MaestroJ - digital strategy & new media

The holy grail of positive social recommendation has been a dream for many brands. Online, the proliferation of social networking sites has seen this goal frantically spread through strategy documents, agency proposals and yearly roadmaps. And what’s not to “like”? Through social recommendation users can share good products and services with their networks, while brands increase awareness, improve perception and eventually generate sales. It’s a win-win.

Many social networks have attempted to harness this behaviour. Facebook, arguably the most successful social networking site at the moment have simplified it to a simple gesture - the “like” feature. While the like feature is applicable across all user posts - status updates, wall posts, photos, links, etc; Facebook has recently revealed that it will place more commercial significance to this by having the term “like” replace “fan” in the “Fan” page. The Facebook Fan page is becoming increasingly significant as a channel for brands to engage with their users. It’s allowed brands to have an official presence within the popular channel; and communicate to their customers in a very important space.

With this seemingly innocent language change, Facebook is drawing even more parallels between how users interact with each other in their regular profiles, as they do with official brand channels. In a letter released to agencies, Facebook declared that they “believe [the feature] will result in gaining more connections to pages…users would be more comfortable with the term “Like”. The goal is to get the most user connections so that [brands] can have ongoing conversations in the news feeds of as many users as possible”

Blippr is another social recommendation service for brands. It asks users if they “like/dislike/love/hate” products and services. More importantly, Blippr integrates across other third-party sites so that a keyword (say of your brand) mentioned in these integrated sites will display the Blippr rating.

Hollrr is a new startup that rewards users who make product recommendations with status badges. Users are rewarded badges for recommendations that others have found useful. This badge strategy is also shared by a competitor site GetGlue.

A Brand Karma "flower"

Other similar services include Udorse where users are asked to take photos of themselves with their preferred brands and products and Blippy, a service that socialises what products and brands users are buying.

Brand Karma adds an interesting twist to the social recommendation space. Users are asked to assess brands based on their “karma”; that is, how “good” a brand is perceived on treating the planet, their customers, their employees, suppliers and investors.

While there is certainly no shortage of social recommendation sites, adoption, apart of Facebook, is yet to reach critical mass. What is clear however, is that brands are now in a landscape where there is an unprecedented amount of scrutiny and accountability demanded around their products and services. Users interact with brands as a single entity, and don’t care that they may be multinationals with many departments, across multiple regions. Users consider and judge at a click of a mouse button. For users, they either “like” your brand, or they don’t, and there are many avenues for them to express it.