EBay, With a Little Help From My Friends (The Page Mage Solution)

EBay to my friends, the Page Mage solution

 
Talk about Social Commerce to your friends and they will give the name Ebay.  And rightly so, since the auction site is the referent of social shopping.

However, Ebay, in its own turn, is impacted by the rapid expansion of social networks and their user friendly quality.  Doesn’t auction selling on Ebay run the risk of giving way to social networks where internet users are increasingly spending the majority of their time?

This is where Page Mage can be helpful.  A platform for designing Ebay auction templates, which helps improve ones selling page using videos, slideshows or even pop ups.

Page Mage is even taking it one step further by incorporating a “share” function that enables to post a page on Blogger, Facebook, MySpace or LiveJournal.

As indicated by Eric Scifres, CEO of Page Mage,

“By sharing the listing where people are congregating, a listing’s visibility grows exponentially.”

For example, on Facebook, your Ebay offers will appear on your “wall”, allowing your friends to leave comments or to share, in turn, your offer with other friends.

If the transaction is still done on Ebay the solution proposed by Page Mage takes the opposite direction of Facebook Connect by releasing the offers into the social network.

Is this a new trend?

Got Any Virtual Chocolate Lately?

AdNectar, for whom this isn’t the first time, and Fun140, publisher of quizzes on Twitter, just launched branded virtual goods, such as Godiva virtual chocolates or Malibu virtual rum, on Twitter or LiveJournal.

 (A previous virtual campaign of Godiva on Facebook)

Thus, if a person sends some virtual chocolates to a friend using Twitter, the friend is notified via a direct message, Twitter’s private messaging service.

By clicking on the URL in the message, a link will then direct it to the virtual chocolates and a tweet will alert the sending party when the gift is received.

“People use virtual goods to personalize how they communicate with their friends.  Branded items will make this social experience on Twitter more engaging and entertaining” explains Ashvin Kumar, co-founder of Fun140.

By allowing the offering of branded virtual goods, AdNectar diffuses the brands directly into the network of friends.  Thus, socially accepted, these goods benefit from a viral dissemination that is much more effective than displaying advertising banners.

AdNectar's clients 

3 years ago the brand fan pages, now common, might have seem to be a marginal and exotic media.

Today, given the continual increasing widespread use of virtual goods, it is more than likely that branded virtual goods are going to become one of the strongest social marketing tools, because it subscribes to the new implicating, engaging, and recreational marketing logic.

A previous campaign for Godiva chocolates in virtual form, conducted by AdNectar on Facebook before Valentine’s Day showed impressionable propagation results.