Building a better Kelly Ripa: Making social product endorsements work
Allen Stern at CenterNetworks posts about micro-celebrity endorsements (aka friend endorsements). He begins with a discussion of Kelly Ripa’s shilling for Electrolux and moves from there to a plan for an advertising system based on friend endorsements:
Here’s what I’d like to see: a friend endorsement system and the creation of a new advertising category named, “social advertising”. Here are the basics on how the program would work. You enter the products you’d be willing to endorse to your friends into the system. Your friends do the same. When you are ready to purchase an item, you check the friend endorsement system and review your friend’s product endorsements in the category you are interested in purchasing within.
I think we have to be very careful about this. Endorsements from friends are more about the authenticity derived from real trust between people. We’re willing to accept that celebrities get paid to say things. However, any system for social product endorsements or advertising has to be extremely careful not to come across as spammy. No one wants someone essentially selling Amway in their social network. This means that things like payments for endorsement become extremely tricky. (Allen’s not directly suggesting payments, but it seems implied.) Any perceived conflict of interest on the part of the endorser and you lose the authenticity on which this system depends. I think this means that endorsements need to be more of a by-product of other interactions and less the focus of the system.
I also think any system that provides this needs to add value on top of our normal real-world endorsements where we mention a product we like in casual conversation with friends. Part of this is providing a way for people to find out about products their friends like that they wouldn’t necessarily sit down and talk about. This sort of serendipity + a trusted recommendation from a friend is a powerful way to discover products you’ll like. There is definitely potential here.
At Appozite, we’re working on a system with some of the elements that Allen describes. However, we’re always very aware of the issues above. Here are our guiding principals:
- Never compromise user trust
- Create something that uses the unique aspects of the web to provide an experience people couldn’t otherwise have in the real world
We believe that if you don’t do those things you should pack up your servers and go home because you won’t have users.
So, can we all become mini Kelly Rippas (sans the irrepressible chipperness and with a heavy dose of authenticity) in our own circle of friends? Should we? How can an online system of friend endorsement improve upon what we already do in normal conversation? I’d love to hear what you think.
Hayes @ June 10, 2008
I’m pretty sure I’ve bought something because someone on Twitter “endorsed” a product. If they liked the product so much as to announce it on Twitter, I knew it must be a great product. There are 2 other factors that built credibility. I knew that they weren’t being compensated for it. And I liked that there was not any “system” for providing this recommendation; it was just organic through Twitter.
To recommend a product to someone, it has to be extremely easy - almost automatic. I don’t think I would login anywhere to recommend something. Twitter is also good for this.
This is all stuff you basically said in your blog post. Just reiterating. I hope you can figure out a good system.
[...] response to my recent post on social product endorsements, Steve Odom wrote an enlightening comment about how he’s used the micro-blogging site Twitter [...]