Therefore, at the Magnolia Conference, it was interesting to see the proposition the guys from NRG Edge are putting together. They are currently building an online banking solution, the Marketing Portal aspect of which is driven by Magnolia.

We like this on a number of levels.

Firstly, it’s another great example of how Magnolia is being used outside of it’s ‘comfort zone’ web CMS area, it’s really encouraging to see an intermediary organisation making a commitment like this to the Magnolia solution. It all acts as further validation as to the quality of the Magnolia product for when we find ourselves speaking to potential clients.

Further, for us maybe in the future, it gives us some ideas about how we can leverage our knowledge of the Magnolia solution within our own offerings, providing the means for clients to publish and maintain products, brands and web content through a single holistic experience for both authors and users.

Plenty of food for thought.

With average conversion improvements of 40%, Social Commerce is real and there are 2 key aspects; Recommendations and the power of groups.  Recommendations is something that’s 2/3 years old on the web – it’s basically where a product shows customer reviews from real people.  Our partners at Bazaarvoice are leaders in this respect and have some interesting statistics – 85% of people will trust a customer review over the site content and having reviews increases a conversion by up to 70% (on a reviewed site, 0 reviews leads to a –30% downturn, 1-5 reviews 20% increase – even if they’re negative, 5-15 reviews 40%…).

The power of groups is all about automatically twittering / facebook status updates during the path to purchase, with the real power being that a friends list contains groups of people who are demographically similar.   For example, a customer buy’s a Plasma TVs and his Twitter account is updated:  “Jim bought a new 46” flat screen”.  Human beings are status driven animals, and posts like this will compel friends think about buying buy a 50″ flat screen.  Our partners at ATG support this automatically with version 9.0, and Bazaarvoice support this with their SocialVoice product again with measurable impact on business.

SKU based retail (clothing, electronics etc.) is taking a lead in social commerce but other industries will catch-up and as always the first to implement will benefit from being the first to market.  For instance, recommendations are becoming common for direct to consumer financial services products such as credit cards, but is not common in insurance.  The first health, general and life insurance companies to implement recommendations should see a big increase in direct to consumer sales.  Again, social network updates will also impact this market, if a friend broadcasts that they received 12 months for the price of 10 on home insurance with Provider X, it’s likely to impact sales in a positive fashion.

The next step is to embed the path to purchase into the social network.  With the ease of use of the Facebook and OpenSocial APIs this is a fairly trivial task and one which could lead to a revolution in internet commerce.

We’ve recently come up against an excellent example of this.  While on client site, we were integrating to a credit card provider in Mule via web services.  Mule supports CXF, Axis 1 and Axis 2 as Java WS frameworks, and they all have positives and negatives so we advised the client to use the same framework as their offshore supplier had used in the back-office system to ensure support and maintenance was made easier.  We subsequently discovered that, as they had no experience of Web Service integration, the offshore supplier had used HTTPConnection and DOM – i.e. they were hard-coding each web service call.

That afternoon, we integrated all 5 webservices and used Mule’s definition XML to model the control process.  In 4 hours work we had acheived the equivalent of over 200 man days of offshore development.

Expertise was obviously the clear winner here!

• ATG’s ability to rapidly develop a new online store, and to maximise conversions with personalisation software is still market leading
• With the advent of Web 2.0, the personalization, user profiling, content management, data exposure and integration functionality made me realise that ATG has been a leader in this area, providing Web 2.0 functionality in the early days of the web

In the early naughties it was often difficult to explain the capabilities of ATG to users – with Web 2.0 ideas becoming prevalent it’s now much easier to explain them leading me to think that ATG was indeed ahead of it’s time.

The 2nd level of integration is the ability to share event data between the sites.  Imagine you have a web site that tracks steps in a financial process, or your progress in a sports league.  By integrating this with Facebook the event notifications appear in the Facebook status notifications, building your brand and attracting new visitors to your site.

As social networking becomes the standard web application, it’s important not to lose business to competitors who understand the value of recommendation marketing.