Just in Time comes to the Web

by biverson | October 5, 2007 at 03:57 am

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People on a mission want to save time. If you know what you want, you just go to [put the name of your favorite search tool in here] and enter your descriptors. If I wanted some Minnetonka moccassins, I'd type that into Google. Hit the return key, and your shopping trip becomes a streamlined drill down to the content you want as quick as you can get it . If I want news about Iraq, same thing. Why should I go to the mall anymore, and take the time to go to a shoe store and see whether they have those mocs? Why "waste" time stopping at the newspaper's webpage, and then clicking through that to get the news I want? If you use the Internet yourself for more than five minutes per day, this is no doubt obvious to you. Marketers are waking up to this phenomenon, too.

The idea that more consumers are coming to brand sites through the side door of search means search engines are starting to circumvent brands when it comes to online shopping. While a consumer looking for a pizza stone offline might drive to her nearest Williams-Sonoma, in the online world she's more likely to just type the product name into Google and see what comes up.

And most people, 85% of those in this consumer study, use reputation ranking, though they may not realize it, and click on the "most popular" links when they make web buys.

social
recommendations continue to grow in importance. More than 85% of people
on the panel used "most popular" links on sites to decide what to look
at and more than 55% made purchase decisions based on user reviews.

This AdAge story leaves us with four tips for designing for this new "pull" environment:

# Make content portable with widgets and RSS so people can interact with it anywhere.

# Turn on consumer ratings and reviews and allow commenting wherever possible.

# Invest in online video.

# Think outside your site -- how do search, social media, offline ads and blogs relate?