I needed soup. I was coughing, sneezing and dying a slow
death called body ache. I needed something warm, something soothing. A few
moments of relief. Soup.
It was my first year away from home. I had never bought
packaged soup before. What I bought was trash. Desperation. All I could do now
was Whatsapp a friend. ‘Dude, any restaurant in the vicinity that serves good
soup?’
He said ‘Why would you want to order soup from a restaurant.
Go to the Supermarket and get soup brand X. Trust Me’.
Good soup procured and the rest was history.
So yesterday when I read about a start-up providing social
recommendations for shopping, I totally saw myself as a user. Recommendations
from your close friends sometimes make all the difference. Even for something
as mundane as soup.
The product was simple. Users keep recommending products
that they feel are worth recommending. Using your Facebook data, the system
figured out whose opinion mattered to you so that when you needed
recommendations, you’d have them at your fingertips.
Great! Sounds like a plan.
Genuine need. All the right pieces of Technology — Mobile
apps on all platforms for easy access, Social Mining to find people who matter and finally a platform which is
time-persistent to record recommendations and provide them on-demand.
Technology solves everything. Yay!
So now I need to buy a new-T-shirt. Friends, what be your
recommendations?
Wait. Why would any of my friends keep adding
recommendations to this service?
In real-life friends help-out each other because ‘They
Care’. When you give them a call or text them, they do their best because they
genuinely want to help you out. How do you translate ‘Genuine Care’ to a
functionality?
How do you make caring an app-based incentive? Why would a
user spend time recommending products on a third party service without any
immediate needs or gains? We can always give them coupons but then we have enough
of those anyways.
Secondly, when you need recommendations, who would you get
it from?
Probably this friend who knows about where all the offers
are. Or maybe that friend who has those ‘Superhero T-shirts’. Or maybe that
friend who has the same shopping budget as you.
How do you translate these to code? How do you record a user
noticing a superhero T-shirt that some friend wore a couple of weeks back and
use it to provide recommendations?
Sure Facebook has a lot of data about your friends and
acquaintances. Pinterest knows the people whose collections you like. But the
way we seek recommendations is more impulsive and intuitive than what data can
currently model today.
And lastly, how do we actually seek these recommendations?
Do we like just ask a friend for some store names and then
hang-up?
Nope. The process is much more than that. It starts with
your friend asking you why you need something, what your criteria is and maybe
how much you are willing to spend. After you've answered these, your friend makes
tailored recommendations for your needs and then goes on to add some extra
goodness like which brands to watch out for, which tailor to insist for and
some real good advice to drop a criteria or to increase/decrease the budget.
Social recommendations the way we seek them today are much
more conversational in nature than just reading a page full of information.
It’s better to give your friend a call than going through 30 pages of
information in the name of recommendations. It’s a no brainer that a call or
text messaging is the way to go.
When I think of such questions, I realize that our ways of
doing some things are much more intuitive than technology can offer.
Maybe some problems should be left alone.
Sometimes, the best way is the old school way.
