Buy.com hopes Garage Sale lures eBayers - Yahoo! News

Yahoo reports that Buy.com will power a new Facebook application that will allow users to offer products for sale on the popular social networking site, with Buy.com handling the credit card transactions for a flat 5% commission fee. Sellers receive funds either via a check from Buy.com or through PayPal. (I wonder if that will last, or if Google Payments will be considered as an option for sellers to receive funds.)

This is an idea with big potential, especially given increasing eBay and PayPal fees that can eat up profits quickly, particularly for smaller sellers.

Unlike eBay, Garage Sale does not offer auction-type bidding for products, although suggests that haggling can be done via e-mail. Right now, fixed price sales are supported.

The Buy.com Garage Sale option is among the latest results of the trend toward widget-type applications that interact with popular social networking sites to offer a variety of functionality via the networking interface. Expanding the range of sites where sellers could use the service to sell products could be a huge boost to its success. In particular, this application appears as though it would be attractive to users of MySpace, a social network with user numbers rivaling those of eBay in the US.

Looking forward to trying the Garage Sale. The flat fee model without transaction fees should be attractive to sellers, especially those with active relationships on social networking sites.

Labels: Buy.com, eBay, facebook, Garage Sale, PayPal, Phoenix.Social.Media.Club social.networks, social.media

Top Social Networks: The Summer of Social? from Compete.com's blog, provides some interesting information about the popularity of social network sites for June, 2007, measured by number of visitors and how much attention they devote to the sites.

mySpace and Facebook are the clear winners in this measurement. The post includes a map of US mySpace users by geographic area (California and the Northeast corridor are where the greatest concentrations of mySpace users live.) Comparing the geographic distribution and density of mySpace users versus Facebook users, andthe post notes that mySpace receives 25% more visits per visitor per month than Facebook, with 72 million unique mySpace users making more than 1.3 billion total visits in June.

Today's post also includes the June ranking of the top 20 social networking sites, ranked by attention.

I found some surprises here:

• Classmates.com, arguably one of the first social networking sites, albeit cumbersome and costly, ranked #8 on the list (although with an attention decline of 19%) in June.


• QuePasa.com, recently resurrected with new ownership, made the list at #16, with an attention increase of 189% in June, the largest increase (percentage-wise) on the list (although based on the second lowest number of visits.)


• LinkedIn squeaked in at #20, although with a decrease of 6% in attention in June.


• Friendster, at #9, actually showed a 6% increase in attention in June.


• Facebook, with nearly 23 million June visitors, had an attention rating of just 1.52%, with a 19% month over month increase.


• Although more than half the sites included have seven or eight figure visit counts, none approach mySpace in terms of the attention metric.
  


• MySpace is the clear king of this ranking, with more than 72 million monthly visitors, and an attention rating of 12.75%, a month over month increase of 20%, for June.

Compete.com has numerous tools for measuring site traffic and visitor engagement. (More about the methodology used to generate this data.) These numbers may not make it easier to decide how to engage social network users, but they do provide unique data to help spot the next big thing in social media, and to put media coverage and buzz in perspective based on user data.

Also on the social networking subject, I added several new articles about Facebook to my Del.icio.us links: http://del.icio.us/sheywood/facebook today. Enjoy!

Labels: facebook, linkedin, MySpace, Phoenix.Social.Media.Club socialmedia, social.media, social.networking, socialmedia

I just received a note from Squidoo Editor in Chief Megan Casey with the news that my Living With War lens is in the running for Lens of the Year! As I write this, the lens is currently 108 of 215 nominees.

Your vote will help the Living With War lens win the first Squidoo Lens of the Year competition.


Seth's Blog: Happy Squidoo Day celebrated several landmarks in the evolution of Squidoo, including the continual growth in traffic and adoption for this Web 2.0 success story on March 14.

Also, on March 15, I was honored to find that my New Authors Resources and Reviews lens was selected as lens of the day! (Its lens rank shot to #47 out of more than 100,000 lenses after the Lens of the Day honor!)

Labels: Lens.of.the.Year, Living.with.War, Neil.Young, social.media, Squidoo. SethGodin, SusanFHeywood

Trying this service linked from FeedBurner - copyright is Fox Interactive. Hmmm.

Labels: social.media, tagging feeds, web2.0

At 11:02 PM Sunday night, Arizona time (just past midnight Monday in Iowa,) I received my regular Monday Midnight Madness e-mail message from Sam at Pendemonium. This format is a great example of how a regular online promotion to e-mail subscribers can help niche sellers create sales, brand recognition and customer conversations by including non-sales focused content that is relevant and engaging.

Sam and Frank Fiorella, serious collectors and purveyors of vintage writing instruments, run both the Pendemonium, a "full time writing equipment shop" and companion Web site. Pendemonium, described as "one of just a handful" of such shops worldwide, deals with the oldest type of social media tools.

This week, along with the Midnight Madness sale items, the e-mail message (delivered two minutes past Iowa Midnight with Woot-like precision,) included a link to the 2007 Travelogue, the account of Sam's road trip down Route 66 to the 2007 LA Pen Show last month.

(Just to let you know, I'm not being paid to write about Pendemonium and have never met Sam. My only connection to the site is my opt-in subscription to Inky Greetings the Pendemonium e-mail updates. I've been "just looking," a former Iowan who appreciates Pendemonium's vintage writing instruments.)

The Travelogue was an engaging account of the leisurely road trip from Iowa to LA down Route 66 that I've always wished I could make, but couldn't those the times I've driven parts of the route traveling between Iowa and Phoenix. Sam has posted pictures and descriptions of her visits to spots along the route I'd not seen, and of some I've noticed but never visited on the way. (I wish I had noticed Sam's offer to mail a real postcard from a stop along the route in time to send him my address--Social media in action using paper and pen!)

On a site about writing instruments that are hundreds of years old, Sam is connecting in a way that represents the best uses of social media, using a mix of Web 1.0 and offline communication to carry on the conversation. Even though the tools used are not the social media sharing and social network sites those of us writing and talking about "social media" might consider the infrastructure of Web 2.0. Sam's conversation with customers and e-mail subscribers is a particularly vivid representation of ways that social media already exists and works.

Pendemonium's the kind of store I would love to shop at or even run if I still lived in Iowa. It's situated in downtown Fort Madison, in a historic district overlooking the Mississippi River (which incidentally is a great place to spot bald eagles,) a scenic hour-long drive down river from where I grew up.

People trust people with whom they perceive they share characteristics, experiences and opinions. One of the things I found interesting in the Travelogue was the way the conversations described in it touched on common themes. In Albuquerque, for instance, Sam shopped at a store similar to hers in that it serves a niche market by specializing in books about the local area rather than competing against big chains.

Describing this bit of face to face social networking, Sam wrote:

"We still spent a couple of hours wandering the shops and an especially enjoyable time talking to the owner of the local book shop - not just about books but about how interesting it is to be in a niche market these days. He carries 99% local books instead of trying to compete against the big chains. Easy for us to relate to the niche market!"

By the way, Sam chronicles her pen seeking quests regularly. I pictured her painstakingly editing the HTML flat files and uploading the photos each day as she shared her road trip adventures and arriving home in time to send out the Midnight Madness message after days on the road.

I couldn't help but think that Sam would be delighted to discover how easy the process could become using Blogger, Twitter and Flickr. I'd sure love to subscribe to her Travelogue by RSS.

Labels: branding, community, content.management zeitgeist, conversations, e-mail.marketing, entrepreneur, events, niche.marketing, Pendemonium, pens shopping, Route66, small.business, social.media, travel

In his blog post on Friday, raving lunacy: Social Media as Conversational Marketing Alan Herrell, aka the Head Lemur, posted a super synopsis, complete with photos and links, of yesterday's Revolution in Marketing Conference, hosted by the Phoenix Social Media Club.

Organized by Francine Hardaway and held at Grand Canyon University in Phoenix, the conference featured keynote sessions from Social Media Club founder Chris Heuer and alpha blogger and social media guru Robert Scoble, as well as panels featuring a variety of perspectives on the use of social media.

In addition to having the opportunity to talk with Chris and Robert during lunch after the event, I especially enjoyed meeting and talking with Diva of Details, Kristie Wells of the Social Media Club (and fiancee' of Chris,) Pamela Slim of EscapeFromCubicleNation.com, who spoke about her experiences in launching her blog during the first panel session, Joshua Manley of UStrive.com and Jon Ford of St. Luke's Health Initiatives.

Asked about the next big thing in social media, Chris Heuer mentioned Twitter, a cool site that provides a way to keep up with what's up with friends using quick updates that can be delivered by RSS or text messages to mobile phones. (You may have noticed the Twitter info on this page--I'm a little intimidated by the adventures of other Twitter users versus my comparably boring schedule, but, what the heck, I signed up, anyway!)

All, in all, the Revolution in Marketing Conference was an inspiring and educational experience!

Labels: Alan Herrell, Chris.Heuer, Francine.Hardaway, Jon.Ford, Joshua.Manley, Kristie.Wells, Pamela.Slim, Raving.Lunacy, Robert.Scoble, social.media, Twitter, UStrive

Spirit Awards on IFC Presents : Little Miss Sunshine

Little Miss Sunshine, the Fox Searchlight release purchased for a record price at Sundance in 2006, was named 2007 Feature of the Year at today's Independent Film Channel's Spirit Awards ceremony.

Via backstage streaming Web video broadcast live after the show, all five producers appeared and expanded on their thoughts about winning the top Indie film honor.

Producers credited the blogosphere for driving word of mouth recommendations that enabled the film to quickly gain popularity, noting that the impact of social media was a big factor in spreading the word about Little Miss Sunshine.

The producers and the Fox Searchlight team "get" social media, which makes sense given the success of other Fox social media and online networking brands, including MySpace among others.

Congratulations, Little Miss Sunshine!

Labels: awards, blogs, Fox.Searchlight, Little.Miss.Sunshine, movies, MySpace, social.media, word.of.mouth