How should an e-commerce site use sharing?

Grant Leboff: One of the most important things for business is always word-of-mouth, recommendations. Off-line we do it naturally, but online of course, you have the ability to share using social platforms and other things. How does an e-commerce site use that to their advantage? What things should they be doing to make that happen?

Graham Jones: They should obviously be giving people the opportunity to share. So it’s saying I’ve just bought this and they can tweet that or whatever. Actually that’s quite good because people like tweeting what they’ve bought. If you do some psychological studies, as I have done, of people who do real-world shopping, you actually see them sharing things. They’ll stop in the coffee shop, they’ve got all their bags, they get a coffee and they start getting things out of their bags to show each other what they’ve bought. That’s all they’re doing online and it’s really helping them confirm their identity as a human being. So if you provide that feature, having the buttons, having those little things that say; ‘I’ve just bought this’, then that’s a really good thing you can do.

Grant Leboff: In terms of showing people what you’ve bought, are there any platforms that work better for that, naturally, than others online? Of course there is a multitude of social sites, but are there any ones that you would say are specifically good platforms for that kind of sharing?

Graham Jones: Certainly Twitter and Facebook but also consider Pinterest because that’s a visual platform and people can share pictures of exactly what they’ve just bought. Pinterest is really good for retailers because people can look at something, they can click through and you can generate another customer.

Grant Leboff: So showing people what you’ve bought is great. What are the other ways you can encourage people to share? Obviously, there are some products that are just not that visual as well, but what are the other things that businesses should be thinking about, in terms of encouraging this sharing?

Graham Jones: The other thing is to think about it in the real world. So when we share things in the real world we say, ‘I’ve just bought this’, or ‘I’ve just gone to this company and they’ve been really helpful’, and we can give the company name. The problem is that company name might not be well found on the Internet, or the product or service might not be well found, so what people need is domain names – URLs – that go to a specific landing page but are really easy to remember.

So if you’ve got a product on your website, your website [address] is going to have a lot of forward slashes, dates and numbers, which people can’t pass it on, but if you’ve got a short, snappy, domain name, so that if you are selling services to an accountancy firm and you are selling training for accountants, then you would have the website [address] ‘training for accountants.com’ or whatever and then when you pass that on in the real world. You would say, ‘Oh, you just go to training for accountants.com.’ and that might then lead to the name of the training company forward slash, forward slash… So diverted domain names is really good for off-line word of mouth.

Grant Leboff: And in terms of other techniques that companies can use, have you seen any techniques, online, in your work where you think – now that’s clever, in terms of getting more people to share or more people engaged with that business and leveraging that community to build more?

Graham Jones: The whole concept of what is called ‘gamificaction’. In other words, turning that experience into a bit of a game, a bit of fun, something that people can share and enjoy as a group of people, then that’s a really good idea. So thinking about how you can turn something into a bit of a contest, a bit of a game, something that people can do as a group on Facebook for instance, then that really works very well.

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