if a business gets out of the way of conversations between friends, which are happening on Facbeook (and elsewhere).
Active.com--the listings and registration site for outdoor and fitness events like marathons, bike races, and sports camps--used Sociable’s RSVP and Purchase Share applications on their Event Detail and Purchase Confirmation pages early on. People looking through those pages could see listings for events in their area, which events their Facebook friends had signed up to do, and then share their own plans to attend or participate in these events, as soon as they've signed up (and paid) via Active.com.
Broadcasting news of users' commitment to fitness events translates to awareness and participation in other events listed on Active.com, Gabbay says. User engagement is driven more efficiently than a passive “Like” on Facebook. Active.com achieved 300% higher conversion rates than it got previously with Facebook and other social media.
Over the past year, the San Mateo-based startup’s been operating in stealth mode with a $75,000 cash infusion from Facebook's fB Fund, and $1 million in subsequent angel funding. This week, Sociable Labs takes its site and service public, and has attained and additional $7 million round led by Battery Ventures.
Gabbay says that the capital will be used to hire more staff, as well as for sales and marketing. So far, the startup's ten customers include "private sale" style fashion sites Haute Look, Rue La La, and a retailer of clothing and gear for outdoor enthusiasts, Backcountry.
The second big piece of what Sociable Labs does, via its test-and-learn ROI platform, is to help retailers avoid social media marketing efforts that fail, and repeat the efforts that work. Brian O’Malley, partner at Battery Ventures says.
“In the past couple of years retailers have spent millions of dollars on social media, yet most are still not seeing hard ROI from these investments. We believe Sociable Labs, with its unique approach to experimentation and ROI optimization is very well positioned to change the status quo.”
The status quo is ready to be shaken up. A recent Forrester study found 62% of retailers said the ROI from their social commerce programs is unclear. Part of the reason may be that it’s too tough to quantify the “soft” results driven by social graphs such as the number of Facebook fans, and the impact of increasing customer engagement or monitoring complaints on Twitter.
Making a sale is a measurable outcome, and having the means to do that right on an e-commerce site can be more effective than setting up a separate storefront on Facebook, says Larry Pluimer, CEO at Indigitous, a provider of "tactical resources" for businesses navigating the digital economy.
Pluimer observes, “There has been some push back on Facebook,” because that is a platform where people just want to talk to their friends. However, friends are the highest authority when it comes to making a purchase, he beileves. More people trust a friend’s advice over a retailer’s recommendation.
Peers are the highest authority, potentially wielding even more influence than a celebrity or an expert which is the key to several emerging social commerce players, including the Twitter-inspired shopping site OpenSky.
Gabbay suggests, while they may be good for buzz-buiding in some way,
“Business-to-consumer social campaigns aren’t the solution for retailers to increase sales from social. Instead, retailers should create ways for consumers to effectively do the selling for them on their sites-- where the vast majority of consumers go when they are ready to shop.”
By Sociable Lab’s measurements about 40% of U.S. web users are simultaneously signed into Facebook while they are browsing e-commerce sites. But still, Gabbay says, web users go to retailers' e-commerce sites to learn about and shop for products.
Though Sociable currently only targets e-commerce, he can see it extending to help market business-to-business products on platforms such as LinkedIn.
Gabbay says,
“Let’s move away from business to consumer marketing and go back to people to people, This is the future of the social space.”
COMMENTARY: Sociable is focused on real dollars or “hard ROI” generated from social media rather than "soft ROI" like building buzz and increasing engagement. Sociable's solution resides directly on the merchant's ecommerce site, where the vast majority of consumers go when they are ready to shop and buy. According to Sociable, traffic generated from their applications converts up to 300% better than traffic from Facebook fan pages, and 50% - 70% better than traditional online marketing.
Sociable's product offering includes three components:
Social Applications - A suite of social referral applications that motivate your customers to share their excitement with friends on Facebook, driving high-conversion traffic back to your site. Plus, a suite of conversion-enhancing applications that personalize your site experience with recommendations and advice from friends. Each application accesses a rich set of data from the clickstream data on your ecommerce site combined with the social graph data from Facebook, creating rich social experiences for consumers.
Every application is built to work with Sociable's Test-and-Learn Platform to enable iteration and optimization of the design elements on each application. Plus, every application is supported by end-to-end performance tracking from user opt-in to referral traffic to conversions. In addition, the design of each application is completely customizable to the look and feel of your site.
Sociable Labs' applications are organized into two product lines, based on the business value they drive.
- Sociable AttractTM– a line of referral applications that motivate your customers to share their excitement with friends on their social networks, driving high-conversion traffic back to your site.
- Sociable ConvertTM – a line of conversion applications that personalize your site experience with recommendations and advice from friends.
Test-and-Learn ROI Platform - Social is still in its infancy and is evolving extraordinarily quickly. Trying to keep up, retailers are challenged to find the right mix of social features on their ecommerce sites that motivate real user involvement and participation. That is why Sociable Labs built its solution around a Test-and-Learn ROI Platform that powers experimentation, testing and improvement – giving retailersreal A-B metrics to know how to maximize user participation and sales uplift.
Click Images To Enlarge
- Test-and-Learn Optimization - Sociable's A-B testing capability, supported by end-to-end analytics, allows you to optimize the critical design elements of each application, as well as the placement and mix of applications overall. The illustration above shows an example of the design elements that can be optimized, as well as the step-by- step performance metrics that are tracked in order to maximize the impact of each application.
- Rich User Profiling - Our integration platform captures every user interaction on your site (click-stream data, purchase history, etc.) and matches it with each user’s social profile data - and that of their friends on Facebook (the “Social Graph”). The integration of the two data sets drives extremely targeted and relevant social sharing, which in turn drives the highest-converting referral traffic back to your site.
Social Expertise and Services - To guide you to success, Sociable Labs provides a dedicated success manager supported by a team of social strategists, designers and developers. Our team brings deep expertise in social commerce, consumer motivation, online marketing and the intricacies of the Facebook platform.
Every Sociable Labs customer is paired with a Customer Success (CS) team. Each CS team includes:
- Social design strategist.
- Social experience designer.
- Success manager (aka Account Manager).
- Plus supporting social engineers.
The CS team works closely with each client to help guide and support them every step of the way, from initial strategy formulation, to launch, to ROI-optimized improvements.
Social Strategy
- Comprehensive Product Vision: Sociable Labs has a clear vision for how social will become a key driver of traffic and sales for online retailers, plus a solution and process that supports that vision. Many of their customers specifically chose Sociable Labs because of this vision and their confidence in their ability to guide them along the road to attaining it.
- Best Practices: One of the advantages of thier test-and-learn approach to social commerce is that they gain deep insight across a wide range of social applications from each of their customers’ deployment. This base of learnings will contiue to grow significantly over time, providing a very rich source of best practices that each CS team will utilize to improve their deployments and results.
- Creating the Plan: It is the mission of their CS teams to make social commerce work to meet the clients specific objectives with their target consumers in their product categories. Utilizing their end-to-end social expertise, they work with their clients to define a phased strategy to meet these objectives.
Social Design
- Creating and Launching: Equipped with A-B tested best practices from all their customer deployments, their social designers will create application designs that motivate target consumers in their product categories to drive the highest levels of participation, referrals and conversion.
- Testing and Improving: With feedback from A-B tests and input from the clients web creative team, their social designers will make the creative, messaging, offer and/or flow changes needed to optimize the business results of each application.
Analytics and Testing
Based on the proven split testing approach, Sociable’s A-B testing platform and the underlying analytics engine will enable us to quickly and effectively optimize the mix, placement and design of our applications deployed on your site. Sociable’s A-B Testing Platform consists of:
- A-B Testing capability built in to each application
- Analytics engine to track end-to-end performance of applications, from your site to Facebook and back
Reporting
Sociable Labs' reporting allows your account manager to monitor the success of our applications deployed on your site. Based on reports generated from our analytics tool, your account manager will help you gain insights about your social strategy, most influential customers and most socially engaging products.
I find Sociable's social ecommerce solution to increase ecommerce sales very interesting, but I am always a bit suspicious when a startup claims their clients increased their ecomemrce sales by 300% using their software, and that data is based on just a handful of clients. I would be much more interesting in knowing what those returns are going to look like over several years, spread over several hundred clients.
The other issue that concerns me is whether Sociable's Social Attract and Social Convert apps will intrude on the website users online experience. If you check Active.com's ecommerce site, all of their Facebook pages are keynoted down at the bottom towards the righthand side. This is a convenient way for visitors to check what Active.com's fans are saying about the company and its products.
Courtesy of an article dated October 27, 2011 appearing in Fast Company
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