Empowering the consumer with a combination of Web 2.0 and business intelligence technologies is the approach behind a new commerce and loyalty tool launched by New York-based OneBigPlanet Corp.
The portal is designed to help social networking sites build loyalty and reap revenue by allowing members to access information like merchant deals and discounts, and other consumer tools, while networking with friends and family to share preferences and product reviews.
During the launch in Montréal, Eric Aubertin, founder and CEO of OneBigPlanet, talked about the history of the Web and how companies like Yahoo! Inc. and Google Inc. help users organize information and find relevancy through search engine optimization, along with the emergence of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.
The void that OneBigPlanet is filling is a consumer portal that connects merchants, members and the community, said Aubertin, because consumers “want relevance and want a portal to know them.” The company uses the motto “Save, Simplify and Share” to describe the platform’s goal for the consumer.
Users will save time and money with the ability to search and compare merchant prices – be it vendors, travel agents – by way of a Web crawler. Through business intelligence, the portal can simplify information gathering by personalizing search results for the user. And, the networking component allows users to share wish lists and favourite merchants. Retailers including Tommy Hilfiger and eBay attended the launch.
The platform also offers a user calendar to record special days like birthdays and vendor sales should the user want to purchase a discounted gift for a friend. Dining out is also made easy by specifying a location, obtaining a list of restaurant listings and addresses including maps for better visualization, before making an online reservation. And grocery deals and coupons are also aggregated in one spot on the site.
A tool such as this is critical in allowing for the monetization of social networking sites given the sheer volume of sites and users of these sites, said the company’s vice-president of user marketing Christopher Hill. “The investment community has leapt on board and given [social networking sites] very high valuations,” he said.
But besides needing to monetize sites in order to sustain valuations, Hill said member retention is also a challenge that the platform seeks to resolve.
Certain trends in marketing, too, play a role in the technology, like one-to-one marketing to get to know the consumer, and permission marketing to “put the consumer back in control,” said Hill. Advantages to the consumer aside, the community reaps revenue and member retention, and the merchants gain from a platform for community-based marketing.
But it’s not just a consumer-facing platform. A community can also be the enterprise, Aubertin later told ComputerWorld Canada. A company could brand and customize the platform as an employee portal of sorts that conveys information about the corporate benefits package, for instance, making it a “one-stop employee benefit shop.”
The modularity of the platform, he said, enables communities to easily remove components they don’t like or need.
And to allay user concerns around the security of business intelligence gathering, Aubertin said the platform is completely secure with member profile data stored using Secure Sockets Layer. The platform doesn’t gather confidential information about the user, nor does it sell the data, he said. Instead, the goal of business intelligence is solely to make relevant referrals based on individual choices.
Aubertin acknowledged that the platform mimics elements of successful Web approaches from the likes of Yahoo and Google, but said driving adoption through familiar functionality is only part of the reason. Rather, the creation process entailed looking across the Web to see what others had done well and not so well, “to inspire ourselves to try to do a better job.”
OneBigPlanet has plans to eventually incorporate around 150 new features as well as new merchants. Future functionality includes a mobile component that uses location intelligence to provide nearby restaurant listings. Also, merchants will be able to change their offers in the short term to reflect a two-day inventory clear-out sale, for instance. A tracking card system is in the works and currently in pilot stage.