As the son of an art teacher, helping others is in my blood. It feels good to see others succeed based on your recommendations and your work. I’m a salesman so getting paid is also in my nature. Fortunately the two go together nicely. I didn’t quite know what to expect when I launched the course. It turns out my success up to this point required much less effort than I expected.

Some background & How the course came to be

My role at Storefront has me constantly trying to figure out new ways to grow & do so with a smallish team at a seed stage startup. When I found out about web scraping it was clear that it was a technique that was going to save me a tremendous amount of time. Fast forward to the present, now our whole team knows how to utilize the technology. It was validated externally through some training sessions with friends and helping other startups crank the data dial.

If I’m going to teach (and sell) something I want to make sure it’s an actionable skill, I can teach it effectively, and that I’m a practitioner of the subject.

Why Udemy? Because I’m really busy!

Leading growth at Storefront is my full time gig. Things are going incredibly well and we’re aggressively expanding the team this year. Consequently, I’ve never been busier than I am today. Ask my wife, ask my friends, it’s hard to come by time these days. I need to pack a punch with the time I have, which is why I used Udemy:

1. Infrastructure is huge – You don’t really think about how much time it takes to put together a landing page, setup a payment system, upload the files, etc. Udemy does a great job streamlining all of this. Just now, in the middle of writing this, someone that bought the course through my website had an issue with the files. Now I’m re-uploading the files to make sure it works how it is supposed to. On Udemy, this type of issue would be taken care of by their support team.
2. Screen sharing is easier than writing – Creating a video of software workflows I’ve done myself is much easier than writing a book on the subject. Speed to launch with a video course like this means the content is relevant for a much longer period. If you think about the time that it takes to write a book and the rapid changes in our industry, it can be difficult to keep tactics relevant.
3. Udemy provides distribution if you don’t have an audience – My online audience is small. It’s grown a lot since the course came out, but Udemy still drives the majority of my sales. When I thought about selling on other platforms, a big reason was so that I could get affiliates and others to help sell the course. After going through the time and effort to customize the offerings to my needs, I realized how much of that was taken care of by Udemy.

Promoting the Course

I’ve done very little to promote the course so far, in fact immediately after the launch I was in Mexico for 4 days. I did nothing for the course during that time. The words “passive income” are often met with skepticism. To make sure we’re on the same page here, I’ll list out my promotional efforts.

1. Distributed free links/promo codes – My course features the Import.io Data Browser and best practices around using it for sales & marketing. The Import team liked what I was doing and helped by sending out a free signup link for my course in their email newsletter/blog. I also sent around some free promo codes around to friends and posted the on sites like GrowthHackers.com, Quibb, and Twitter. This resulted in lots sign ups at the same time, which made my course #1 in the trending section of Udemy.
2. Offline conversations – I’ve had a lot of offline conversations about the course and how to utilize scraping for sales & marketing efforts. Like I said in the beginning of the post, I love to teach. The result of these conversations is often times an advocate for the subject of the course.

That’s about it. The rest of the effort has been on Udemy’s end. I’ll share some of the breakdown below.

The Stats

Students: 4476
Total Revenue: $5267.11

Overall Revenue by Channel
Udemy has driven 92% of revenue and ya boy has only brought in 8%.

Revenue by Channel by Month
I have a big month every time Udemy pushes a heavy promotion.

Bonus Data

Number of Gift Purchases
Someone out there is really nice.

Honestly, these results are nothing compared to a lot of Udemy success stories in terms of sales. I’m really surprised at how well the course has done compared with the amount of effort I put into promoting it. If you’re considering an info product as passive income, Udemy is a great place to start.

You can get the course here on Ellsworthy or wander over to Udemy.

The post 5 Months & 5 Stacks later: My experience with Udemy as passive income appeared first on Ellsworthy.

When I first learned what web scraping was I knew it was a game changer! Being able to grab massive amounts of data from the web for leads was the unfair advantage over my competitors I was looking for. The only problem was that I had to know how to code to use it. I spent months learning to code just so I could start utilizing web scraping, but this course shows you have to skip all of that.

Imagine you could have all the web data you need to power your sales team or your marketing efforts and you can get it in minutes. Research that takes hours, sometimes days or even weeks can be accomplished over and over with the click a button. Web scraping is more powerful than you think.

You’re here because above all else you want to be successful and you want your company to benefit from that success. You’re one step ahead right now, but let’s make that 10 steps ahead, today.

If you’re here because your competitors are growing faster than you, or you are losing opportunities to other peers that are more efficient than you, this course will give you the tools to be more efficient and beat the competition.

• You want or have a job in growth – Whether it’s sales, marketing, or business development.
• You want to crush your competitors – This course will teach you how to create a dataset to track your competition’s job postings, media coverage, and expansion plans.
• You want to easily capture the names and content of the publications writing about you – I’ll show you have to search all of the blogs & publications in your field and compile that into one dataset.
• You want you to create massive lead lists for your sales team – You’ll learn to scrape sites like Yelp & Crunchbase and export the results into a spreadsheet to load into your CRM.
• You want to optimize your content marketing effectiveness – Want to know what’s getting submitted to news sources like Reddit & Hacker News? I’ll show you how to get intelligence on the posts from top influencers.
• You simply want to be the best! – There’s so much more to unlock and we’re going to work on that together.

Some of the sites you’ll scrape in this course

• Twitter
• Yelp
• Reddit
• Hacker News
• And many more!

“The lessons taught in this course provide the tools to make a single sales rep worth 3x by making it easy to source thousands of targeted leads. This is a must see course for teams trying to get the most with limited resources.”

-Ryan Budd, Growth @ Square

“This is the ultimate course for anyone who wants to reach new customers.”

-Tristan Pollock, Co-Founder & COO @ Storefront

“This course is for anyone wanting to mine any public data on the web. The competitive intelligence section is pretty much exactly what anyone who can benefit from collecting info about their industries competitive landscape.”

-Louis Abramowski, Founder & CEO @ Unbenchable

“More leads, less time, lower costs? I’ll take it. This is a must have for early startup teams looking to send their growth chart up and to the right.”

-Soso Sazesh, SEM & Paid Acquisition Expert

“Understanding how to scrape the web is one of a startup employee’s best asset. This course makes it dead simple without any prior technical knowledge.”

– Max Altschuler, Founder @ Sales Hacker Conference
[stag_divider style=”plain”]

[stag_intro]Want to get started in minutes and use scrapers I’ve already built out of the box? The Complete Bundle is $140[/stag_intro]
Includes:

• 18 lectures teaching you how to scrape without using any code
• 3.5 hours of content
• Configuration files for pre-built scrapers shown in the videos

I’ve had over +4000 students take this course and the results speak for themselves. The complete bundle comes with the all 18 course videos teaching you step-by-step how to scrape + the configurations files from the scrapers you build with me in the course. Just open up the app, load the files and you’ll be scraping right away. The is the fastest path to scraping the data you want.
Get the Complete Bundle Now!

[stag_intro]Want to take your time and learn by doing? The Basic Course is $99[/stag_intro]
Includes:

• 18 lectures teaching you how to scrape without using any code
• 3.5 hours of content
• Step-by-step instructions for scraping Yelp, Twitter, Reddit, Hacker News, and more.

That’s great and this course is perfect for you! I’ll take you through how to scrape all the sites I mentioned above and teach you how to apply those learnings to scraping all over the web. It’s scary how productive you can be when you’ve got machines doing the work for you!
Get the Basic Course Now!

The post Web Scraping for Sales and Growth Hackers Course appeared first on Ellsworthy.

First off, I have to thank my buddies, Max Altschuler & Nate Gilmore. They saved me months of effort by sharing their best practices around VA’s and giving me plenty of inspiration on how to make them work as a team. I’m going to give an overview hiring, onboarding, and managing a team of VA’s in this post. There are a ton of extra details to be covered so please feel free to ask questions in the comments. Let’s get after it!

Hiring your first VA’s

There are several different sites and services that you can use to find VA’s but I’m only going to cover using oDesk because that’s what I know. Just do a Google search if you’re interested in testing out the other services. On oDesk there’s essentially 2 ways to go about hiring. You can post the job and wait for applicants, or you can browse through contractor profiles. I’ve had luck with both and I would recommend that you give them both a try.

Posting a job

When you post a job you’re going to get a lot of varying replies back. This is an opportunity to see who’s paying attention to the finer details and who’s just replying to any job post they see. A couple lines into the job post, give some instructions on how they should apply. My first job posts required the line “Bluh, bluh, bluh, shots fired!” to be the first part of the application (shout to Max A. for this trick). Any responses that didn’t include the line, I knew the contractor didn’t read all the way through the application.

Reaching out directly to contractors

I personally prefer this approach because it gives me a chance to do some research on the contractors and also it brings less noise to the process. This also means that often times you’ll be reaching out to high quality VA’s, so you’ll want to know what’s important to them. From what I have found, the two biggest pulls are full-time work (40+ hours per week) and long-term roles. Depending on what you need done, this may or may not be part of what you’re offering. We’ve got a solid team in place today because we’re committed to them and they are committed to us.

I should also mention that you can easily combine the approaches by inviting specific contractors to apply for a job posting.

Hire several VA’s for a test and look for leaders

I would strongly suggest breaking your project up into pieces and hiring at least 3 VA’s to do the same type of work for comparison. If you can’t break the job up, it’s probably still worth it to have them do the same work so you can compare their efforts. During this part of the process I spend my time looking for leaders and answering some fundamental questions about the contractors. Do they communicate effectively and follow my directions? If I give them feedback, do they implement it? Are they eager to work on the project and attentive to details? I’ve been lucky to find great leaders this way.

Hire in the same area

My man Nate is a genius for this one. Hire from the same country and better yet, hire in the same city. Give them the chance to be a part of a team locally and have get togethers when the team in US does the same thing. They’ll all be on the same timezone and they’ll reap the benefits of working as a part of team in-person.

Once the project is complete and you’ve established whom your leader is, it’s time to onboard your new team!

Onboarding VA’s

Now let’s dive into the onboarding process and how to make it a smooth process. The funny thing about writing some of these tips is that this is really just another hiring process. There are some caveats & best practices of course, but right now we’re just talking about adding more people to your team. Somehow though, people manage to screw this process up, so here are some things to pay attention to.

Treat your VA’s like humans

Somewhere along the line with the combination of cheap labor, english as a second language, and a lot of times never seeing the VA, people think it’s ok to treat them differently than any other employee. It’s almost like people think they are hiring robots sometimes. This is unfortunately a sad state of affairs for outsourcing. Treat your VA’s like humans. They are wonderful people that want to work hard, they want to learn more, and they will be incredibly loyal to you if you treat them with respect. They’ll work harder for you and you should feel good about giving them that opportunity.

Teach them about your company and learn about them

Context is something that everyone wants when they are working on a project. As you can imagine, making judgement calls on tasks is incredibly difficult when you lack context. In the beginning, take the time to teach them about your company and why it exists. I’ll often do a training call over Skype and just take them through the general info pitch on our company. As you add more to your team, it becomes overwhelming if you’re answering simple questions over and over again for 6 people. Show them the “why’s” behind your company and give them the ability to make judgement calls. We’ll talk about another solution for this later on in the post.

Another great tactic is to create a quick survey for VA’s to fill out. I use Typeform because it looks nice and you can create a great survey that also teaches. I include the company mission, some of our videos that explain what we do, and I also make sure to find out about their personal lives & families. You’ll also be wise to find out what types of skills they would like to learn on the job and what types of tasks they enjoy the most. When I created my web scraping course, the first thing I did was share it with the whole team and they were extremely grateful to learn the extra skills. Now they all know how to scrape websites as well, which means their effectiveness goes up and cost per lead goes way down. Win-win-win, Michael Scott.

Managing your team of VA’s

Once onboarded and the projects have started, it’s good to have a framework for how you’re going to work with your team. Because they are virtual and not chilling in your office, you’ll have to learn to effectively communicate and you’ll also have to reserve some patience through the process. Don’t expect to get it right out of the gate every time, there will be mistakes but you should know that already. Focus on iterating and making the process better all the time. If you over-engineer ahead of time, you’ll move slower and get less done.

Promote your leader

In the beginning of the post, I talked about finding a leader in the group. We’re going to make that leader into a player-coach, responsible for the entire team’s output and also a contributing member on the projects. What we’ve done is selected our leader, doubled their hourly rate, and detailed out the extra responsibilities for the job e.g. creating reports, grading the efforts of the other contractors, and being responsible for all project deadlines. I’ve gone as far as giving extra permissions in the account settings like work diary access so they can see how the others are working and offer help. I’ve also granted them recruiter status so that they can put out additional jobs posts for us when we need extra hands on deck. Lastly, you should have all the other VA’s run their questions and distribute your tasks through your team leader. This will prevent you from getting overwhelmed by questions and requests.

Use Start/Stop/Continue

Start/Stop/Continue is a deadly simple way to continue giving feedback on a weekly basis. It works like this. “Start doing these things…., Stop doing these other things…., and Continue doing these things…” It means that everyone is getting constructive criticism/feedback along with some praise every week. It doesn’t become a blow to morale when someone is asked to do better or eliminate something from their weekly activities.

Require consistent login times

Our team logs in together at the same time everyday. This obviously has big communication benefits but it also brings predictability to completion dates and is reassuring to the rest of your company. We ask our VA’s to login at 12 PM in San Francisco, and we’re not as worried about the end time because they all end up working their complete hours every week.

Tools

I do my best to keep the VA team integrated with our current toolset so I can maintain the same types of habits in working with them. Here’s a list of some of the helpful tools:

• oDesk App – You can see whom on your team is online and you get to see their most recent screenshot. Rather than micromanaging, I like to use this tool to understand workflow. I’ve learned a lot by catching interesting new ways to be efficient in their screenshots.
• Asana – We use Asana for tasks internally. I keep track of the work in progress for the VA’s and just assign them tasks through another project.
• Quickcast – Beautiful and simple screen capturing software that constrains your video to under 3:00. I love this tool and it’s free.
• Google Docs – Duh.
• Hipchat – IM is oh so necessary for me. Hipchat makes it easy to shoot the shit and to answer any questions about the tasks. This is our main communication method.

Conclusion

In all honesty, there’s so much more to cover than what’s been said above but this should help answer some of the basic questions you might have about setting up a team. Please ask questions below if something is unclear or even if you have a question about something I haven’t covered in this post. Other than that, all I can say is that the experience of hiring an entirely remote VA team has been an extremely positive one for us. I’m a believer and will continue to use oDesk to power our outsourced teams.

This post is a part of Startup Edition #31 – How do you work effectively with remote teams?

The post How to build a team of virtual assistants to help grow your startup appeared first on Ellsworthy.

Click the link to check out my interview for free.
http://bit.ly/me-ghtv

The post Check out my Growth Hacker TV interview for free appeared first on Ellsworthy.

I can tell you after spending the last year as the first employee at Storefront, it can be an amazing experience. Taking a role like this can be the perfect training ground for becoming a founder yourself one day. This means learning lessons at much lower risk than actually being a founder and considerably less stress. If you’re given the opportunity with agreeable terms, this series of posts will indeed tell you want you need to know to be successful and will give you an idea of the benefits that come with the role.

Getting to know your founders

Getting to know your founders is the first thing you should do when you join a startup.  Ideally, it starts during the interview process. Not just for the first hire but also for many after that. In a small and fast paced office, managing upwards is a key skill. To drive that point home further, managing relationships of any teammate is key. Hierarchies are blurry when a startup is small, and responsibilities bleed into the territories of other employees.

Back to your founders. Here’s a checklist of some things that you should know:

1. What drives them to succeed? Prior to taking the job you should have a feel for their hopes, desires, and even their dreams. Their core motivations will tell you how they’ll handle tough situations, company culture, hiring other teammates, and potential liquidity events (should you be so lucky). If you don’t know why they started the/a company, what their end goal is for the company, and what motivates them, find out soon. The best way to get that info and the best venue IMHO, over drinks. Make it a couple drinks.
2. What are their hot buttons positive or negative? Everyone has a way of doing things, a theme, a philosophy of sorts. Make sure to check-in on your progress. What should you be doing differently? Look for any themes in the way they evaluate the success of projects or employees. You’ll find they emphasize the same elements over and over. If you’re being observant and catching on to the hot buttons, you’re ahead of the game.
3. Why did they hire you and what do they believe you add to the team? Related to the most important question you should ask yourself every day, what value do I bring to the team? The company will change and so will its needs. If you don’t adapt your skill sets & abilities to those changes, you’re inviting a tough conversation with your founders. (AKA you’ll get shit-canned) Start with why they hired you. If you were solving a specific problem, is that still important to the company?I wrote recently about a great exercise from Reid Hoffman’s book. This is another great way to figure out if what you bring to the table is still aligned with the company’s mission. Remember market realities are always at play. If you’re not the right fit for the mission or the team, a change will happen eventually. Either make it work or make your way to the door.

And that’s my advice, player.

The post The Player’s Guide to Being an Awesome First Hire, Part 1: Getting to know your founders appeared first on Ellsworthy.

The article definitely made things sound good, but we all know this is false. If you could see under the hood, you’d find out that it’s not all lolcats and double rainbows in there. This company’s shit does in fact stink.  The bottom line is that EVERYONE has problems.  From the start, almost everything that can be broken, is just that.  It starts off that way by omission.  “We can’t do A, B, or C because we don’t have a budget or even the bandwith if we wanted to do A, B, or C.” TechCrunch painted the wrong picture for you.

When you work at a startup you’re learning to be Ok with incomplete. Ship an incomplete product, work with an incomplete team, or have an incomplete understanding of your product market fit. I could work for the rest of the year, straight through and I’d still be behind on “what could be done”.  I go home every day with a heap of untapped opportunities piling up in Asana. I’d say this one of the most important training grounds for current/past/future founders.  How well can you handle being in the shit for days/weeks/months/years?

Fast forward to the moment where you’re sitting down for dinner with the founder of the company you read about in TechCrunch.  “How are things going over there? You guys still finding any challenges to work on? Har har.” You feed em‘ a couple drinks, keep asking questions, and suddenly you start getting answers.  Diarrhea of the mouth occurs and the founder spills all the beans. You start to realize everyone has their problems. They don’t go away, and well, you’re not alone. I guess what they say is true:

Startups are hard.

But how else am I supposed to make friends?

The post Broken from the start: the art of working for a startup appeared first on Ellsworthy.

I’ve been selling professionally for a long time (relative to the length of my career). Something I’ve always felt was tough is/was selling myself. The question “What makes me special etc etc?” is a difficult one to answer. It’s not for lack of confidence or desire. It just never seemed as easy as selling a product.

Anyways, the Startup of You takes on this challenge in the first chapter of the book. They layout three elements for you to consider when defining your competitive advantage, just like you would for a normal startup.

Assets – This is an inventory of what you currently have. Hard assets being the money in your pocket and other physical posessions. Soft assets being your traits and skills.

Aspirations – Your core values, wishes, ideas, goals, and all that jazz.

Market Realities – This is the tough one. Where do you stand in the market? If the market doesn’t need what you’re selling… well shit.

While I found this to be insightful and it got me a long way in better defining how to sell myself, my favorite exercise was at the end of the chapter. The reason I think this exercise is so great is because it makes you examine yourself, and then you have others tell you what they think about you as well. Here’s how it goes:

1. Start by writing down your assets as you see them.
2. After you’ve done that, pick some people in your network that you’ve worked with and that know you well.
3. Ask them about your soft assets. Specifically, what do they see as your greatest strengths? If they had to come to you for help/advice, what would it be for?

What really surpised me about the exercise was that 3 or so people indicated that they thought my memory was a big asset for me. “I remember stuff about people” was not on the list I wrote down. So the fun really starts when you get interesting answers. You’re able to measure how you are perceived to those that have worked closely with you. Additionally, you’re about to get a ton of compliments and it feels good no matter how forced it is.

If this sounds interesting to you at all, you should read the book. It’s a very quick read and really helpful.
[stag_alert style=”green”]Congrats! You’re about to get more Ellsworthy in your inbox![/stag_alert]

The post What you think about yourself… and what everyone else thinks appeared first on Ellsworthy.

On June 26th we announced our launch in New York and the amazing support we’ve received from our investors and advisors. On July 10th we celebrated the launch in New York with our partners in retail, real estate, and friends old and new. The support we felt in New York was incredible (in 72 hours over 1,700 pop-up advocates RSVP-ed, totaling over 2,000 by the time the doors opened).

Overall, our launch in New York is a major milestone for our team and it brings us one step closer to our dream: making it as easy to open an offline store as it is to open an online one.

The current state of retail

For the last 20 years, retail has gone through myriad changes. There was a time when zero products were sold online and the only way for you to buy something was in a store down the street. Now e-commerce has become a mainstay in retail. It’s easier than ever to sell online. It’s easier than ever to create an online store (think Etsy, Shopify, Storenvy, CustomMade, and many more). Now, in a matter of minutes, your business is live and you’re accepting orders.

Tragically, even though 95% of retail transactions occur offline, little advancements have been made to make opening up a brick-and-mortar retail store any easier.

In the future we’re working towards, opening up a brick-and-mortar store will be as easy as setting up your store online. Today, retailers can find space over lunch hour. Space owners can easily add their properties to Storefront and present them beautifully to the world. We’re committed to improving this process every single day and we can’t wait to show you what’s next.

The team to make it happen

Changing the world of retail is not one person’s dream. A dream this big, requires a team. An amazing team to get the job done and take the time to enjoy the view along the way.

We’d like to send a big thank you to anyone that has worked with us, we’re lucky to have had you. A big thank you to our current team, you make it easier to get out of bed every day and do what we do best.

And, finally, a big thank you to future members of the team, we’re looking forward to learning more about you and we’re going to be better because of you. You’ve chosen an amazing place to call home. Join us: hi@thestorefront.com 

The post The Storefront Dream: Why we do what we do appeared first on Ellsworthy.

“How do I say this?  Social Commerce.  Social Design.  I want both of you to listen to me.  Stop playing games, you two were meant to be together!”

Humans are social beings, and not surprisingly the technologies that take advantage of that on the web, are here to stay.  The word “social” is thrown in front of every other business term you’ve ever read, it’s probablya lot of bullshit really, but that is a post and a discussion for a different day.  I’ve been working in “Social Commerce” (see what I’m saying) since 2009, and it’s clear that despite the marketing hype cycle social ______(pronounced social-blank) has gone through, there’s a real science to succeeding in social ______.  We’re seeing that elements of social applied to commerce, can have a significant impact on your business.  Since 2009 when I started working in the space; the pundits, budgets, and brands have let social commerce into their hearts in a big way.  As more and more brands look to social commerce, it is important to consider what social commerce is, and how we should go about designing social commerce experiences.

DEFINITIONS FOR SOCIAL COMMERCE & SOCIAL DESIGN

Wikipedia says:

Social commerce[1] is a subset of electronic commerce that involves using social media, online media that supports social interaction and user contributions, to assist in the online buying and selling of products and services.

More succinctly, social commerce is the use of social network(s) in the context of e-commerce transactions.

I like the last line when thinking about what Social Commerce is.  We need to understand why social commerce has an impact, so let’s review social design as well.  Facebook/Eric Fisher published social design guidelines to help with this very process.  Facebook wants you to create apps etc that are a pleasure for its users, so it’s no surprise that they would release some guidelines to help us all figure it out.  Eric has published additional social design strategy resources on his blog, and will be speaking about social design at SXSW this year.  I suggest you check it out if you are there.  I met Eric some months back and I can tell you confidently to follow along, the guy is smart.

Anyways, back to the show.  Facebook says that social design is:

Social Design is a way of thinking about product design that puts social experiences at the core.

And:

Social Design defines how we understand ourselves and each other and can be broken down into three core elements: Identity, Conversation and Community.

• Community refers to the people we know and trust and who help us make decisions.
• Conversation refers to the various interactions we have with our communities.
• Identity refers to our own sense of self and how we are seen by our communities.

The guidelines go on to talk in detail about each of the core elements.  As a primer before we dive in, there is a story that Eric tells at the beginning of his post on Social Design Strategy.  The story, fittingly, is an example of social commerce.  Eric is walking down the street with a friend, and she tells him that he would really like the Strand Bookstore, as they pass it.  Eventually, after taking his friend’s advice, he leaves the bookstore with a new book in his hand!  She was right to think that Eric would like the store, and Eric trusted her judgement.  The takeaway is that social commerce can bring information to us, that is very relevant & trustworthy but isn’t necessarily something that we are looking for proactively.  Clearly we can make the argument that social can help even if you we know exactly what we are looking for, but the fact remains that social networks are changing how we consume the net and now the products/services that we pay for, whether we are actively or passively seeking them out.

COMMUNITY

A community can be a lot of different things.  The definition above is good, but it is naturally weighted towards Facebook.  Their contention is that users are actively building their social networks/communities on Facebook, so the easiest thing to do is to tap into that.  This is a true statement, but it does ignore that other communities may exist on your site around certain themes: products, lifestyles, whatever you can think of.  So for now, we’ll keep both in mind.  The important thing to recognize here, is that there are powerful forces when discovering you have common threads with strangers and with friends you already know.  Both are serendipitous, “happy accidents” if you will.

The reason Facebook is so powerful in either situation is that you can gather information about a user and their friends from the Open Graph(posts to come about this).  The Open Graph tells us the relationship of objects on the web to each other eg. person to person, person to web page, etc.  This is an oversimplification, so if you want more on the subject and just how powerful it is, read up at Facebook.  In the interest of time, we’ll move on with that basic definition.  With the power of the Open Graph, apps can be designed to utilize the information in powerful ways around communities.  Here’s some things you should think about:

• Who is in your community and should it be segmented?  Current customers are a community and so are their friends. Identify the communities, see if you have any data on how they are connected.
• What is important to the communities you have identified?  If I am booking a trip or buying clothes, what type of information should I know about others using the site?
• What social actions/cues make sense for my users?  This is social commerce, so keep in mind if you are selling diet pills, asking for someone to share that purchase with their network is a tall order.

CONVERSATION

Next up is the conversation.  The conversation is the interaction between the members of the community.  This is how we find our commonalities, and other information relevant to the context of the community.  There is a reason the community is formed, and the exchange of information(the conversation) is how we begin to identify with the community.  Eric describes the conversation as:

Conversation is simply a generic term I’m using to describe the interactions between the self and the community and the stronger the associated emotion, the stronger the bond.

This is inherently a back-and-forth and therefore is comprised of two different experiences that play off each other. Generically, we can describe these as listening and speaking.

Listening is the information and content that gets brought to us.  In Facebook an example would be checking your News Feed to understand what is happening in your network.  Speaking can be seen as the reactions we have to those posts eg. likes, comments, and shares etc.  Largely in social commerce, a big part of the conversation is based on reviews right now.  People have questions, some have answers, good and bad.  I’m excited to see what the new Open Graph updates Facebook announced bring to this part of the equation.  Now that users will have access to social actions, rather than just “liking” something, we’ll be able to see a whole new range of interactions.  Someone might want, love, desire, hate, or even wish for something.  It’s a new understanding of what a user’s interactions with your site are.  Here are some things to consider:

• Are you forcing interactions?  Is there a real reason for a user to share what they are doing on your site?
• Is there a natural motivation for users to interact with each other?  Can you create that motivation with incentives?
• Can social interactions make the experience better?  Is this the type of purchase you want an expert to weigh in on?
• Have we set the right expectation to the user?  Do they know how or why their social data is being used?

IDENTITY

A long time ago, my good friend HotLou told me”Facebook is in the identity business.”  That is becoming more and more apparent with the launch of Timeline, etc.  As it relates to identity, humans have a very natural tendency to want to understand/hear more about themselves.  They want others to tell them what they think about them, and they have the same desire to let their friends know as well.  In the world of social commerce, identity plays an interesting role.  From one brand to the next identity can be completely different.  For lifestyle goods like fashion, it can completely define us to the point that we would like nothing more than to be associated with that brand, like Louis Vuitton.  Others bring us closer to good, by helping to give back like TOMS or Warby Parker.  As our relationship to the brand changes, so does the does the conversation and the information we find relevant to our identity.  We could spend all day on identity alone, as it is a very powerful motivator but for now consider these questions:

• Am I revealing something about the user or about how they fit in the community?  Is this personally significant to the user?
• What can I tell the user about themselves or their relationship to others, that they don’t already know?
• Are we trying something that is a new fun experience for the user, like which one of your friends is most similar?
• What actions does this experience make the user want to take?  Does it get more engaging the more friends they invite?

OVERWHELMED?  DON’T WORRY, IT’S STILL EARLY

The social web is still in its infancy, and that especially includes social commerce.  Over the next couple years, we will know exponentially more about how social data can help ecommerce.  With the exciting new changes to Facebook and the Open Graph, right now is a very exciting time for exploring social commerce and the impact it can have on your brand/customers.  If we keep learning, and keep these important guidelines in mind, we will create amazing advances in ecommerce as it stands today.

The post Create Social Commerce Experiences Using Social Design Guidelines appeared first on Ellsworthy.

Here is how they are killing it:

Crowdsourcing Lyrical Definitions – Much like Wikipedia, Rap Genius is crowd powered by a dedicated group lyric decoders.  Right now the only reward for submitting songs/definitions to Rap Genius is RapIQ and a boatload of swagger to go with it.  RapIQ is defined by participation for submitting songs, defining lyrics, and most importantly you are rewarded for quality entries.

YouTube Soundtrack – One of the most clever pieces of technology on the site is the YouTube soundtrack Rap Genius provides.  When a user submits a song, they input a YouTube link, and that link turns into an audio only track.  Now you can read up on the lyrics and get your head bobbin’ to the track at the same time.

Like Individual Entries – This is one of my favorite things about the site!  As a total Facebook goon, I like when I see clever implementations of social plugins on websites.  When someone decodes a set of lyrics, an extra little window pops up that allows for voting up/down AND you can Like the individual definition!  This is absolutely one of the coolest uses of the Like button I have ever seen.  Imagine if this was a part of your everyday browsing experience?  If you could Like small snippets across the web that would absolutely be a game changer for the detailed information contained in the Open Graph.  Someone with technical skills, make it happen, damn.

Incredible Community – Hip hop in general has an incredibly passionate community but the group that has formed around Rap Genius is doing work, everyday.  There are a lot of sites out there that have been trying for a long time to get a community that is this engaged, but continue to fail.  I’m sure it has something to do with the site’s focus on hip hop, but the user experience when you are on Rap Genius is something that everyone can learn from.

Passion – Rap Genius is a clear result of passion, and it shows.  I myself have trouble making projects like this simply because I am passionate about it.  It’s hard not to look for the money in anything that you do, and maybe Rap Genius will eventually start to monetize the site, though right now it appears they just love hip hop.  I have a lot of respect for what they have done here.

Make sure you checkout RapGenius.com.

The post How Rap Genius is killing the game appeared first on Ellsworthy.