Hoan Ton-That is one of the smartest people I know. Earlier today we spoke about how the social gaming/virtual goods companies could save the incentivized offer industry which have had a bad week.
The offer industry is built on the concept of product bundling. Andrew Chen wrote a great post about here so wont go into the details.
In search marketing we’ve learned that the magic term “Intent” is the key to how most of the value is being created for someone like Google. By capturing the intent of a person who is out to buy something you have the power of directing traffic of huge value. How do you carry intent over to other sites where we’re not searching? It’s hard but here is an idea:
Amazing has something called “wish-list”, basically a list of books or products that I’ve saved on Amazon that I might buy sometime in the future. There could be many reasons why I’m putting something in my wish-list but one of them is certainly that I might buy it in the future. Compared to any book on Amazon the intent captured in my wish-list has a much higher value for Amazon. Basically Amazon have captured and saved my intent for the future.
In my opinion it’s crazy that this isn’t something that is being used on other sites, especially e-commerce sites . If I was able to “Heart” or “Like” products on any e-commerce site and they were able to save those “intents” for the future they’ve created value for my next return.
The big idea here is to capture someone intent and link it to a specific user. I think there is a huge opportunity with the mysterious Facebook Open Graph API to do just that. And it doesn’t have to be the same thing as with the beacon-fiasco. Imagine I’m on Etsy, I find something pretty and click “Like”. Etsy is connected with facebook and my (possible) intent is shared with my friends. Privacy-issue? Possibly, but the value of sharing something I like to facebook is probably larger for most users.
Value created for Etsy? Duh.
Facebook should start sharing Intent over the social graph and enable the “Like” function for everything on the web.
Here are some stuff I would “Like” if I could:
- http://www.amazon.com/Audacity-Win-Lessons-Historic-Victory/dp/0670021334/ref=wl_it_dp_o?ie=UTF8&coliid=I10NKD5T6CVBIR&colid=BYJ1NXGDESBF
- http://www.myspace.com/kaffibarinnights (great bar in Reykjavik)
A universal Facebook like button that shares a line to your newsfeed would be awesome.
At the last FB dev brouhaha they talked about expanding the social graph to objects outside Facebook. Is it possible to build a widget that displays a button on any page to “like” it? (This would add a one-liner to your stream, and presumably save that like info on the site.)
Etsy does have such a feature, they call it “favorites”. And hundreds of millions of items have been favorited.
