Some miscellaneous nuggets:
Consumer opinions online (61%) are nearly twice as trusted as search engine advertising (34%) and banner ads (26%), according to the 2007 Nielsen Online Global Consumer Study.

Less is the New More – overload is taking its toll. Content we care about will find us through clever combinations of friends and algorithms.

When I first learned PR it was a job filled with control.  We sent out highly crafted material to select audience of influencers and it was all about push, it was not a conversation.  Now just as PR becomes a role that multiple people in a company play, it is also a role that is blurring with customer service and customer care.  As many PR luminaries like Brian Solis keep saying, it’s a conversation. Sometimes letting go of that control has been hard but it has been well worth it.

The same shift, and the same release of control is happening to online marketers.  It is not about what you think is important, it is about what your site users think is important.  Turning site search and navigation over to the crowds might put you out of your comfort zone.  But our roles are changing.  If customer care really is part of our job, then it’s time we faciliate a conversation rather than make a speech.

My mom had an issue with Comcast recently.  I suggested she contact them through Twitter. Their Comcast Cares persona has become pretty legendary.  But my mom isn’t on Twitter and unlikely to join so I tweeted for her and she got amazing service as a result.  It was great!  I felt social!  I felt powerful!  But really I was one squeeky wheel who happened to know about how to leverage a particular channel, Twitter.

What about the more invisible, average visitor to Comcast or anyone else’s website?  What about the person who leaves disatisfied with their experience without leaving any sort of explict feedback?  What do you learn from that person and how can you leverage this to make the experience better for the next customer?   Without my tweet, my mom would have just been an upset unknown customer, searching but not finding. 

Don’t get me wrong.  I love Twitter.  My friend’s love Facebook.  But my mom and the big silent majority are still out there, searching on traditional marketing, eCommerce and support sites for answers.  Let them help each other find what they need.   Harness their successes and their failures without making them have to actively participate in anything.   By including everyone, you really are tapping and sharing the broadest possible “social” community, both active participants and average browsers like my mom.

In this webcast, Sucharita ties the Forrester Consumer Forum’s uber-theme of the universal needs of consumers (Connection, Uniqueness, Comfort and Variety) to what we do at Baynote.  She made us realize that product recommendations can tap into all four needs.  Sometimes recommendations provide an online shopper the reassurance that a particular product is “mom-tested” or “peer-validated”, meeting our need for connection and comfort.   In other contexts,  recommendations might allow someone to explore their need for variety and uniqueness by exposing long-tail niches like “third-person shooter” games.

For another angle on how human needs and desires affect how and why we buy, you might want to check out Martin Lindstrom’s recent book buy.ology -truth and lies abut why we buy.  Of particular interest and the direct tie to the Forrester material and our webcast is Chapter 3 I’ll Have What She’s Having — Mirror Neurons at Work.  It talks about how our need for connection is wired into our brain structure.  Mirror neurons drive us to imitate and, interestingly, work in conjunction with dopamine to make that imitation feel good.  It’s no wonder then that people who use recommendations buy more and feel good doing it.

Another interesting point of the book is the difference between what people say they want to buy, as uncovered through market research, surveys, or focus groups and what they actually buy.

When I was pregnant,  Amazon kept recommending me books on exotic locations my husband and I had planned to travel like Cambodia or Patagonia.  Oh cruel Amazon and you won’t even fetch me ice cream!

I haven’t done a lot of shopping this year on Amazon.  If I had it would start showing me crazy recommendations based on some esoteric book I bought my physicist stepfather.  That was his wierd niche, not mine, not mine!  Let it go!

So this morning, I log on and what do I see but an Amazon recommendation for a book on losing weight while breastfeeding.  Not only is my youngest now a year and a half and I am waaaay past that phase but it seems, again, eerily cruel that Amazon finds a way to remind me that during the holidays I am eating more than I burn.  Now that’s just cruel.

From their blog – “ReadWriteWeb talks to a group of leaders in the online shopping market. We have executives from Retrevo, ModCloth, Baynote, ThisNext and Cartfly on the call, and we’ll be discussing what’s next in online shopping in this timely holiday podcast….  We will post the audio from the show at the end, but we hope you join us LIVE on Calliflower or Facebook.”

One of the interesting things that happened at Juniper after overlaying Baynote on top of their existing search engine  (you all know this right, no rip and replace, we’re SAAS, we’re very nice that way) is that the mix of search results shifted significantly in two main ways:

First of all, the Mob of Juniper site users found documents relevant to queries that the search engine couldn’t.  Humans just get things, make connections that machines can’t.  Period.

Second, the items that percolated to the top were more often the more technical documents that the majority of the site viewers were interested in, not necessarily all the various product pages that marketing felt they needed to create.  The Mob, of course, knew what it needed and put these items on top.  Simple.  Voilà.

So sometimes what the Mob, via Baynote, delivers is more results (i.e. stuff an algorithm can’t find like pdfs) or sometimes fewer results (just the stuff people want) either way, the Mob delivers better results.

As we worked with Suresh Vittal of Forrester Research to put together the content, Jack, Suresh and I frequently hearkened back to a similar “sea change” that happened in the early days of content management.  In 1998, we spent much of our time talking to journalist, analysts and customers about unlocking the so-called webmaster bottleneck.  If you could only put web publishing in the hands of the internal content experts, then you could eliminate this delay created by having a “webmaster.”  By 1999 when we went public, everyone got it.

But unlocking this bottleneck created a new bottleneck – people finding the information they needed.  Now we suffered from content overload — because organizations kept producing more and more content and there was no efficient means to make sure that the content you showed was the content people needed or the products people wanted.  Organizations tried to fix it by investing in complex search engines or analytics or profile-based personalization.  None of this fixed the fundamental problem.

It’s time to get rid of the expert bottleneck.  In this economy, the timing is perfect.  There are some task that will always be manual but there are others that can and should be automated.   Automate for a better user experience.  Automate for efficiency. Turn what people see on your site over to the Mob.  It might make you feel a little uncomfortble now, but so was the idea of eliminating the webmaster bottleneck in 1999.  I say FUGETABOUTIT.

During the Advanced Search Forum, when asked if there were any activities they were doing in 2008 that they intended to scale back in 2009, there was silence.  It seemed that everyone there was still doing anything they could to improve the customer experience and get the right message to the right person. I canvased several people privately and asked them if their high level goals were changing – few described any sort of retrenching, some said efficiency and automation were becoming more important.  The idea of putting the collective intelligence of site visitors to work, as Jack Jia has described it “let the mob run the store”, seemed to make sense to everyone.  It appealed to those trying to do more with less as well as those trying to bring the right social technologies to play on their sites.

Interestingly blogs themselves are still up for grabs regarding how and when and why they should be used.  Barbara Mousigian of CDW commented in the session on Customer Experience, that people were frequently distracted by blogs as the latest shiny object to add to their site.

I asked our CEO Jack what his biggest take-away was from eTail.  He said that businesses still haven’t figured how to create a connection with customers the way business could when mom & pop stores dominated.  They put so-called experts in charge…marketers and merchandizers in the world of eCommerce.  But this isn’t the same and the gap is still great.  Shopping on the web is still, in its essence, a lonely experience.  But what was cool at eTail, was people acknowledged the gap and were actively looking to fill it….not haphazardly with the latest shiny object but with the best practices and technologies already proving themselves in the marketplace.