A good article in Business Week, Will Work for Praise, on motivating content creators with evidence that status is more powerful than cash for getting users to create content.
From my perspective there are a whole host of ways to encourage users to participate and engage in a site through content creation.  I met with Tim Chang, principal at Norwest Venture Partners a few weeks ago.  We were talking about game development and how effectively tapping into the seven deadly sins play a huge role in game engagement.   Community engagement is no different.  We need to give our users a reason to play games, write reviews and help create the StyleHop community.  For all these, tapping into base desire is critical.

What many startups miss is that while the promise of status is a powerful and important motivator, it’s not the only one.  We are developing our community with a mix of incentives that tap into desires for status, greed (read discounts) as well as positive influencers like contributing to our mission of democratizing fashion.

Focusing only on status and creating mavens is a natural mistake of many fashion sites…..the mavens and wannabe-mavens are the first ones to come to your site and they are the most enthusiastic.  However, this is a trap.  You can’t forget that big destination sites need to help everyday folks solve problems – that’s job one.  While mavens can help support this goal with original content, their deep interest in being heard can often times overwhelm broader goals.  Many social shopping sites are peaking out on traffic because they are leaning too much on helping the maven’s build status – There are too many sites where we go and feel like we are being bombarded by experts.  It’s like that great boutique you want to love but you don’t go in because the sales people are too pushy.

Fashion shopping destination sites need to make shopping for fashion easier if they want a mainstream audience.

Will eBay incorporate social shopping into its fold?

Link to another Vator.tv interview with Erik Stuart.  Erik clearly understands the dynamics at play in social shopping and has pretty good advice for ThisNext.

Charlene Li, co-author of “Groundswell” and a thought leader on social and emerging technologies made some predictions for 2009 that included one for Social Shopping:

Shopping Goes Social. After a devastating holiday season, retailers will eagerly seek a way to improve results other than driving demand with deeper discounts. One option they will investigate will be how to insert people and social connections into the buying process, illuminating and influencing for the first time the Black Hole Of Consideration. As they lick their wounds in the first half of 2009, retailers will watch from the sidelines as media companies implement open social technologies like Facebook Connect and the Open Social Platform. But as the holiday season launches early after Labor Day, shoppers will find options to see what friends are recommending, buying and rating integrated into the shopping experience.

Charlene is spot on.  There are going to be lots of different takes on how to make this a reality.  At StyleHop we are building the first fashion affiliate e-commerce engine that allows you to order your product search results based on the rankings of your self-identified fashion peers. Take three women living in Des Moines. One may want to see the top designer jeans as ranked by other women in her neighborhood, another by her friends, and another by women in the East Village of NYC. Each may have similar demographic characteristics and even similar initial “clicks” but, by identifying their unique fashion peers, they each get highly specific lists of styles that work for them.

This is so much better than black box behavioral analytics which consistently give back poor recommendations in fashion. Peer review has credibility and gives a woman shopping online the ability to shop quickly and confidently knowing that, when she buys an item, the people she wants to look good in front of have already pre-approved her purchase.

Social Media expert, Noa Gafni, recently covered us in her blog, Webutantes.

I’ll be giving a product demo of StyleHop at Web2NewYork’s networking party tomorrow, November 18th.

Here is an interview I did with Web2NewYork’s Peter Verkooijen:

Everyone is talking online about “creating community” within social networks for their brands.  It’s starting to sound hollow isn’t it?
Here is a link about the topic with my comment directly below.

The value of social networking and fashion shopping goes well beyond providing a sense of connectedness.  The truth is, shopping for fashion is really difficult.  Women have to identify the current trend, think about the occasion they are buying for, identify who will be their “fashion peers” at this occasion and consider their own personal preferences and fit issues.  This is all just to identify what they want/need!  Then it gets really hard – Women must go out into the world to find the one item among all the retail outlets, brands and channels that matches their need.   For many women this is just too much work!  It’s often far from fun.

What’s missing in the fashion ecosystem is a destination where women can go for specific unbiased style-level advice and recommendations.  Much like the role Amazon plays for books, Yelp for local retail and TripAdvisor for travel, fashion needs a place consumers can habitually click to make shopping decisions more quickly and confidently.

And, yes, we’re working on this problem at StyleHop

I was at Tim O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 conference last week in New York.  As far as I know he coined the term 2.0.  Recently, he wrote an insightful post that suggests there are three things that explain everything you need to know about web2.0 as it relates to the enterprise.

For those of you trying to generally understand how StyleHop is going to help fashion companies, this post will help ground you in the fundamental value proposition.  The only point he misses is that creating a consumer destination also allows you to create and monetize a dialogue between companies and consumers.  Yelp is proving that.

Here is the excerpt I found most illuminating:

If you understand the following three things, you know everything you need to know about Web 2.0 and the enterprise:

1. Harvest every bit of user contribution, not just the explicit. Your business has thousands of touch points with customers. When they buy from you, they contribute data as well as money. When your suppliers increase their prices, or change their delivery times, they contribute data to you. When you advertise, and people respond (or don’t), they contribute to you. When you introduce a new product, when you do something your customers love, or hate, and people talk about it, they contribute. Your data is one of your most critical business assets. Are you doing everything you can to wrest competitive advantage from it? I’ll remind you again: PageRank and the real time Adwords auction were both hidden in plain sight. Understanding what data you have, and what meaning you can extract from it, is the holy grail of Web 2.0.
2. The era of IT as a back-office function is over. It’s no longer good enough to gather data and analyze it, then propose and adjust strategies over the next budget cycle. You must infuse your organization with IT, so that, like Walmart, your supply chain responds every time a customer rings up an item at the cash register. This is how Walmart is like Google. No, not the website, but the live enterprise, which learns and responds. That’s why in my enterprise 2.0 talks, I usually end by saying “turn your IT department inside out – or wait for some innovative startup to do it for you.” Banks could be building something like Wesabe’s Value Engine and tips feature, which extracts collective intelligence from credit card data; phone companies could be doing something like Skydeck’s extraction of your social network from your phone bill. In fact, they’d be in a way better position to build integrated services against this data than startups that are having to first extract the data from corporate databases one customer at a time!
3. Web 2.0 thrives on network effects (also known as virtuous circles): data begetting more data, services getting better in such a way that they are used more often, until you are so far ahead of the next guy that he can’t catch up. That network effect is enhanced by letting other people use and build on your data, not by keeping it private. What we’ve seen is that the first company to create network effects in a particular class of data tends to end up owning that data simply through having the biggest pile, or the best results, not because they have unique data. (Again, Google: Microsoft and Yahoo! have the same data for the most part; Google is better at creating value for others from it.)

For those of you that don’t know how the NY Fashion 2.0 Group started, last month I posted on NextNY about how many times I had attended tech events that promised the potential to meet lots of VCs/Angels only to be disappointed by the lack of investor presence.

Charlie O’Donnell, founder of NextNY and CEO of Path101, challenged me to get off my ass and create a fashion meetup:

“In my mind, though, the best way you could ever meet really relevant angels is to run an event yourself. Why not do a “Technology of Fashion” event… there have to be other fashion related startups besides yourself and the Gilt Groupe… or start the fashion entrepreneurs Meetup and start inviting successful people in the fashion industry to come and speak at them. It’s SO EASY to get speakers and if you get to know these folks, they’re much more likely to be angel investors in your company than anyone you meet at one of these big events, where people probably don’t know anything about your particular v-neck of the woods. (ba-dum-bump!)”

Bad puns aside, Charlie was right and Yuli Ziv, CEO of MyItThings took the lead and immediately created a Fashion 2.0 group on meetup. Our first meeting was last week and, like Yuli said, it was a great start. We had over forty people show up all interested in connecting and finding ways to challenge the industry with new ideas and new business models.

At the first meeting alone, I met six other fashion 2.0 startup founders (and know I’m missing a few I didn’t get a chance to meet):
Yuli Ziv – MyItThings
Michael Pratt – Gift Girl
Jane Lu – Dress King
Trish Ginter – Smashing Darling
Tavia Sharp – Ave Swimwear
Seph Skerritt – Archimedes Cloth

How cool! Even if I never meet a single investor through this group (though we’re working on that), the potential to create a platform that promotes the development of the fashion 2.0 ecosystem in NYC is exciting. We all realized after our very first meeting how much we need each other.

Thank you, Charlie. Thank you, Yuli. If you are a fashion entrepreneur with a disruptive business model working in NYC, hope to see you at our next event.