Thank you, everyone, for coming.
The session is called Increasing Website Revenue by Driving Social Behaviors.
I'm Oliver Roop, the founder and CEO of Big Link.
I think the first thing that's going to add to you here is the, there is a poll.
You can all fill out, I believe, their paper copies have been distributed, and you can
also use your smartphone.
I presume you've done this earlier this morning, so you probably know how this all works better
than might be.
So an interesting sea change is going on on the web right now.
As recently as three or four years ago, the most common purchasing behavior we saw out
of consumers was a very simple pattern where a consumer would go to a search engine and
type the name of the product they were looking for, and often land on a merchant site and
perform product selection on the merchant site and end up purchasing right there.
And certainly there were lots of varieties, but even three or four years ago we really
saw this as the predominant way that purchasing was taking place.
We have seen a big change in behavior over the last couple of years, and this is actually
a clip out of a study performed and published by Google called the Zero Moment of Truth,
and showed that from 2010 to 2011, the percentage of shoppers that used social media, social
sources as an influential driver in product purchase decisions has roughly doubled in
the single year, from 19% to 37% to 95% increase.
And certainly, in fact the study was conducted in the middle of 2011, so certainly by now
I think the trend has continued.
And I think you certainly you don't have to look very far online or in the news to see
the real sea change underway.
Pinterest is probably the latest big mind share grabber that is just sort of changing the
way that people select products and make purchasing decisions.
So one of our customers, Kodak Gallery, this is a quote from Cynthia Thomas, I want to read
the whole thing, but if you notice the highlighted parts, traditional avenues no longer provide
a clear purchase funnel, and the shift requires us to invest in a lot of different parts.
So merchants are finding that to secure consumers when they're making at the moment of purchase
decision, that their behavior has changed fairly substantially even just the last year,
and that we see that continuing dramatically.
Because some of the old techniques which were around securing traffic from search engines
through paid and SEO means creating landing pages to convert and securing purchases that
way really are deteriorating and effectiveness pretty dramatically and very rapidly.
So what do we see now?
This is just a specific example, there are many different sort of instantiations of this.
Here's an example of a consumer searching for best Blu-ray players, or searching Twitter,
or searching Facebook, and then seeking guidance from the community.
We've shown an example here of a forum where a consumer reads the accumulated content
that has accrued in the forum, surrounding the products, and makes a purchase decision
before they ever get to the merchant site, or the affiliate landing page, and the purchase
decision has sort of moved upstream.
And so it's really just going to require new tools, new techniques from affiliates to capture.
But there's plenty of good news in this story.
The, again, quoted out of the Google study, Kim Cadleck, the Johnson and Johnson brand
manager, really is looking at how do you become a part of the content?
That's the challenge and the opportunity.
So how can brands seeking to engage with consumers change their behavior to become a part of
the content so that this new behavior that we're seeing out of users, you can still reach
them, still affect purchasing decisions?
So I'd like to propose one answer here and essentially walk you through a case study.
Certainly lots of still being learned about social media, and we certainly wouldn't say
we know about all the aspects of it.
I think the first thing I want to say is you definitely keep doing what you're doing.
So no one is saying that you should stop doing SEO, SEO, and you should stop building
great landing pages, you know, you should stop sort of understanding your incoming traffic.
All those techniques remain valid, absolutely.
But really we want to walk you through, I want to walk you through a couple of examples
where a social component can be attached into the purchase decision, which both attaches
to this new behavior, seeing out of consumers, and in fact gives the affiliate leverage
in the sense that when you can get this cycle flowing, really you find the wind is at
your back, and the work you need to do to continue the cycle actually sort of reduces over
time and you start to find a sort of snowball rolling downhill.
So what that is really is creating a space where purchasing decisions are made, trying
to be the center of that purchasing decision within whatever niche your products or services
are in.
So I'm going to, I'll get to a specific example in a sec, but I think the specifics
really are, you know, if you can create a social community around the products and services
that you sell, you know, what are the upsides, right?
Increased engagement, imagine it's essentially a, you know, a water cooler where your users
are hanging around talking about your products, evangelizing them to others, discussing the
nuances, and effectively creating free content on your behalf, right?
I think that's what effective, effective communities, you know, that have gathered engagement,
that have reached critical mass, that's what's happening, that the user community is creating
content, you know, without you sort of directly paying for it or creating it yourself, and
certainly when that happens, it's a magical thing.
And you find users coming back on their own, you know, traditional affiliate sort of sites
and properties, often don't see a lot of repeat traffic, a lot of organic traffic, really
it's about sort of paid driving, you know, driving traffic to the site and, you know, less
so about users coming back on their own.
And so if you can create this community, you know, you really see the visible part is
sort of users hanging around creating content, and the part that shows up in the data, but
it's not immediately visible just by looking at the page, is higher click-through rates,
you know, more, the sort of take of your affiliate links, you know, can improve dramatically
when it comes from a conversation, you know, that's credible and has user engagement.
So I feel like I've been sort of talking a little abstractly, let's start by saying, what
am I not saying?
I'm not saying what you need to do is go by ads on Facebook, I'm not saying what you need
to do is go by sponsored tweets.
I think both of those are, you know, attempts to shortcut this process, and I think they
certainly work in certain circumstances, but what we are talking about is, again, sorry,
another example of not just a, this is a customer we've seen, you know, of just trying
to put their existing creative into a Facebook page and seeing poor engagement.
Here's an example of user tweeting, you know, please, I only need five more followers
to hit 500.
You know, if you think this is effective messaging for your brand, you know, it's not.
And we've, we've mercifully, I think, removed the names.
So this is one of our customers, it's called Watch You Seek, and they are, you know, a watch
vendor, and notably what they've done is they've done a really great job of integrating
community into their, you know, what otherwise would be a pure merchant site, right?
You could certainly imagine there are many examples on the net of just, you know, here's
the watches to buy, click here to buy them.
Watch You Seek has put a really a lot of effort into, you know, building a community.
And they, if you just sort of read the copy on site, they have tons of forums, both official
and unofficial, they've, you know, they've succeeded to the point of getting watchmakers
to use them as the official, you know, forum for watches, obviously not everyone's going
to be able to succeed in doing that, but really creating a territory where products are,
are discussed in a positive way, and that has great sort of bleed off commerce opportunities
for Watch You Seek.
It brings our customers back, it gets people talking about them repeatedly, and it really,
you know, has a ton of benefits.
So you can see, you know, here's an example in their site, you know, 898 members and
5,000 odd viewers are looking at this site right now.
So that kind of engagement, that's something that you can't get out of a flat landing
page, right?
So if you have a flat page that says, you know, this way you should buy the product, it
doesn't have the same effectiveness as here are all the other people who are essentially
sitting next to you, talking about the same things, and, you know, sitting where you are
right now, this is a crowded place, you know, and that feeling of community, definitely
our customers say has, you know, a sort of a big impact on monetization.
And then you see the integration into Facebook and Twitter, which is what you want, right?
What you want is for your customers to be organically inserting you into the parts of, you know,
the organic parts of Facebook and Twitter, right?
Not sponsored tweets, but organic tweets, not sponsored ads on the, the right column
and Facebook, but, you know, organic shares where users sort of just enthusiastically, you
know, share references with their friends.
And of course, you know, the search engines can't capture this, but they certainly pick
it up.
You know, when, when, you know, to secure engagement to your site, Twitter, you know, increasingly
a big source for Google, Facebook, obviously, less so, you know, but certainly, you know,
organic user engagement is really the holy grail of what you're looking for.
And you can see, at least for what you see, it's really paid off in traffic.
So, you know, there's a, there's a group called, you know, all watch sites and watch
you seek is rank number one.
And really, you know, this, certainly if you talk to the owners, you know, they would
tell you it's, it's a result of, of the community, right?
The community is not a sort of ball time that they added, but it is sort of core to the
mission that they're, that they're performing.
So they think of themselves more and more as really a community, you know, that feeds
commerce rather than commerce that has a, a community ball time.
Another great example of like what happens when organic traffic really gets going, you
can see repeat visitors.
So this, this visitor with the Obi-Wan logo sub-Rosa, you know, you can see 15 posts, you
know, joined October 2011 as posted 15 times, I think that's the kind of engagement that
a lot of affiliates really kill for, right?
So to really have enthusiasts, you know, out there pointing to your site, discussing
your site, sort of, egging on other users, you can see, you know, the upper left here,
you know, the comment, you know, I'd recommend a Herschel Liberty series of straps and,
and the person said, you know, I ended up ordering a year against Buffalo.
That, you know, that's commerce happening in the field, right?
That is social behavior driven by, you know, by a lively community.
And so, you know, as this picks up, you know, you can look at some of these numbers here
in this particular case, you know, free high quality content, which sort of begets more
of itself, all of which inherently contain opportunities to monetize, right?
So all of these conversations, or many of these conversations, take the form of, you
know, I have $1,000 in my hand and I'm thinking I'm trying to decide between item A and item
B, what do you guys think, you know, discussion ensues, you know, and we, we measure the sort
of engagement through from that content, and it's dramatic, it's really impressive, that,
you know, the downstream purchasing that happens as a result of, you know, user engagement
and sort of organic threads, you know, it is really something to be envied by a lot
of the affiliates in the room.
And, you know, increasingly, you know, pandas, that the panda changes that Google has
done recently, only enhance this effect, right?
More and more, you're seeing these sort of, you know, forum and other, like, real organic
content of real users discussing things are getting increasingly, you know, good focus
from the search engines, and the traditional, you know, affiliate landing pages are really
having a harder and harder time, you know, attracting the notice and getting the traffic.
So what's easy is a great example of, you know, a community where purchasing decisions
are made, right?
People, you know, make decisions to buy, you know, in the case of luxury watches, obviously,
very high value items, expensive item time, margin items, but really we see this across
the gamut that really almost every sort of product and services genre has at least the
opportunity for lively engaged communities.
And, you know, obviously the challenge becomes, if you're in a crowded space, you know,
how do you break in?
And certainly, you know, there are techniques there, but I think, you know, the, certainly
in our discussions here with, you know, affiliates, I think the sort of need for real communities,
you know, it's, I think it's fairly emerging.
It's not, we have not found that, you know, affiliates sort of deeply embrace the need
to create communities around, you know, the content they're building, unless face it
is a lot of work.
So certainly, and you don't get to not do the work you were doing before.
And so, you know, certainly, you know, it adds, it adds complexity.
So let's say, okay, you're signed up, you, you like the idea, let's, let's build a forum.
You know, what, what kinds of things can I do?
It's not for you forum, but any kind of community.
What sort of things should I do to, to sort of achieve success, you know, in what I want
to create?
Well, the first I'd say is to incorporate your community within your main site as tightly
as possible.
And I think certainly a number of, I think probably the worst offenders are consumer
electronics manufacturers, you know, they have sort of an entire site built out and then
somewhere off in the corner, there's a button of community or forum or, you know, users.
And it sort of goes off to a whole different site that no one really goes to and isn't
really, you know, an organic part of the site.
And those communities often fail.
So really, you know, integrating your community deeply into your site, you know, so it feels
like where people are, you know, is definitely a critical first step.
Really you can organize your community in a way that encourages but doesn't force product
discussion.
So you get to, you know, highlight what the forum threads are, you can set your own,
you can make sticky certain threads and sort of force them to the top and you can really
see discussions.
And you know, obviously there's a fine line here between, you know, sort of pushing
this too hard and forcing, you know, trying to force, you know, buying discussions.
But you know, we found that amongst enthusiasts, you know, they're really receptive to this
kind of conversation.
They're really organizing your forum in a way that sort of enhances commerce, you know,
is really, is really welcome.
I'd say be careful not to, you know, put a hole in your own boat.
Certainly, you know, introducing this, this actually is one of our customers who we've
carefully filed the name off for.
But, you know, making it difficult to participate in the forum in this case by sort of reducing
the surface area of the forum that's visible, you know, by, by introducing ad units, you
know, certainly will win you a little bit of ad revenue.
But, you know, really hamper the success of your forum and will make it very difficult,
you know, to engage your users and, you know, certainly likely to produce bad results.
Mac rumors is actually a site that does a great thing.
They actually, essentially, link their comments through, they essentially replace their comments
with a forum.
So if you think about the range of, of comment technologies that are available out there,
I'd say at one end is probably the, you know, the Facebook commenting platform where the
ability to have rich discussions is somewhat limited, right?
The sort of nesting is difficult.
On the upside, there's good identity, but, you know, the ability to have real sort of discussions
in Facebook forum comments is quite limited.
You know, disgust is probably a little better if I'm sure everyone's interacted with websites
with disgust on it, that, you know, that really makes it possible to have sort of deep rich
conversations.
And I think Mac rumors has taken it, you know, right to the extreme by essentially building
a, you know, a replacing their comment system with a forum, but in a really organic way.
So essentially, each of the, you know, every time someone has the urge to comment, they
run through to the forum.
And so the each comment becomes a page with a permalink, you know, where real discussion
can happen that people can refer to, that has links in it, you know, and really enables
the creation of real content, you know, around the user discussion, right?
So if your users are already excited to discuss, don't give them the tools that make that
difficult, make them the tools that make that easy.
And, you know, Mac rumors is a good example, you know, the TED, some success there.
Another great way to seed conversations is to ask questions.
So, you know, once you have some form of community engagement, you know, seeding it, you
know, is a really low cost way to keep discussion going.
You know, so you see the questions here, to slash query readers, own any of the aforementioned
smartphone devices, which ones, now if you found carrier IQ testing software on your device.
Yeah, those kinds of questions stimulate conversation.
And if you think about the ROI that's needed there, it's really quite, or the investment
that's needed to get that returns really quite low.
Like, you know, a blog post is potentially a lot of work, you know, an article of some
kind is a lot of work.
Asking a simple question, you know, can bang it out in the first few minutes of every day.
And, you know, as your community starts to gel, you know, you're going to find yourself
getting traction around creating discussion, you know, that your users create for you.
And that just creates more engagement, more page views, and ultimately more commerce.
And then, you know, don't be afraid to be a little provocative.
You know, Gizmodo here, obviously not a sort of the same type of community we've been
talking all this time.
But, you know, the headline here, eat some babies, save some homework, and head on down
to Ninja Town.
You know, that is likely to create discussion and engagement and, you know, controversy,
which, you know, in our view is generally positive, right?
I think, you know, all PR, all PR is good PR.
Really, I think engagement, for the most part, you know, with your users is almost always
a positive thing.
And then, you know, we spoke earlier about ad revenue, and you saw an example of like
a really bad, intrusive, you know, case where, you know, ad revenue is sort of detracted
from the form.
I think, you know, the more traffic you have, certainly there's always an opportunity
to introduce ad revenue, you know, in the case of affiliates often it's not sort of
ad revenue.
It's more like conversion attempts to the product you're already working on.
But certainly there is, you know, our customers have found there is definitely an appropriate
place for, you know, for ads within the content.
And, you know, certainly, you know, there's a place for that.
It's not, it's not outruled out entirely by communities.
Communities don't reject it, you know, per se.
And then, you know, really taking advantage of the product references and opportunities
for commerce that do appear, you know, is really critical.
So I think when you see, you know, references to products or commercializable discussions,
you know, enabling commerce in the sense we're linking out to the relevant product that's
already being discussed, you know, or other monetization opportunities, we find is both
critical and, you know, not poorly received by publishers or by users, excuse me.
So, you know, as long as they understand that monetization is occurring here, we think
we certainly find that, you know, users who are surprised to learn that monetization
is occurring in this content, you know, get upset.
But I think if the forum or community discloses upfront, you know, look, commerce is happening
here.
We link out to, you know, monetization opportunities and we collect affiliate fees there.
You know, we've definitely found, you know, users, you know, tolerant or receptive.
And, you know, doing the work here is a technology, actually, so this is what Vigling does.
You know, we essentially help the monetization of existing content.
So I think I blasted through that a little faster than I expected.
Definitely happy to take questions, any questions?
So we certainly, there are cases, so thank you, Eric, that the linking opportunity,
like when an organic discussion happens, there is a trade-off between, you know, trying
to keep the product reference as sort of natural within the conversation on one hand and
sort of really, you know, enhancing the brand of the product being discussed on the other.
So I think on one sort of far extreme, you might imagine, you know, like a really great
version of vibrant or something where, you know, you mouse over a product name and sort
of, you know, the price of the item, the photo of the item, where else you can buy the
item sort of all contextually pops in there.
I think on the, on the far other extreme is, you know, just a flat link which sort of
has no brand enhancement.
You know, I think that is a, that is a spectrum we've seen a number of our customers have
very different appetites for and certainly, I'd say our customers probably tend more towards
the latter side where it's a little less intrusive and there's less sort of brand enhancement.
But certainly, you know, there's an opportunity for both publisher and merchant to, you
know, increase the brand and, you know, have, have, you know, greater impact.
So you could imagine, you know, a link to a comparison shopping engine like Nextag,
you know, and makes it clear, this is Nextag, who's selling, you know, we're linking this
product reference out to Nextag and here's a photo and here's the price and I'd say,
you know, that's a great example.
Saw another question back there?
Well, I'm curious as far as I wonder regarding it, and then again, when you have zero
customers in your form, you'll come here and you'll come in and you'll ask them to be
in there with normal customers.
That's right.
Right, so that is definitely the hardest spot and, and I think the, though, the answer
is you probably don't, you start by becoming a participant in existing forum, assuming
one exists, right?
I think, I think there's two, there's two scenarios there.
One is, trying to break into a community that's well served, like, you know, watches or
automotive parts, I think where there's not an existing one, you know, really it becomes
like any other website promotion, right?
You go where the users are and you, you promote, you sort of talk about your forum, you know,
this great discussion, you know, you see the discussion and you try to convince, you
know, hopefully if you're an enthusiast, you have a small group of friends who are, you
know, versed in the topic and kind of bring them in by hooker, by crook, and, and then
you really, you know, you reference your forum on other forums, you, you know, it's, it's
promotion.
But, but certainly that bootstrapping is, is definitely the toughest part and, and certainly,
you know, it's easy to stand up here and talk about what you see because it's already
the sort of number one watch forum and, you know, how great they are, but, but, you know,
they have enough traction that they can keep doing, seeding from zero, really in our experience,
at least in the case of classical forums, most of them happen when there's some sort
of schism in, in an, in an earlier popular forum.
So often, you know, you reach the sort of, you know, the number where a community stopped
yelling and some subset gets pissed off and basically says we're going to go start our
own forum.
And, and that actually happens quite a lot.
I don't know that I'd necessarily try to precipitate that.
I think it could cause blowback, but, but I think really, you know, it's, it's, it's
promotion, but, but it can start quite small.
I mean, you know, you know, a seed group of 510 users is really enough to start a conversation
that feels real, that, that can accrete.
Anyone else?
Please.
I'm just wondering if the vendors that are being discussed or be discussed about a negative
fashion, in that form, your relationship with them, is your facilitating?
So that's a great question.
I think, in our experience, that's inevitable, in fact, right?
So I'm sorry, the question was, if the vendors being discussed or discussed in a negative
fashion, can that hurt your relationship with them because, you know, you're facilitating
that conversation?
So I think, it's a great question.
I think, inevitably, negative conversations will happen about every vendor, you know,
on your forum.
I think most vendors understand, you know, that the, the ordinary stuff, right?
You know, that the negative comments that are sort of 1 in 5, certainly, you know, there
are cases where things sort of spiral out of control, right?
And there's just sort of really vitriolic stuff going on.
It's a tough judgment call, right?
You can, you can lock the thread and sort of shut it down, but definitely if, if you start
to be observed by your users as sort of a tool of the, of the merchants, your formal,
your, your community will lose credibility quickly and, and can sort of dry up.
And so I would say, for the most part, our customers tend the other way and tend to sort
of let that stuff go and say, look, like we're a forum, I'm sorry, maybe we can bring
one of your reps in to advocate on behalf of a company.
So I'd say, basically, the you as the site owner should try not to engage in advocacy,
but to behind the scenes, bring in the vendor to advocate on their own behalf.
I think if you as a site owner start to try to turn the dial, you can definitely cost
the credibility, you know, of, of your community.
But, you know, there certainly are cases, you know, every forum has, has people who've
been banned, you know, and that, you know, usually is around anti-social behavior, forums
for whatever reason have a, have a sort of lineage of student-inemity, where the identities
are persistent, but not real, like they are in Facebook.
And that, you know, that has certain attributes, one of which is pretty free willing discussion,
but a negative one of which can be, you know, somewhat anti-social behavior.
And so there is, you know, there are tools available to the forum and community owners
to sort of try and tamp that down and, you know, banning and sort of slow accounts.
But I'd say in general, you know, our customers have, you know, tell us that they try not to
take a side, but at least to give the other side an opportunity to respond.
Absolutely.
Next question?
I have a question about social proof you're talking about before.
One of the things that you mentioned, I was just making an update to my site, do you feel
it's important for, like, world maps to show how many people are on-site at the same time,
how many people visit the site last 30 days, is that been social proof, is that the thing
to better improve?
I think it's good social proof if your numbers are impressive.
Yeah, I absolutely.
I think certainly our, you know, we have, our customers who do that speak highly of it
and believe it works.
I think we have not done sort of A, B testing double-blind, but I think certainly anecdotally
in the community that there's a strong belief that's true, as long as your numbers are
impressive.
I think nothing is worse than, you know, three posts in the last 30 days.
You know, actually, the simplest one that people often screw up is copyright 2009.
Nothing says dead, you know, dead site like that.
So I think certainly a feeling of community and vibrancy, other people are around, you
know, if, you know, your software permits it sort of live updating where you can see
new things pop in as you're reading, all fantastic, you know, social proof, as you mentioned.
Next question.
Do you recommend any software or performance?
So I'd say that it's funny.
I hesitate to use the word most popular.
I'd say the most heavily used, certainly in my art customer basis, people, but it's certainly
the sort of interesting, somewhat, you know, there's a fair amount of archaeology involved.
You know, but I say B-Bulton's most commonly used, PHPB is very popular.
There are some new takes going on, so the guys at Hudler, for example, you know, it's
a new startup that has done a great job of migrating forums from whatever old technology
they're on to a new platform that SEOs well, that looks good, that's responsive, that
loads quickly, you know, and I'd say they're a great example, and they're a customer
of ours as well.
You know, the 0XERO is another sort of forum software out of the UK by some of the founders
of B-Bulton, they're getting a lot of traction as well.
So I think you can sort of browse around and find, I'd say those are probably the three
or four most popular out there.
Next question.
Great.
Okay, well, I apologize for running a little quick, I think, obviously, new material blasts
out a little fast, but thank you very much for joining, I'll be around after the talk.
Actually, David Gorsi down here, if you'd like to learn a little more about VigLink, he and
I will be around after the talk, and we'd love to chat with you.
Thank you.
Thank you.