Bernardo Huberman, Hewlett-Packard's director of the HP Social Computing lab, and fellow researcher Gabor Szabo have published a highly detailed report (PDF) on "predicting the popularity of online content." Focusing on content submitted and popularized on popular social sites Digg.com and Google's YouTube, the two concocted not one but three ways to predict how much traffic and overall user interaction a story or submitted video will receive well after it hits its initial popularity.
Is social media/Web 2.0 for retail just hype or an essential part of doing business in the 21st century?
The Wikipedic definition of Web 2.0 is "a second generation of services available on the World Wide Web that lets people collaborate and share information online." Wikipedia, being a user-generated knowledge base, is itself Web 2.0. In the ecommerce context, Web 2.0 includes leveraging social commerce on your own site, blogging/podcasting and participating in social networks like Youtube, Facebook, Twitter - and anywhere you or your customers can create and share content.
Retailers often wonder what Web 2.0 / social media activities to be involved with, so this post ranks what I believe are the top 10 Web 2.0 activities for ecommerce based on their business impact.
Editor's Note: This is part four in our special report on "Video for Ecommerce," where we describe real stories of online merchants creatively using video to drive sales and grow their brands. Previous installments are linked in below.
What's next once you've added product videos to your site? Get the word out.
"We know that [consumers] are looking for videos online," said David Burch at video analytics company TubeMogul.com. "That's why our goal, and the goal of our merchants, is to be everywhere where video content is consumed."