Social functionality and platforms are transforming digital commerce.

But harnessing the power of social data is difficult.

Today there is far more heat than light.

A major strategic focus for Wize Commerce is to track and make use of the maximum amount of social data that can make a measurable and differentiated difference to the bottom line, both directly for our shopping network of sites, and on behalf of our merchant clients.

Leveraging big data, the Wize Commerce team has developed a proprietary system for aggregating real-time social data about products: this benefits shoppers by enhancing the consumer shopping experience, and merchants, by increasing monetization.

From buzz to Buzz Score
At the heart of the Wize Commerce Social Analytics System is the Buzz Score, which rates every product in our extensive catalog on its “buzzworthiness” across a number of dimensions.

The main components of the Buzz Score are the social score, the want score and the need score, representing the different phases of consumer engagement with a product.

• The social score measures consumer interest, based on how many consumers are discussing and sharing the product on Twitter, Facebook and our own shopping sites such as Nextag and Thingbuzz.
• The want score measures purchase intent based on metrics, such as the number of shoppers visiting the product information pages on Nextag as well as those creating Nextag “Radar” requests for us to monitor the product for them.
• The need score measures actual consumer demand based on sales data such as Nextag purchase rate and Amazon sales rank.

Our analysis of this data involves a set of batch, distributed tasks that crawl, fetch and map these “buzz” signals to our product catalog using various internal and external APIs, and a centralized HBase database where we accumulate daily statistics and crunch the data to calculate buzz scores and ranks for each product.

Starting soon, Wize Commerce clients will be able to access the latest scores and historical trends via APIs.

Keeping it real
We expect to rapidly improve the Wize Commerce Social Analytics System as we learn from this exciting new source of data.

We feel that Wize Commerce has a big head start (and solid foundation on which we can build) translating social data into better consumer experiences that increase monetization via:

• our global Shopping Network, with years of SKU-level shopping data across an extremely wide range of product categories, travel, and event ticketing
• the historical metrics and domain expertise that come from being a major advertiser on all the major platforms
• ongoing analysis of 40-50 million shopping visits every month
• cost effectively driving revenue to thousands of client merchants e-commerce sites

There is still more work to do, but we’re already seeing impressive numbers… on the order of hundreds of thousands of product-related Tweets and Likes per month that we can map directly to our catalog.

Now, through our Silhouette service, we will be working with clients to show how the Buzz Score and other social data can immediately sharpen their acquisition and retention efforts in several ways, including:

• Inclusion of social data explicitly in product recommendations and social banners (e.g., “#3 most tweeted Television”)
• Incorporation of social signals into search ranking algorithms
• Onsite and email content pushes of hot/trending products to existing users
• Marketing reporting that adds immediate and actionable relevance to product-level social data

Want to learn more?  Contact us here!